Xylus and Dexter in Space! "What's That?" Episode 2

Xylus and Dexter in Space! "What's That?" Episode 2 - Cartoon animation

Episode 2 -
of my animated cartoon series Xylus and Dexter in Space!

Here is another episode of my animated cartoon Xylus and Dexter in Space!

The original story I made for this cartoon was 17 pages long! I didn't want to work on just one big long cartoon, so I broke it up into 2-minute episodes.

I was on a Rocky & Bullwinkle kick at the time and I liked how they would tell a story over a series of episodes.

Plus, this way I could try out different things as I went along from part to part. Kind of like how the Rocky cartoons would look very different over the duration of the stories they did.

Concept

In this second cartoon episode, The boys have crash-landed on Mars in front of a creepy castle.

Artwork

I'm still drawing the characters and scanning them to my computer to animate them.

For speed, I had stopped using a brush for inking and changed to a Pigma Micron size 08 marker. It doesn't have the pressure sensitivity of the brush but gives a good solid black line.

Inked castle background

Inked Mars background

Animation

I was able to re-use a lot of the body elements I made for the previous episode. So all I needed to do was pose them in the animation software and add drawings for whatever new moving parts I needed for these new scenes.

Here is an example from the scene in this episode of Dexter being surprised by Xylus.

Dexter animation body elements

Xylus animation body elements

Scene layout with body elements colored and put in place

Audio

I was now adding more sound effects and ambiance as part of the animations, learning how this could enhance what was going on for movements. I started to get obsessed with collecting sound effects and was building up quite the library.

Next time: Watch episode 3 "Castle clause"

Check out the previous episode 1 "Fly Right" here

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Waiting by the train.

I've always been amazed at the stuff they leave sitting out overnight.

Tom Ray

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