One character, twenty-three states, one rig. Every state below is the same drawing with different numbers on its face, wings, bill, lids and feet — which is what makes it the same little duck each time rather than a set of stickers.
The duck is live. Pick a state and watch it settle into the pose — nothing cuts, because every part eases from wherever it happens to be.
Leave it on idle for a while — it will look around on its own.
Parts are separated exactly where the rig needs to move them and nowhere else. Each one rotates about a named pivot, so a tilt is always the same tilt — and because head and body are one closed shape, there is no join between them that can come apart.
Everything here comes from the lids, the gaze, the brows, the bill angle and the head tilt. No feature is ever distorted to make a point — a duck that squashes its own skull stops being a character and becomes a cartoon.
The same sixteen moods, read from across the desk with the face too small to see. If a pose is not legible as a silhouette it is not finished.
84px is the size the duck actually appears on the desk, so this is the test that matters. Each tile also names what puts the duck into that state in Involets.
Every frame below is the live rig sampled at the stated moment, not a redrawing of it. Read a row left to right and you are reading the actual animation.
Stated in units of a 100 × 100 box. Head and body are within a tenth of each other — 1 : 1.07 — which is what reads as a chick: no shoulders, no waist to speak of, and a head taking up a third of the whole height.
One light, upper left, as a gradient in page space rather than per shape — so the silhouette, the crown, the wings and the lids all sit in one continuous fall of it and no part can shade itself differently from its neighbour. The form is then turned by a core shade hugging the inside of the far flank, a lit top edge on the head and the near wing, a raised belly pad, and a contact shadow that narrows as the duck leaves the ground. The line does almost nothing — {{ lineSpec }} of a darkened body tone, enough to hold an edge at 24px and nowhere near enough to draw the character. Head and body are one closed shape, so there is no seam between them at any size.
The eye is a dark oval with two cream highlights — a large one upper right, a small one lower left — and a lid in the body's own colour riding down over it. Shut eyes become a line, and which way that line curves is the difference between content and asleep. The bill is not a fixed shape: its outline is solved every frame from two numbers, so smile lifts the corners against the middle or drops them, and open drops the lower plate away from that same line and opens the cavity behind it. Shut, the two plates are one form.