Our stick-figure animation looks at most mildly engaging. This smooth, vectory style is good for technical animations, such as demonstrating the workings of a machine, but is not too inspiring for an animated dance. Can we do something about it?
Hide all layers except 001, select the figure and lower its opacity. Then arm yourself with the Calligraphic pen (14.3 The Calligraphic Pen Tool), select the Width of 20 with Tremor of 40, and draw over the stick figure trying to make it more random, funky, personalized. While at it, you can also add more pronounced feet and fists and more human-like body forms in general.
When done, delete the original skeleton figure—it’s served its function of a blueprint and is no longer needed. The result is not bad, but it looks a bit foreign in its roughness upon the immaculate white background. To fix this, reduce the width of the pen to 1 and add some thin random strokes around the dancer, hinting at his limbs’ motion and shadows on the floor. Don’t worry if this looks too random to your taste—when you’ll see him move, this randomness will come live and natural.
The main rule in this kind of the project is, Don’t copy. Freehand roughness cannot be recycled; no matter how similar is one frame to another, you need to sketch each frame entirely from scratch, using nothing but the stick figure as your guide. Duplicating the freehand strokes (even if you move or scale them) will instantly kill the rough, natural feel and make your animation wooden and dull. Don’t be lazy; the more you draw the easier it gets.
And the result is certainly worth the labor: See http://www.kirsanov.com/inkscape-animation/rough.gif for the complete hand-drawn animation. Much more inspiring than the interpolated stick figure!
Note
Using the same technique, you can manually trace with Calligraphic pen over any imported bitmap. Make the bitmap half-transparent and sketch on top of it, trying to highlight the most important features and ignore the rest. In an animation, the source bitmaps might be frames of a video, still photos, or rendered 3D images.
If necessary, you can move your entire animation—for example, to free up space for a heading above it—by unhiding all layers, selecting the whole bunch of shapes, and moving/transforming them as needed on the canvas.