16-09-2013 Croquis

Some of my sketches from Monday. The model had some really lovely poses!

07.09.2013 Gestures

Ah, I've gotten rusty over the holidays. It's fun getting back together with my friends for these though!

B is for Bear; C is for Capybara

Here's my next batch, B for bear and C for capybara. (I love capybaras!)

A is for Aardvark

    Here are the results of day one, letter A, of my animal alphabet. 

    I love aardvarks! In fact, one of my novels features an animal sidekick, Ignazio the aardvark, best friends with Babou the robot monkey. Good times.

 

     Ah well. Definitely working on those drawing skills.

A wild Bananaluga has appeared!

Do you...

a) fight?

b) try to catch it?

c) run away?

It's organic, don't worry.

    I'm trying out Sydney Padua's A to Zoo daily sketch exercise, asking people everyday for a random animal all the way along the alphabet. This is what happens when I'm asked for both banana animal and beluga whale.

   The other animals will follow... eventually :-)

Blingy Pig

    This started out as one of those "hey, it's midnight, let's draw a pig with bling!" things. The result is still pretty sketchy, but hey. What can I say, I love mah piggies.

  
     Sloppy outlines: TVPaint. Colour: Photoshop.

Introduction to Maya

    Our three last days at school were rather relaxed as we were introduced to Maya software by Magnus Møller, who also taught our very first course of the year. He was as fun as ever!

    The first assignment we got with the words, "Now you guys know how to make shapes like cylinders and circles and deform them a bit... You're gonna go and make a character. You have, um... one hour. GO!" Lots of weird and funny results! This is mine.

Charming, isn't she?

    Tuesday and Wednesday we spent making full illustrations. Whew! Quite a challenge! I wasn't there during the lighting lecture because I had my end-year review, but I made do with shading with surface shaders, plus a few details in Photoshop.

 Damn, why are my wings so stubby?

     Not a masterpiece, but hey, I only just started. So far, Maya isn't as scary as I thought it would be.

End-Year Exam Animation

I can't believe that, except for a short intro to Maya next week, my first year at TAW is over already! I've grown so much in this place, both as an artist and a person, and I'm super-grateful to be in this wonderful place surrounded by so many awesome people. I'm proud to call them my friends!

This is the last 2D assignment we got, our end-year exams. We had to animate the Sultan from Aladdin, being woken from a nap by a fly buzzing into his mouth. My final result isn't very polished, but I'm quite satisfied with the stage I reached. While working on it I could feel how many things are starting to click into place that I struggled to understand during the year.

Model Practice, Volume 1: Hogarth

    As people who know me might have noticed, I quite like Hogarth from The Iron Giant. (Haha, good one. Slightly obsessed is more like it.) Anyhoo, we had to do model practice before we could animate him, of course, so here are some of my sketches.

Facial expressions

 Range of motion

Courtesy of the sob-worthy fact that his helmet and bomberjacket belonged to his Dad, a pilot that died in WW2.

Character interaction, you say?

 Coloured because it's F-U-N.

     The Sultan might be up next, but I'll only post my animation once I've touched it up some more.

Horned things and a boot

    Just a bunch of old stuff I've dug up. A pseudo-self portrait, a random rhino rider and an old Nikolaus card thing featuring my rabbit. (Yeah, Photoshop and I had a tricky relationship back then.) I might fix and finish the first one at some point.

 

 

Birthday Present!

    This present for my amazing classmate and friend Awesta is long over-due, but I'm glad I finished it and I'm quite proud of it, despite obvious flaws. Took me quite a while because I'm still learning Photoshop and I only had a bit of time here and there to work on it.

    The characters featured are Bartimaeus (aka Grumpy Cat) and Nathaniel of the Bartimaeus trilogy, which everyone should read.

    Happy Birthday, Awi! All the best, I'm grateful that a chain of unlikely coincidences has thrown us into this crazy animation thing together :-)

Some old doodles...

     ... inspired by Rachel Brice, queen of tribal fusion bellydance. I started developing one of these further ages ago, maybe I'll take it up again and make a series of tributes to inspiring bellydancers. Who knows.

Thanks for 1001 views!

    The image says it all. Today this blog hit 1001 page views, yay! I'm pretty sure that's not even much on a grander scale, but hey, I'm always up for finding more reasons to be happy.

     Happy Hogarth (from The Iron Giant) because I actually get to animate him for my new assignment and am being supervised by one of his animators from the movie. It's like going to heaven but without the dying bit.

My magic bullet: Fan art

   So it seems like my theory is true: the one thing that always cures a possible lack of motivation or enthusiasm for art-making is making fanart. For me, at least, it always works. I love fanart, it's one of the things that got me started back in the day when I used to scrawl the little mermaid onto every available piece of paper.

    It's also a nice way of revisiting old stories and characters that shaped my childhood. In this case, it's Will Vandom of W.i.t.c.h.. I grew up with those comics and still have about sixty issues lying around in my room, not to mention that Alessandro Barbucci is a genius (and Barbara Canepa too, of course).

   That said, this picture was quite spur of the moment for a DeviantArt contest. I don't think I have great chances (I'm the only one that didn't work in colour and with sparkles and stuff...) but I'm quite proud of it nevertheless, even though it's still very flawed. I had little time to spend on it (5-7h maybe?) but it was fun and I learned lots about lighting and rendering <3

   Now I feel like making pictures of all my childhood heroines, Sailor Moon, Mila, Lady Oscar, Mulan, die Wilden Huehner, Bibi Blocksberg... Maybe someday :-)

Short Short Film: Player Two - Boot up your imagination

   So here it is: our first real film! A mere minute long including titles and credits, but it was a great challenge nevertheless. My team consisted of four CG artists (Bjørn, Casper, Mathias, Kristine) and three animators (Ben, Sofie and me). We had to work with random elements and aim for a child audience.

   It was a very daunting tasks and in hindsight I stressed out too much, but I'm quite happy with the end result, even if there's still room for improvement. (There always is.)

   The scenes I animated are these:

- the couch scene

- the montage with scissors and sticky tape (thanks to Sofie for clean-up assistance on the sticky tape!)

- the over-the-shoulder running scene (I also composited the moving background in collaboration with Bjørn who did the layouts :) )

- the logo

   Looking back, I'm amazed at how much I have managed to do within a mere two weeks. Animating all these things as well as cleaning/colouring them. It has given me a new perspective on myself as an animator and given me a lot of confidence as to what I can achieve within a relatively short amount of time, which helped me with our collaboration with La Poudriére this week.

 

  That's it for now, but there shall be outtakes AKA my favourite crazy frames :-)

Late night sketch

Just a quick doodle from last night, messing around with Photoshop a bit. I'm getting a bit more comfortable with the program.

 

I feel like this should be part of a cherry coke and chocolate cake promotion, because using all these nice colours gave me sweet cravings.

Old gestures

I never really got around to uploading the last few gesture sessions' drawings. Well, here we go - my favourites.

Making faces

I've done so little personal art lately, I really want to do more. And because I've written two novels (and about 200k words for unfinished ones) and never actually done any illustrations for them, I'll try and tackle that. First up: Glimpses Of Colour, written 2009-10, a whopping 283k long. Probably some portraits of the main characters before I try actual illustrations.

The nice thing here is that I'm accepting from the get-go that there's no "perfection" to reach, because when it comes to specific facial arrangements my characters keep morphing a bit in my head, so it's just impossible to make them look exactly how I imagine them. There are some vague ideas like, "Bas has a very straight nose" and "Albert has lots of freckles and a slightly up-turned nose" but it's hard to pin them down exactly.

The first attempt is for a portrait of Albert, my second male main character. He's a ghost who reawakens a century after his death in his old house and can't remember anything. Hence begins his relationship with Abraxas/Bas, who lives there now. He's a bookworm and an old book of his, The Complete Novels and Short Stories of Sherlock Holmes, plays an important role. So of course he has to have a book in his portrait :-)

It's a rough sketch. I wrecked the face the first time round, spent two hours practicing faces, and then messed with it again. Ah well. All the rest is roughly slapped on, so... Yeah. His arms don't need bones. It's fun trying to pin down his face though, and a bit weird. I love working in unconventional formats.

Happy Mother's Day!

 (Click for full size.)

It's been such a long and tiring four weeks working on our Short Short Films that it was nice to do something small and relatively simple again. This is for my Mum, whose many sacrifices for us kids I can probably never repay, but I'll do my best :-)

Character Design - Part II: "Taste" by Roald Dahl

    Our final design assignment was to interpret and design two characters from Roald Dahl's short story "Taste". The man is a genius with words! Just thought I'd mention it, in case you didn't know already.

    Anyway, I opted for Margaret Schofield and the old housemaid. I wanted to challenge myself by designing two female characters that are of different ages, personalities and social status. It was really tough! I had a hard time getting started.

    Because I'm still mostly a writer at heart I decided to take an approach I'd learned in Lawrence's first design class, which is "words first, gimme some poetry!" So here's what I came up with for Margaret:

"The only part of her face that did not recede distastefully from whatever was in front of her was her lips; twisted into a perpetual starburst of disapproval protruding towards the world."

    That "starburst lips" idea is what became her defining characteristic to me, as well as her being tall and imposing: she has no choice physically but to look down on people all the time!  So the brainstorming began. (The ticks indicate which designs Julia encouraged me to pursue further.)

      I played randomly with the lasso tool and textures/colours in Photoshop, the result of which Julia really liked. She asked me to rework it into a younger, more fashionable version and combine it with a combination of two face design I'd done. (Neither of which I liked, but Julia definitely had the better eye here!)

    And this is my final result for Margaret. (Click to admire the texture of her skin!) I'm very pleased with the result, although maybe the middle pose is just a bit too lovely for her character. This is a style I've been wanting to explore for a long time! It was a lot of fun to do once I got a grip on the technique.

    The second character, the Housemaid, gave me a lot of trouble and ultimately the design could have been pushed even further, but I still like the result. She's not really meant to be placed in front of stark white backgrounds, though.

    I made the left pose in a bit of a hurry (deadline!) so there are definite continuity issues between the designs but I like to think that, given the time, I would have been able to give her some more facial expressions like Margaret.

   Whew, this was a long post! I like keeping track of my progress though, not just end results. To sum it up I got a lot braver during this class and I freed up my creative process. There's a project I have in mind that I just might tackle in the future, now that I've learned so much about the design process. If it ever gets to anything I'll post here.

Character Design - Part I: "Dr Frankenstein's Experimental Pet Shop"

    The past week we were introduced to new ways of generating ideas for character design and how to streamline those ideas into a finished concept for a character. It was lots of hard work and at times I felt frustrated over how stuck I am sometimes in artistic habits. Ultimately, though, I think I learned a lot and am excited to tackle new design challenges.

    There was an assignment that asked us to design two pets for "Dr Frankenstein's Experimental Pet Shop" in a photocollage style. I created the Frilled Dogfish and the Split-Tongued Splatterpurse, complete with Latin names, though I probably broke all grammar conventions. Click to read the descriptions!

      I'll add some details of my progress on the final assignment, so they'll get a separate post :)

Learning to talk... Dialogue Animation!

These past two weeks we made our first foray into dialogue animation with Christian Kuntz teaching us.

Working with dialogue and lip sync is pretty challenging but I enjoyed it a lot. I got a lot of positive feedback on my final result and even though it was a struggle half the time I learned a lot. I think this kind of subtle acting, be it with or without dialogue, is more natural to me than action shots. (No need to slack off on the action, of course!) Another challenge was animating Sawyer, which I've been wanting to do ever since watching her in "Cats don't dance". Her construction is really tricky! Again, I learned a lot.

I hope to get back to this scene eventually and inbetween/clean it, but I have some personal projects on my list first.

Some gestures & croquis

The midyear review went okay. As expected, pretty much all teachers agree that my work process is too messy and that my drawing fundamentals kind of suck. On the other hand they like my ideas, storytelling and Mike liked my dance animation in particular. ("Excellent" - yay!") So I'll try to get back into the croquis habit as well to strengthen my draftsmanship because that's been frustrating me for quite a while now.

Colour class with Lawrence was both frustating, fun and very enlightening. I see a long line of still-lives coming up, I'd really like to keep working on that. Once I fix my final assignment I might post that too, it's nothing extraordinary but Lawrence said he liked it and the lighting was good, only that my painting technique itself is really awful, haha.

I'm slowly getting better at gesture drawing... Doing it regularly is starting to pay off already. Here are results from recent sessions, plus two from croquis.