Shaitan animation

(The gif is 28 seconds long, make sure you catch all the scenes)

This is my animation midterm project featuring my character Shaitan.

I don't think I realized just how much work animating was until now. It's very counter-intuitive to how I normally work, too - many simple drawings rather than one very complex and polished one. And of course I had to pick the character with the complicated design. It was kinda frustrating at times but I'm glad I went through with it. I actually planned to do shading on this originally, but with less than two weeks to get it done I had to scrap that once I saw the amount of time it was taking (14 hand drawn frames for the rear, 9 for one canter stride, and then 5 for the reflection). I do plan to revisit this someday, shade it and add the missing details (mane/scar/green patch).

Anyone know good ways to combine gifs? I drew this in Photoshop as individual scenes, then combined the gifs into a video and had to re-render it as a gif again so there was a bit of quality/color loss there.