Holidays

As the title implies, it's Holiday time! I'm off till January 13th (cause I don't have classes on Monday according to the new schedule, hoping that doesn't change) so obviously there won't be any projects.
However, hopefully I'll end up doing something artistic over this break, so if I make something I might put it up here or at DeviantArt, or both, so this won't be totally ignored during fun winter season time. Yesh.

Duelling Paintings Part 1

Final assignment for this year, everything else is handed in already, all tests are complete etc., so this is all I have to work on now.
Final painting assignment for this semester is two paintings, one the opposite of the other, in whichever way you care to interpret the meaning of 'opposite'. For mine the 1st painting is a tranquil ocean scene (well the waves are rather choppy but it's still cheerful). In the 2nd I will replace the water, with lava, and that happy dormant volcano will become a raging fireball-like lava dome surrounded by the shattered remnants of the mountain's sides.
Like the previous painting (get that back soon hopefully) I'm making the rouhgs in photoshop, from which I'll paint the finals. Making the rough for the 2nd at the moment, I hope to finish that and get some progress on the finals before tomorrow.

EDIT: Finished the rough (a very detailed rough, too much fun!) for the 2nd painting as well. The 1st might be a wrecked civilization amongst crashing waves, but compared to the 2nd painting, ANYTHING else would look like paradise. Observe:

Ball and Tail Animation

Last animation assignment for the semester! And thus 2008 as well. 2 other projects left, but they will be done shortly.

Here's my Ball and Tail animation. If I had a little more time I'd go in and add more frames to the part around half-way, where the ball jumps in from lower left, lands, looks around then jumps away (particularly the tail is moving too fast as it twists to the 'jumping' position) but other than that I'm happy with this:

These Dry Bones Part 3

Here's the last of it, this completes my Life drawing class for this semester! Well, I still have to hand it in, but only some extreme and unforeseeable event could prevent that now. Like a Walrus invasion. Actually, that'd be really cool.

ANYWHO, this leaves an animation, 12 object drawings and a painting to finish off the semester entirely. Just seven more semesters to go! :D

This pelvis drawing was just a study I did before drawing the pelvis in full. I used it on my title page because despite being unfinished and a little 'bent', still like how it looks. The pelvis was the only bone I did these 'studies' for, due to teh time constraints later.

These Dry Bones Part 2

Almost done! Well this semester, though there's still quite a few things which need rapid completion. Anyways, here's my Leg, Scapula and Pelvis bone drawings, only have the arms in supinated and pronated positions left to do, those will be done on Thursday, after I finish off my English essay (should start that, NOW), the whole thing is due Friday, but I'll have all day thursday after class to work on this, and then it will be DONE.

Well here's what you've all (ok I have no idea how much traffic I get here, meh) been waiting for:

Shark-Bait Hoo-ha-ha!

Character expressions assignment, our last drawing assignment for Character design class! Though we still have to do an artist presentation...
Anyways, went with a shark for this one. Originally his head was going to be much more square, but Enzo (our teacher) suggested I put a more standard snout on it, so basically it now has the bow of the Titanic for a nose. I'll be using this guy for our final storyboarding assignment as well.
And now for a fairly rapid 2-point perspective room drawing. And I've already maxed out my caffiene quota for the day this morning! w00t

Landscape Painting Part 1

Well I did the painting, but in the wrong medium. No, I didn't use the wrong paints, I mean completely the wrong medium, as in it is on the computer, not paper.

No it wasn't a mistake. I did this for my final cloud painting too, I make the whole thing digitally, because Photoshop is nigh-infinitely forgiving if you know what you're doing (which I do, w00t) then print it off and use that as a basis for the traditional painting I'll actually hand in. Basically I end up with two different finished works. The digital one SHOULD be less 'finished' than the physical one, but I often get carried away, so whether or not this approach adds or detracts from my final is yet to be discovered. I did two studies traditionally before, so the switch in medium shouldn't be too startling. Anyways, I'll be doing the real one tomorrow, for now you can see my digital study. Which I might add, you'll get to fully see, where as the finished 'real' painting won't entirely fit in the scanner.

They need to start selling bigger scanners to the masses...

If I can make something that looks like this in gouache, I will be very happy. If it looks better I might be ecstatic : D

Saying a game has vehicles section nowadays is like saying it comes in a BOX

El Box foldio. Okay enough cryptic messages, it's my box fold animation. Quite happy with it, looking forward to the ball and tail assignment that's up next as well. Thank goodness that one's due at the very end, as opposed to every other class which has final assignments due the week before, ie: much sooner than is comfy.

One of which is the landscape painting, which is tonight's task. But for now, Autobox, roll out!
(no, the bad puns have no end):

Royal Winter Fair didn't have Chairs.

Oh the wit! But seriously, when it was lunch time we only saw about four tables, and of course there was that bar section with a whole bunch more empty tables but you weren't allowed in unless you bought a drink at the bar. Was there like another food court outside or something? Whatever, the indoor situation pertaining to seating was re-donk-u-lus.

ANYWHO, I was hoping I would make more drawings than I did while there, but I certainly have enough for the 6 pages we're supposed to hand in from the fair. Or is it 4 pages? The handout at the beginning of the year says 4, but I keep thinking I heard 6 somewhere. Meh. So here's my 6 pages, as always the drawings were scanned in and arranged in Photoshop (cleaned up a bit too), so if I have to reduce to 4 I can always re-arrange stuff:

The originals were all done with a mechanical pencil. I brought markers, conte pencils, pens and regular pencils with me, but a combination of not wanting to waste time switching between tools (in a VERY crowded building no less), and just being more comfy with my mechanical pencil resulted in doing everything in one medium. At least I had the options there.

Dyslexic Cow

It's like having the movie Dune in your drink.

So in painting today we ironically didn't touch the paints, but did landscape studies using graphite powder in preparation for our landscape paintings due in a few weeks. Combining a few reference pictures I came up with this:

I'll be making some colour studies based on this using photoshop and eventually in real paint (remember that stuff?). It's a sand desert, though as it is it wouldn't be hard to convert to an ice desert. But as the title for this post suggests, I'm headed for the hotter variant. The scene is supposed to have a man-made object in the foreground, I'm thinking either adding a wrecked plane, oil well, generic hut or just rip off a Wind Trap from the Dune series (link is NOT my work). Anyways this exercise was great fun and I'm much more confident about painting dunes now.

These Dry Bones Part 1

Obviously I'm not done all the bone drawings, but the Skull, Lumbar and Cervical Vertebrae are completely, complete, and the Scapula is only missing 2 drawings which won't take long once I get the model again. Pelvis needs 4 more drawings so I haven't bothered assembling the 2 I do have, yet. But the Pelvis was the first bone we got, so I was still figuring out how I was going to draw these when I had it, I improved my method immediately afterwards. Haven't touched the arms and legs yet, but I'm comfy with being able to get to those in time.

Anyways, doing these with H and a 3B Conte pencils, plus a Charcoal White pencil for the shiny bits. Ooo, shiny. Done on Manilla. These were all drawn on 8 1/2x11 then scanned and shrunk down, I scanned a blank Manilla page for the background then put it all together in Photoyshop:

EDIT: Work-in-progress scapula drawings removed, cause I have the full ones posted later.

Seaweed part 2

And the book too. Got them done and handed in today. Would've preferred to fine tune a few things, but time presses, at least our class is caught up now, we missed 2 animation classes due to holidays. They should really plan ahead more with that, I mean it's not like they can't see it coming. Anyways, here's my seaweed/book page turn video:

Paintings that worked!

Today I was working on my Cloud Painting assignment. I still have to do the final painting for that, but half the project is the studies before that, which are now done. Lessons were learned once again this painting session, but nothing as drastic as 'bought wrong paints' went wrong this time. Some of the paintings turned out better than others, but I'll be using them all anyways, since he's not expecting the studies to be masterpieces:

Just an FYI, these are about the same size as you see them here, as in if you click the image to enlarge it what you'd see would be larger-than-life.

Things that would be changed: The one with in the desert, those yellow lines on the road were a late addition I wish I'd left out. Also, I think these have to be analogous, so that yellow sand is too different a hue. The one with the wispy clouds over the ocean (not the billowy-clouds-over-ocean), the clouds need to stand out more. Though that may be difficult to achieve. I did that one by painting a plain blue sky then adding the wisps with white paint, whereas the usual method is to leave the spaces that are to be white unpainted (which I did with every other painting). But with wispy clouds this is quite tricky, I'd basically have to paint the sky in between each wisp. And the night scene with the full moon is a little bland...

The aforementioned billowy-clouds-over-ocean might be my favourite. I feel comfy with the orange sunset but I'd probably rearrange the cloud formation. I like the crescent-moon scene too, though as-is it's pretty much the billowy-clouds-over-ocean, just with purple.

For tomorrow, the room drawing! REALLY hope I can finish it all tomorrow, but I do have Saturday to work on it as well. Wish me luck!

Character

Well got lots done so far this reading week. My Seaweed AND Book Page Turn are both done, but I need to get to the school to put the frames into a video (the pages are larger than the regular scanner) so getting the videos up will have to wait till Monday.

The other thing I've finished this week is my 6 Character Poses, and I can put those up:

Yes, a zombie seems stereotypically thematic for this time of year, but you're just going to have to believe me when I say the thought of Halloween honestly did not cross my mind when I chose to use a zombie for this project. I don't think I've drawn a zombie since, grade 7 maybe?

Anyways, credit has to go to my character design teacher for the idea of the zombie taking off his arm and using it as a back-scratcher. From there I had a series of epiphanies for the other uses for his limbs. And I love that sun. The zombie does not.

Darn, I did spell Bogey wrong... You still get it though right? Right??

Seaweed part 1

Just starting on the seaweed assignment. First thing I did was scan in the 'template' they gave us in the hand out, traced it into individual frames and made it into an animation. So if you follow the template drawing exactly, this is the motion your seaweed will perform:

As you can see, it really isn't very seaweed-like. Obviously this template was given to us so that we could clearly see the details of the motion, but many people end up making their seaweed move in the exact same way anyways. This template is EXAGGERATED, so if you don't want your seaweed to look like a wagging tail or some sort of vicious attack plant (I can just hear the 'thud' at the end of each swing), don't make it sway as far as this. 80% less sway might work.

Feet

Handed these in today, I'm quite eager to find out how I did, but patience we must have grasshopper.

Also reading week has finally arrived and I'm so grateful it has. Lots to do yes, but I finally feel like I have more than enough time to do everything, as I mentioned in the previous post my time management had been thrown off at some point, so now it should get back on track.

So here's those feet drawings:

Handz

Here's my 12 hands, I'll put up my 12 feet once they're done. Just 3 more feet to draw, they're due tomorrow, but since I'm not shading my feet they get done much faster. At some point my time management went kablooie, so it became impossible to draw all 12 feet in time with shading. Oh well, like how they're working out anyways...

For reading week, in order of importance (ie: what's due first):

-Seaweed+Book Flip animation

-6 Character Poses

-1-point perspective Classroom

-Cloud Painting

-Object Drawings (20 by the end of the semester)

So yeah, that's going to be busy. We should REALLY have an extension on the seaweed/book, since we've only had about an hour of in-class time to work on it (during which we were also finishing our previous assignment) but let's not COUNT on that happening.

Well it's time to go Back To The Future.

...

Feet.

Lessons learned: Painting

Tonight I started work on my 2nd assignment for Painting, Rendering a Sphere.

Simple, yes?

Well here are the lessons learned when I started painting tonight:
A) Tape down your paper on something that won't warp when it gets wet, wood works, newsprint on wood doesn't (I was using newsprint to help avoid a mess, turns out it just created a mess on my image).
B) Good Watercolor paper is THICK (takes a lot of swipes with an exacto knife to cut!)
C) ...



USE THE RIGHT PAINTS


D) Water soluble Oil Paints act and look painfully similar to gouache, until you try to mix them, or clean them off your brush (thank goodness that was a dirt cheap brush, the trash can now contains a very orange object).

Lesson D is particularly important to learn, as said water soluble oils are sold at the Sheridan store, by the same company (Windsor & Newton) and with the same selection of colours we were told to buy in GOUACHE. And since they're paints they are naturally right beside the gouache.
And since they're paints they are quite expensive.
Whatever, I'll hang on to them anyways, maybe I'll get to use them for a mixed media thingy, someday.

In other words: I've lost the receipt.

Portfolio

This is what got me into Animation at Sheridan this year. We needed a minimum 2.97/4 score to get in, the score starts at 2.5 and goes up or down depending on the competition. This is because they only let about 100-130 people into the program each year (still not 100% sure on the number of us).
I got in with a 3.12/4 while taking the Visual & Creative Arts program at Sheridan. The previous year I got a 2.43/4 while taking Art Fundamentals...
And the year before that, during highschool I got about 4 out of 100 (the marking scheme was different, but not the standards!).
As should be evident, Art Fundies at Sheridan is an excellent program, and most highschool art programs are next to useless. They don't need to be, there's so much BASIC stuff they could just tell us that would immediately improve our art skills, but nah, we'll just run in abstract circles.
I mean I really enjoyed Grade 12 art and took it seriously, but I was NEVER told anything about line quality throughout my education before post-secondary. I mean it's SO simple. Use thicker lines away from the light source, and lighter lines near it, and don't use 'hairy' lines! There, that's all you need to get started!
Anywho (yes I use that alot), I'll only put up the stuff from my victorious portfolio (w00t) cause the other stuff is redundant or, in the case of my highschool portfolio, sacrilegiously bad.

Life Drawings

Animal Drawings

Hand Actions

Character Rotations

Character Action Poses

Household Objects

Room, and the same room from a different view

Storyboard

(I really hope I don't have to draw this cat again, I drew him 3 years in a row)

Personal Pieces

The following piece is the only thing common to all 3 of my portfolios. Yes, I did it in highschool and could do much better now, but I still think it's a fairly good drawing, after all it did work eventually (I got 3.5/4 on my Personal pieces overall, so the judges certainly didn't hate it).

Quite a story behind this one, I'll spare most of the details and say this was for an anti-abuse poster contest, at the top of the original it says "Should love hurt this much?". In my actual porfolio I used a full size copy I had recieved (original is in a frame in London), the image was too big to fit in my scanner so what you see is cropped.

The drawing is of a friend who gave me several photos to choose from, I felt this angle worked the best.

Main issue is since this is from a photo, the light from the flash 'flattens out' the shadows. If the flash wasn't directly lined up with the lens, or if there was no flash (so you'd probably need a spotlight or sunlight to get sufficient lighting) you'd see more cast shadows and reflected light which would help define the form better.

These selections from my sketchbooks were all put on one page, so they counted as one peice:

My last personal peice was my self-portait painting that I've already put up on this blog.