Meet Koffie Cat (Part 1)

Hi,
I've been unavailable for a looong, long time, apparently. 5 years! There were a lot of things going on those years. People came and went on so quickly. Lead a team of 60 people, have been working overtime for so many occasions, romance drama (well, finally I experienced the twists and turns of being in a relationship LOL), etc. In fact, those are the things excite me a lot, at least made me want to jot and share things happened these years.

Around January 2019 was the time I found out about Grease Pencil in Blender. I used to use it to do some simple video editing (although I do not highly recommend it) few years before. The Grease promo video was AWESOME! The future of 2D animation wouldn't be so expensive! I WANT it!

But I was too lazy to learn.

Then here I am, a year after, trying so hard to learn this thing after I watched Jeremy Clapin's "J'ai Perdu Mon Corps" on Netflix. The animators team drew the animation in Blender! The uncanny and unexpected Grease Pencil!

What.

So I decided to download the newest, the most updated and stable version of Blender here. Then I dragged myself to learn it, fully-determined trying so hard mastering this open source-hidden-gem...

...later on the next few weeks, of course. I gave up in the grasp of laziness.

But hey, I sketched a cat. A lazy cat.

Eventually I had my hands on it, after some fights with my bed and pillow, naturally.

It was quite trouble, of course. I'm not a native Blender or any expert of using it. Newbie-er than all noobs of the world, apparently. The user interface/experience concept is a whole different thing with other 2D softwares. I just knew I could draw something in the '2D animation' section (or whatever you call it) that you could easily find it in the opening dialogue.

YAY! We can draw in Blender!

After a lot of miss-clicks and head-aches figuring out which one is what, I could remember that [Alt + Ctrl + right click] means zoom in/out, [Alt + Shift + right click] means slide the canvas, and somehow find out that those fancy icons at the right side of frame are your tools properties. Also, [Spacebar] is to play the timeline. Well, splendid!

These are Tools Properties, I guess

These four items are most important goods for drawing in Grease.

1. The white screw driver-and-wrench shows you your 'Drawing Properties'. I picked pencil as my sketch tool and ink-pen as my clean ups.
2. The green rope-like shape is your 'Object Data Properties', which allows you to see layers that you're working on. Well, or so I assume.
3. The red ball is your 'Material Properties'. It pretty much is colour properties.
4. The last one is printer icon, the 'Output Properties'. You need it to render your work into .avi.

With those things in mind, I was ready to draw something! I was thinking to animate a simple thing before I could jump to action-packed, thunderclaps, and explosions everywhere.