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.

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 :-)