Some gestures from Center Stage Gallery's Wednesday night sketch club. It's owned by the founder of CTN animation eXpo, so the gallery has some fantastic programming available. Pirates of the Caribbean theme with model John Tucker this past Wednesday, and then an exciting book talk this coming Sunday on Marc Davis and some key designers for the Pirates ride itself, including imagineer Alice Davis. (Living in LA is finally combining my love of animation and history and I'm just so excited about it!!)
In other news, my website is (sorta kinda) up and running. Web design is not yet my forte, but at least I'm learning!
While I've had quite a few life drawing classes, the one I'm in this semester is the first to allow me to try my hand at digital painting. Here's the first round of results, to varying degrees of success.
I will never get over how much I love short poses in life drawing. All five minute pieces, and all done at Film Roman, in sessions hosted by the awesome Paul Wee. He just released a book of his life drawings with some AMAZING tips. Go buy it!!!!!!!
Still playing around with shapes, now in character design! Some are hits, some are misses. I started my internship yesterday, so I've been doodling away. I did this during a few off minutes at work today; I love it because when I'm not busy photoshopping away on projects for my work, I get free time to mess around with the programs! Soon I'll try messing around with their storyboarding software.
An artist I follow sometimes uses the lasso tool for speedpainting. And I tried to find him again but got lost in my list of blogs! Tried it out. Loved it. This one is definitely influenced by Mary Blair's Sleeping beauty work, and some of the stuff Claire Keane did for Tangled.
That's a lie I'm still very lost, but at least I'm discovering that I loveloveLOVE perspective/scenery drawing. I never thought I would, but I'm really enjoying this.
The one below was my attempt at simple 2 point. I know, an empty street. How original. But I had fun trying to sort out lighting.
This one I did in the emergency waiting room at like two am. Thankfully my friend was okay, but it gave me some nerve-wracking hours to doodle away. Also this is two point but it somehow turned into one point? Guh???? Help????
This doesn't count as perspective really (atmospheric?) but it fits in the theme of me trying to figure out how to draw scenery. I actually painted this on a wooden tabletop I found at home depot. Kind of cool because it's 20 inches across or so.
In other news, my tablet finally gave out so I've been pathetically color-free for a while. But that's okay because I can do simple color stuff with just my travel watercolor set!
Here was the last piece I did, lasting about 2 hours and 20 minutes. The model was a very still and patient woman. I've been struggling with color for a long time, but I think this is by far my most successful try at it.
Below are some of my final pieces for my life drawing class this semester. They're longer poses, ranging from 25 minutes to two and a half hours. Although I haven't had a chance to crop most of these pictures and adjust their brightness, I think they show a definite improvement. I love life drawing.
(here's a detail of one. I really enjoyed that model. He was a photographer.)
Here's a little sample of what I've been working on in life drawing. All are 18x24", and with the exception of the first and last pieces, all are graphite.
So for my Life Drawing II class last week, we were assigned an 18x24 work with the theme "Yellow." Rather than just paint or draw something more traditional like I've been doing recently in that class, I opted to design two characters that embodied the theme.
I chose to make them styled not for animation, but maybe more video-game or comic book centered. Basically these two are traveling companions, a young girl whose Sanxian (a chinese instrument) lets out a golden light, and a kangaroo-skull thing with a pipe whose tail is luminescent.
I don't have names for these characters. Is it important to name characters like this? I'd like someone else's take on the matter, because I often forget to name them. I usually identify characters by traits, i.e. Smoke Light Being and Plucky Scarf Musician.
... Maybe I'll just call 'em Smoky and Scarfy for short.
One of my favorite artists is illustrator and webcomic artist Der-Shing Helmer. She's been a big influence on my work since I was probably in middle school. I'm a big fan, and if you have the chance, check out her amazing webcomic The Meek.
Here is a very crude (I repeat: VERY crude) rough animation I've been working on. The basic premise is that it's a baby chasing a butterfly. Simple enough. I'm looking for an avenue to subvert it later, although I'll probably express that through storyboarding rather than animation. Well, maybe eventually.
Looking up reference material for this was fun. Just looking at videos of babies and butterflies. More to come later, particularly in finishing the action, and adding detail, expression, and of course the butterfly.
I'd like to ideally make this at least a 15 second animation.
I made this on a macbook app called AnimationDesk. It's pretty much a steal at $6.99 but some of the controls are weird and it crashed upwards of 6 times just tonight alone. It's nice because it's on the iPad, too, and it's pretty simple to use. But I'm just excited to install my Flash cs6 soon.
Here's a "model sheet" (I use quotations because honestly, I'm really just learning how to stay on-model) that I made for the baby character. Ideally, I'll get him to look something like this as I edit the animation. As far as character design goes, I think he's got some interesting shapes and a lot of potential for emotion, but I need to work a bit more on creating defining characteristics. Ah, well. It's my first time, I guess.
Also! I'm sorry my sketch photos are the absolute WORST quality. It's like 4 am, so I just grabbed the nearest paper and used my iphone as a camera. It was grainy and green-colored charcoal paper, so I didn't really think that one through. It was that or lined paper, and you gotta make do when inspiration strikes!
PS I have an astronomy midterm tomorrow WHAT am I doing working on this at 4 AM. PRIORITIES.
