Quick Colour Mess

 Yeah, light obviously doesn't work like this... Just experimenting a bit.

End-Year Exam Animation

It's hard to believe this is already the last assignment we have in our second year. Time sure flew by!

This one has been challenging to work on because it's just a character acting, no props, no sets, no shiny things to distract, but it's really forced me to focus on the essentials, which is always good.

Getting explosive!

I've kind of neglected my blog ever since starting 3D. I'll have to put up some of the stuff I did since!

Here's my current obsession: effects animation! So far I've only tackled explosions but they're fun and surprisingly relaxing to do.

Some things I've done so far, in the order I've done them:

 My first ever explosion!

 More of a burst of steam than a proper explosion, to warm up.

 Something between a magical tentacle plant thing and a cloud puff? Or something?

And some concepts I did for our current short film project, though we ended up going with different designs. (Layout by Rune Hansen.)

Can't wait to tackle more effects!

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.