Happy Five-Year Anniversary to The Autistic Animator’s Desk! 🎉✨🎈 I cannot believe that today is the fifth anniversary on when I first started this blog back in year 2019, when I was twenty-four. I was both very nervous and exciting, even as a new autistic newcoming blogger at, but the main goal was to share many hundreds of my collection of animation drawings, fan art, animated pencil tests, paintings, and of course, adding autism and disability advocacy and educational readings. Here we are, five years later, with now 363 posts and 246 followers. It has been such a long, incredible journey going from a newcomer to where I am today, and this blog has been a life-changing experience for me, as an artist, and not only do I want to share my work, but I also want to inspire autistic and other disabled cartoonists, animators, and artists to let them know that they can become one of the best artists out there.
So, thank you all so much for your kind and loving support you have given me for five years, and I hope this blog will continue to bring you comfort and joy, as well as inspiring you all out there 🥰
Anyhow, let’s move on to the main event on today’s newest post and the first one for March 2024: It’s another Swan Lake artwork, which I’m very excited to share. This one is from the second act of the ballet, and it’s called ‘Dance of the Big Swans’. The drawing was done on Autodesk SketchBook in digital drawing medium at 1525 x 1080.
This dance movement is the follow-up after ‘Dance of the Little Swans’, which is the other drawing from Swan Lake I’ve already shared on this blog nearly a month ago, and if you haven’t seen it, please feel free to check it out in the link at the end of this topic. Known as the Pas de Trois, it features three ballerinas of the white swan corps de ballet dancing together. The choreography was done by Lev Ivanov and the music score was composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
After having to do a full drawing of the ‘Dance of the Little Swans’, I thought I would like to do another one, and of course, this idea came to me, which totally makes sense, because ‘Dance of the Big Swans’, like I’ve just mentioned from the previous paragraph above, is the following up dance after that. There will be another Swan Lake drawings coming up this month, and it will also be featured for the next new Animated Variations post. It’ll be on Odette’s Variation, known as the White Swan Variation, so stay tuned for that.
The process of this following-up Swan Lake drawing is very much like how I approached for the ‘Dance of the Little Swans’ project. The first thing to do before getting started on the sketching was having to watch a clip of the Pas de Trois on YouTube, and the production of it was performed by Tatro alla Scala Ballet that stars prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova and Roberto Bolle in 2005, which I have seen on YouTube, when I was nearly eighteen, and it’s beautifully well-done, and highly recommended it. La Scala’s production of Swan Lake has Ivanov’s choreography for Act II, and the goal was to stick to Ivanov’s choreography. Both Ivanov and Marius Petipa worked on the choreography for the 1895 recreation of the ballet, eighteen years since its first premiere in Russia, and the first premiere wasn’t a success. The main pose by the three white swan ballerinas in the drawing you have already saw at the beginning was taken from the end of the Pas de Trois.
🦢 Dance of the Big Swans Drawing 1 (Rough Drawing Process & Copy and Paste) 🦢
After watching the YouTube video, as well as finding the right poses for three white swan ballerinas to put into the drawing, I begin working on the rough pencil drawing process, and for one thing, I only did one pencil sketch of one white swan ballerina of the corps de ballet. The blue pencil was for light sketching, and the black pencil was for detailing.
Just like how I approached with the ballerinas for the ‘Dance of the Little Swans’, there was the copying and pasting process, which helps to save time, thanks to the work of the drawing software technology in Autodesk SketchBook.
The reason for copying and pasting two more identical ballerinas was to carefully place each two into their exact location on where they should be standing beside by. The straight line down on the bottom you just saw was to measure their feet, making sure that their feet are standing in the exact same measurement.
🦢 Dance of the Big Swans Drawing 2 (Cleaning-Up Drawing & Copy and Paste) 🦢
Now that you finally got to see the rough pencil sketches, the next process to work on, like how to make animated movies, was the clean-up drawing task. Very much like how I worked on the rough drawing, I focus on the main ballerina in the middle, and did the clean-up drawing on her, and whenever it’s finished, I copied and paste for the other two white swan ballerinas and place them on their location.
The black lines were for the head, eyes, nose, neck, arms, hands, legs, and feet; the white swan costumes, tutus, and headpieces were drawn in bright blue-ish gray, which were the exact colors I did during the clean-up drawing process for the four white swan ballerinas in the ‘Dance of the Little Swans’ project.
The shadows were drawn in blue pencil tool by hand, so there was no need to do the copying and pasting.
🦢 Dance of the Big Swans Drawing 3 (Adding the Background) 🦢
This background is the very same image I used for the ‘Dance of the Little Swans’ drawing, and so, I wanted to add it onto the ‘Dance of the Big Swans’ project.
🦢 Dance of the Big Swans Drawing 4 (Coloring Process & Finishing Up) 🦢
And now, the one last thing to finish up this project was getting the white swan corps de ballet in color. They were colored in the very same color studies as how I did for ‘Dance of the Little Swans’ except I used different colors for each of the dancer’s hair, even though they’re drawn identical, but that’s okay.
The color studies I mentioned was for the costumes and headpiece, so I wanted them to be colored identically as how I did for the ‘Dance of the Little Swans’. Of course, you will see the exact colors for Odette’s costume, once you’ll see three variation drawings in the next post, so that way, Odette and the white swans can share the same identity as women who were transformed into white swans, thanks to Von Rothbart.
The white swan ballerinas are finally colored, and you can combine them and background into all-in-one finished artwork! Finished on January 23rd, 2024. Took me a day to work on this project, but like the previous drawing, it was a fun one.
I hope you all enjoyed this topic, and I am excited to share the Odette Variation drawings for the upcoming Animated Variations in the next post. And thank you all for your continuing support you have given to this blog for five years, and it means so much to me. If you are a new reader, please feel free to subscribe here to get more notifications on newest posts. You can also follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and my YouTube channel, where I share videos of my animation tests.
Link:
- Dance of the Big Swans clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=726TWrOY7I8
- Dance of the Little Swans (“Swan Lake”)
The Autistic Animator's Desk 
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