Been wanting to give a crack an animated stuff again, I decided to use the second best MLP dragon girl ever, whom I’ve been itching to draw for a long time now, and attempt a pseudo-3D visual technique of sorts.

It’s not true animation per se. Instead, the idea was to make it look as if the camera was rotating in a frozen image and go back and forth different perspectives. Each moving part of Smolder’s body and also the lava were all separate layers, which on top of coloring and shading individually, I also animated meticulously in After Effects (no puppet rigs of any kind whatsoever). Needless to say, I pulled an all-nighter on trying to get this done. It’s far from perfect, but insomnia aside, it was a rather fun experiment. Hopefully in the future I’ll find the opportunity to improve it and make something more interesting out of it!