The Island

This is it! Final animation of Year 1!

Which is of course the famous Flour sac animation, I'm pretty sure we have more flour sac assignments in year 2. Anyways, my object was an Easter Island statue. Naturally I had it shoot laser beams (and cannons as it were). I mean how would you feel if your pillow jumped in and woke you up from a one thousand year slumber? Hmm?

Anyways we had 12 seconds to do perform two jumps and some sort of interaction with the object of choice, besides that we had free reign. I actually went a half second over 12, but the part that's after the 12 second mark isn't 100% necessary, but I sure like it!

So without further ado, Mr. Flour Sac meets his end:

Yes, he taunts the statue after the first shot by waving his butt at it, bad idea buddy, bad idea.

So even though, like just about every other project I had to stay up till 4am on the last day to get it done, still happy with the results and it would be difficult to fix the issues that are there while keeping within the 12 second timeframe. This is of course because the only real issues are with the timing, the jumps come down maybe one frame too fast and a little more time for the transitions from action to action would help guide your eyes to the right places at the right time. But hey, we still get to see a flour sac get roasted by an elder statue of death, and that's all that matters right?

Dog the Builder

Here's my final character design for year 1! We only had 2 character assignments this semester, weird but I'm not complaining, we were BUSY as it was.

So this assignment was basically a fusion of the last two from 1st semester, a pose sheet and an expression sheet, or all on one, either way we needed 8 of each. We had to hand it in digitally as well.

What I'm putting up is the scans I made at home. I REALLY wish I had handed these scans in, but alas I had to draw the last poses the day it was due at the school, so I had only the school scanners to use.

I thought the bad scans I got from those scanners was because I didn't really clean these up (the blue rough drawing is on the same paper) but the results I got from my scanner with the same images proves that the school scanners are in fact ridiculously dirty. I mean my scanner isn't new and it is certainly used often, and it's still so much better.

Sorry for the rant, but what are blogs for? Anyways, here's a very busy dog!

10 points for saying Precarious

Almost the end! Just one test and one digital animation to do! The animation will take all of a half hour, I'll see what other stuff from our Digital class I want to put up once I grab everything off the school network on Friday (cause they wipe everything after the end of the year).

Meantime, here's my last 2 painting projects! First up is the second half of the second-last project, the interior, you know the one 'based' on that copy of a painting I put up earlier. It's Dr. Jekyll's office/lab:

Finally, the final painting! We had to take our latest (also last) character from character design and put it in an environment. My character was a construction worker doggy, so I put him having lunch on a skyscraper. I was gonna have the skyscraper look a lot less finished, but time constraints said otherwise. That way his presence at the end of the seemingly random steel bar would make a bit more sense. Also, trying not to blatantly rip off Mirror's Edge here, but I really like that crisp blue skyscraper-cityscape.

Stay tuned, more final project uploads to come!

My workstation

Finishing up the final animation for this year. w00t!

Go figure it's now that I finally pull together a fully functional workstation at home. I know we get our own desks in 2nd year, but I like working at home, and anyways I don't think we can pencil test on Flipbook at our desks. And if we can, still I like working at home. It's homey.

I'll put up some rough work of my Flour Sac before the day is done (it has to be finished before the day is done!), but for now, behold my completed workstation arrangement:

My computer is less than a meter to the left of this desk, I can stand behind this setup with the keyboard on this desk or my chair, so I can hit the enter (capture) button, then just reach over, switch to the next drawing, capture, rinse and repeat.The lightbox is on when shooting to provide consistent and strong lighting, which is a problem with the stations at the school, they;re by the windows so the lighting condition can change while shooting. I have a line penciled on the wall showing where to tape the peg bar. Might just buy a 2nd peg bar and keep it taped there all the time.

Then to work on the drawings I just spin it around, take down the peg bar and re-stick it to the lightbox. If the webcam cord is in the way I can disconnect it on this end since it's on an extension, the webcam's original cord is very short.

Phone, speaker (I still have to get up to change songs gosh! but a few of my playlists last a few hours at least) and even my fridge are all within arm's reach. There's lots of space behind me so I can spin around and pile drawings there if the desk gets too crowded, which it always does!

So yeah at this rate I'll be like the people in Wall-E who can do everything they want without getting off their butts. Except I'm underweight, so that's at least a good place to start that habit, right?

Right?

The Ant and the Dove

This is the final project for storyboarding class (or Mauryboarding as the 1st years call it), we needed to make a storyboard (surprise!) based off the Aesop fable of the Ant and the Dove, this is what I put together:

Instead of a gun the hunter is supposed to be threatening the bird with 'lime twigs' in the original fable, but hardly anyone knows what those are and even if you do, they're a REALLY boring plot device so the gun works so much better. Yes, the Dove makes an origami/papercraft sail boat to save the Ant.

Just 3 more projects and 3 tests left!

Interior Painting 1

I know, lack of posts for like a month and then BAM!

Anyways, working on our last major painting assignement. We have to paint a room interior based on a description given in a selection of book excerpts which we were provided. I chose the Jekyll and Hyde excerpt, but that's actually not the painting you'll be seeing in this post...

Cause the other part of the assignment was to find an artist whose style we wanted to emulate in some way and make a copy painting of one of their works. I really didn't have any specific artist in mind, to be honest I wouldn't be able to pin down one specific artist who drives me, but I certainly know a piece I want to emulate when I see one.

But again, I also need to find something that first off, wasn't going to be impossibly hard and secondly had close-to the same mood as the interior painting, which will be of Jekyll/Hyde's gloomy laboratory.

So I browsed around and found a piece I liked by Lou Romano, who works for Pixar, doing the voice of Alfredo in Ratatouille and is apparently the Art director for the upcoming 'Up!' (ignore the pun, it was unavoidable). I got the image from his blog here: http://louromano.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

My version:

I used only gouache, he used acrylic and gouache. His was 11 3/4" x 23" in size where as mine is 5 3/4" x 11". Just FYI.

Next post will (hopefully) be my finished interior.

Caricatures

Today's in-class activity was Caricatures! No model, well we were the models, most people went up to be drawn twice, and since multiple people drew them each time there are now a LOT of portraits floating around.

I handed one in and gave one away, but in return I received two drawings of me (equivalent exchange!), one from our prof. with his signature (bet it'll fetch a pretty penny one day but totally won't sell it) and one by fellow classmate Eva, (can't seem to find her blog, not sure if she has one), both are quite excellent so thank you!

Anyways, for most of them I felt I made a good likeness, but that's just it, these ended up too much like regular portraits, exaggerate! Grrr!

^Ashley from Lame Art

^Danielle from Danie's Stuff

^Eva will never live this joke down.

^Katrina

^Kyle from KVMOWAT

^Sam from Images and Ideas

^Shaela

^Sonia

^Vincent (Decepticons attack!)

And here's me by Eva:

And finally, me drawn by the Thurmanator (our prof Mark Thurman):

Yes, my lower half appears to have become a mannequin/pinocchio, obviously Mark was just having a little fun with this.

Polar Bear Walk 2

Here's my finished polar bear, would've added more details (ie: fingers/toes and pads under his paws), but still happy with how it works overall. Onto the flour sac! 144 drawings of characterized sac-y goodness!

Zoo zoo zoo

We went to the Zoo 2 weeks ago, actually could've put these up anytime but it slipped me mind (sorreez!), we needed a minimum of 3 pages with 6 gestures each, and 3 pages with 2 studies (ie: longer drawings) each. It was very cold at the Zoo, which was quite detrimental to the drawing initiative, but we managed. At least I had a chair for this trip, and they had buses! So why didn't they have a bus to the Royal Winter Fair again?

......

Anyways, here's me drawings, I ended up with just one extra gesture page:

Still Life March 09

Just got this back , we had to do a still life painting involving a reflective object and a transparent one and some cloth/drapery, handed it in right after reading week (yeah we get paintings back kinda slow). It was nice to go back to good ol' observation paintings, used gouache to get some more practice with the medium.

I'll have the finished polar bear walk up tomorrow (well that's the plan), for now, onto charachter design!