Bleh still sticking with photoshop because I know it and it works okay for moderately high res graphics. I cut the resolution, though, because these are just for planning and it was making things run slower than they had to.
So, okay, I've been playing around with transitioning into and out of the run cycle. It's a bit jerky, but here's where it's at right now:
Part of the reason it's so jerky is because I'm trying to have something that I can naturally transition into from a bunch of different nearby frames without looking too weird. I could probably make it look better if I was sure which frame it was coming from, but oh well. The way it is now, it gives a kind of snap to the animation which might actually work out well. I'll probably try to get more animations done and reevaluate this later when I see how it works with them.