Animating! Using a reference video I shot myself, I sketched up a color-coded skeleton - red for front legs, green for rear - and tested it in Photoshop. Looks excellent. The weight is distributed and the legs move in the proper phases, alternating with their partner(s). I did an earlier walking yak, but its legs looked rubbery because I was just shooting from the hip (har?) and the main joints were hidden under all the fur. So, animation tests are good.

We took the boats down to the shadow forest.

One of my many creative friends is a musician. She recently sent me one of her songs, a 6-minute epic. The lyrics were so bizarrely, wonderfully, symbolically parallel to my own epic that I began sketching up a movie trailer of sorts, set to her song. It's a pipe dream, of course, as I've hardly ever animated - and I have learned not to commit myself to massive projects that simply look good in my head - but it's at least fun to visualize.

A bit of trivia that I like to tell people is that movie trailers make me cry. (The E.T. one kills me.) They are just one of those visual media that is potent, intense, and perfectly-crafted to elicit a gut-punch emotional response. Being an empath, I am absurdly vulnerable to such onslaughts. So I dream up my own movie trailers because they are a wonderful imagination exercise, allow me to stretch my emotional muscles, and spark me to daydream of fame and fortune... even though such things would likely make me into the kind of celebrity that gets hooked on a cocktail of pharmaceuticals and tries to assault paparazzi with kitchen utensils.

So I stick to simple sketches. It's safer.