Greetings all.

I've started a set of hobbyist-level tutorials, aimed at creating virtual cut-out animation on a home computer.
I'll be using inexpensive or free software for these tutorials, and using techniques that work on a range of software.

I've started with a technique I've seen people struggle with in the past - masking out the pieces from a scanned hand-drawn character, already designed in pieces.

As time permits, I'll then show how to create pieces directly in software, and how to make pieces from an existing artwork or photograph.

After that I'll proceed to rigging (setting up you character like a puppet ready for animation), starting with a very simple rig for a walk cycle, and adding more rigging detail (for facial emotion and lipsync) in later tutorials, and examples of how to use the rigs.

You can find the first few tutorials at:
http://virtualcutout.posterous.com/ (PDF format, good for printing and downloading)
http://www.scribd.com/myles2 (PDF format)
http://virtualcutout.wordpress.com/ (HTML format, quicker loading in your browser)

Video tutorials still to come for a couple of the tutorials.

Updates via twitter, http://twitter.com/myless

Regards, Myles.