Thursday 30 May 2013

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.

Monday 27 May 2013

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 :-)

Sunday 26 May 2013

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 :-)

Wednesday 22 May 2013

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.

Sunday 19 May 2013

Old gestures

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







Wednesday 15 May 2013

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.

Sunday 12 May 2013

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 :-)