King of Hearts - Animated short

The King of Hearts is seriously on edge. After being placed on the table yet again, the expectation to perform is starting to feel overwhelming. Trying to keep cool, he notices something in his periphery that gives him the shock of his life… only to realise it’s just himself.

I initially started animating this using Blender’s Grease Pencil, since I’d recently used it for The General. But my lack of experience caught me out — I ended up setting up all the layers incorrectly, and the confusion got so bad I decided to move the project over to Clip Studio Paint EX (CSP). By “move”, I mean: completely start again from scratch. 🤦🏼‍♂️

For some reason, I always do this. I bought CSP specifically for 2D animation… then thought, “Hey, Blender has Grease Pencil — that could be worth learning for future projects that might need 2D/3D integration.” (I’m imagining Futurama-style stuff here.) But since this project is entirely 2D, CSP really was the perfect choice. It just took hours of messing around in Blender to admit it.

Starting with the initial card, I drew everything that stayed still: the main body, with no face or arms. I wanted to give some movement to the “still” image by adding line wobble. Unlike Blender, in CSP you have to do this the traditional way — which meant drawing three full frames that were all very similar. That took a surprising amount of time.

Once I had that looping on its own layer, I added the arms and hands on separate layers, like cardboard cutouts. The face became its own layer group, containing all the mouth shapes needed for lip-sync.

You may notice the face, mouth, and arms don’t have line wobble — I didn’t want to expand my workload too much.

To make the arms work properly, I also had to add a partial shoulder/robe layer that sits above the arms layer (see below), so the arms sit between the robes and the main body.

The face layers were separated into face and mouth. The face layer handled blinking and eye movement, and the mouth layer was the lip-sync frames. One detail: the mouth also includes a bit of white around each frame to cover some of the face lines, plus a little nose movement that overlaps the face layer underneath. It helps add expression without needing to redraw the entire face every time.

Once all that was done, I added the camera movement keyframes — pans, zoom-ins, and the final reveal of the whole card at the end for titles. This was one of my favourite parts. The camera moves really help sell the story: the pan-in at the start, and the extra emphasis zooms on his shocked face. Getting the timing to feel right took a lot of trial and error.

The reveal at the end was something I added while I was working on the camera moves — originally it was just going to cut to the title. But the little zoom-out and tilt gave the short a bit more character.

Other than the voice, all the background audio was added after the frames were imported into DaVinci Resolve. To give it a bit more character, I went with a cocktail-party vibe: martini glasses clinking (which I separated out and placed at specific moments), plus a few extra tracks of general party crowd noise. The final touch was some lounge music — podcast-jazz-waltz-cozy-relaxing-vibes-233733 — which I found on Pixabay by Denis Pavlov Music.

The King of Hearts youtube version can be found on the House of Normal Youtube channel.

100% Drawn by hand Clip Studio Paint EX
Tablet - XP Pen Artist Pro 15.9
Edit / Sound - Davinci Resolve 18
Written, Voiced, Animated by Damien K Quick