All Around Practice

Just trying out some new ways to build the figure and color, simple stuff.

http://rawgreen01.deviantart.com/art/Fullbody-Animation-1-307237159

Or if Deviant art doesn't work for you;
http://www.fileize.com/view/d9f22160-d3d/

It took a little less than 6 hours.
there is some anatomy issues I accidentally made while shading.
e,g, the foot is on backwards during the kick.

Critique is appreciated.

And even though I have a list of my own;
Suggestions for animation assignments and studies would be more useful! than critique at this point!

The concept of animating without lineart is used a lot lately, some do it better than others.
Yours seems to fail because of a lack of understanding of anatomy and shading.
This causes the entire movement to become hard to read.
Currently, instead of an actual human being, you seem to have animated a bag of boneless flash, just flailing around.
Focus on the basics first, make your movements easy to understand and your character clear enough to follow when it's moving around.

People seem to forget that the basics is what you need to focus on before you start to think about animating something on an advanced level.

like, the top down view (I guess that's what you were going for?) is extremely hard to understand,

I saw the run cycle animation on your DA account, do you want to share that too on psuda?

You seem to like trying to go for styles of advanced animators, sakuga mostly.
My advice to you, the best that I can give is:

Learn to walk before you want to run.

As for assignments, animate a character on model, I wanna see you animate a walk cycle conveying a certain emotion of your own choosing.
Also, the bouncing ball excercise is always good to see how much understanding you have of the basics, and if you now how to show different types of balls.

ThickSolidTight style.
3.5/5 would view again.

Tom's anatomy comment is on point in my opinion.

His walk cycle and bouncing ball suggestions are indeed effective because the ball demonstrates your understanding of physics and ability to time and space a super basic shape, and to demonstrate behavior and interaction between such simple shapes.
The walk cycle demonstrates your ability to make a character loop in a naturally repetitive movement, walking being one of the most common movements characters do, making it a fundamental ability to have under your belt.

But there are actually other things you can do, too, that trigger really fundamental skills. Like, animating things you can't see, but can feel, like:
weight (someone pushing something or carrying something)
wind (although you can see it pretty clearly in smoke, but think of fabric, hair, loose or light objects, and body language)
pain (body language, and that's basically it)
and so on.

To enhance your anatomy, it's pretty much fundamental to build your understanding of two things:
Perspective
3D space

You get those down pat, anatomy's a piece of cake. So practice those two things.

Your cliffside painting here displays a severe lack of perspective understanding:
http://rawgreen01.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d4zonmr

So don't even tell me you get it already! I'm talking getting it into your subconscious ability, not just something you have to think about and kinda get. You need to get this down deep into your head enough that it's just a basic mental ability you have so you can focus on things like shape and movement.

Anyway, enhance both perspective and 3D spacial imagination by:
Drawing from life.

In this case, like I told you on IRC, just draw the forms, not the lighting or anything like that, you're just sketching. Draw objects you see in real life and simplify them on paper down to a super low poly version.

Like this:

(And evidently, I could use some practice too lol)

To conclude:
-Anatomy is important
-Therefore Perspective and 3D space is important
-Therefore draw low poly shapes in 3D space and look up rules of perspective
-???
-Anatomy get!

And test your animation skills by doing a pure, no bullshit gimmicks attached walk cycle or something like that.

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I saw the run cycle animation on your DA account, do you want to share that too on psuda?

It sucks, I'd rather work seriously on something that I plan to post here.

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You seem to like trying to go for styles of advanced animators, sakuga mostly.

never heard of him but I'll check him out.
I've only really started to find names of animators who worked in anime.
Yutaka Nakamura is the one that got me into finding and studying more advanced animation.

It's that hyperactive overload of inspiration when you find a new toy you want to play with it right away.

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animate a character on model, I wanna see you animate a walk cycle conveying a certain emotion of your own choosing.

Character on model? I'm not familiar with that term.

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the bouncing ball exercise

http://fav.me/d4lm7za

They're all pretty bad looking, this was more than a month ago.
Should I be doing the exercise regularly?

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I'm talking getting it into your subconscious ability, not just something you have to think about and kinda get. You need to get this down deep into your head enough that it's just a basic mental ability you have so you can focus on things like shape and movement.

I understand now!

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like I told you on IRC, just draw the forms, not the lighting or anything like that, you're just sketching. Draw objects you see in real life and simplify them on paper down to a super low poly version.

Hahah you left out that last bit of information on the IRC,
thanks for the example as well.

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And test your animation skills by doing a pure, no bullshit gimmicks attached walk cycle or something like that.

straight up man, I'll get to work.

On model means that you stay true to the model sheet of the character, so no resizing or deformation along the way as you am animating.

I saw comments on your bouncing ball animation dating back to january, so this is a pretty old one.
Do you think you've learned from the comments you got, or were they just comments and you didn't use those comments to learn from your mistakes, as obviously, the stretch in those balls is just waaay too much for the speed they have.

You don't have to do these regularly, but they're definitely a good test to see if you have the basics down.
If you want to challenge yourself, create a room and launch the balls inside the room in a random direction and let gravity decide where the next frame goes.
If 1 ball at a time isn't fun enough, animate an extra ball after every 0.5 sec of the previous ball coming into the frame and let them interact with eachother if that is needed.

By the way, the term sakuga means key animator in japanese, it's basically used as a word to describe the people that animate those epic scenes you like to watch.

Yutaka Nakamure, among others, is part of that group.

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Hahah you left out that last bit of information on the IRC,
thanks for the example as well.

Dat memory. Must've been the other people I was talking to about low poly (there were several).

Anyway, real nice ball bounces, I'd say your animating quality is about 60-70% of what it ought to be. And the quality of your anatomy knowledge/3d understanding is like, 5-10% of what it ought to be, so I highly recommend you prioritize practice on your raw drawing ability.

Afterwards, timing and spacing would be more doable to practice with, and you can explore all the little intricacies of behavior and body language and expression, etc.

I'm impressed by your seriousness about practice, so I can tell you that I personally think you have a lot of potential to grow like this. Please come around here whenever you'd like any help at all with your training.