loopdeloop january cute (didnt submit)

this month’s loopdeloop theme is "Cute" which sparked my interested. I went to find out what i need to create to submit something in time which was difficult because of the time management in terms of not having time to work on it whilst working on other projects. But besides that, I did have an idea which involve an animation loop i did a few years back of a character playing with string, here is the example: http://sta.sh/0b4yvy6xs8b

Instead of doing a character as i was thinking about the time i had and how complex it would be i moved on to thinking of drawing a new animal character that was simple to create, here is the example of the designs and tests:

At first i wanted to just concentrate on making a cat as ive not drawn one before and i wanted to experiment to see what i could come up with in designing using simple shapes. from top to bottom, u can see how i start to creating a base shape that looks like a cat and is simple to draw. I end up using the cat in the middle, the next step was creating the eyes and i wanted to make it as simple as possible so i tested some eye shapes and decided that i like the closed eyes you can see at the bottom left of the picture above.

I realised that i was having a bit of a problem with the anatomy of the cat and how they move, so i decided to do studies of cats, here are is an example:

All i did was look up anatomy of cats and tried to understand how they work and this definitely helped when it came to making the final designs of the character in this example:

I asked around and everyone one replied with it being so cute, which was 1 aspect to the whole project. i then moved on to creating a simple story which loops which turned out to be very similar to my old animation which is linked above. the concept of a ball of string entering from the left and the character interacting with it then gets taken away and this process loops. And since i had the concept i moved on to the animation on Animate CC

Through the process i learned very quickly that it was quite hard to think about the motion of the cat in terms of arms and tail. but then i developed a technique, i used the technique mostly on the tail. To move the tail smoothly i used circles inspired by my friend and this was a really good way to understand the motion, as it moved like a chain, heres the progress:

heres the final incomplete animation as i did not have time to do it and by this time i missed the deaad line:

i hope to try and make another loopdeloop for next months competition and submit it. I should also consider the time i have to do these animations and just try to mange my time to be able to complete these competitions.