Scary rocks 2

Continuing the painting assignment, I've put together some digital color roughs (still have to paint more the old fashioned way, but this helps me visualize quickly):

If I wanted to fiddle more with these I'd make the sky brighter in the 2 monochromatic ones, which are literally the multi-color painting desaturated, then with a few mouse clicks set so the achromatic lights and darks translate into the lights and darks in monochromatic. No re-painting was done, as I said just trying to quickly visualize, since I need to repaint by hand anyways, why waste time?
I do quite like the multi-color and I'm hoping the final will mostly be an improvement on that. Also after a demo in last weeks class I'm considering switching back to acrylic, only this time using a transparent method. I've always painted super-opaque with acrylic, but transparent-style painting with the layering ability of acrylic (as opposed to gouache which often gets messed up when you paint over it again) is tickling my curiosity...

EDIT: Re-uploaded the monochromatics with new versions where I fiddled with the brightness/contrast setting to get rid of the murkiness.

So a Wave, a Boat and a Flour Sac walk into a bar...

Most of my fellow animation friends will be putting up their completed versions of this assignment, but since Group D's (my group within the year, D rules!) animation class is on Mondays, we missed the first week due to teh Labour Day, thus our due date is pushed back one week.

So Animation #1 for Year #2 brings us back to our old friend the flour sac. This time he is braving treacherous waters on a floatation device of choice (pirate ship, tea cup, Data etc.) Actually works well in conjunction with my first flour sac animation (recall Easter Island roasting action), he's either sailing towards the island or making his escape from the enraged Moai...As you can see I just got the wave down. There's actually 4 parts to this assignment, the wave, the boat, the flour sac and finally the splashing effects. The boat can be quite simple, pretty much trace a boat drawing and move around each frame appropriately. The sac will need to be fully animated of course, as does the splash, but the splash only occurs over a few frames near the end so that won't be too bad once I get to it. Plus it's really organic (water eh) so I can have some fun with it. I already have the movements for the boat and sac roughed out, should have at least the boat done soon.

And what you don't see in this wave is that half of the basic motion had to be completely reworked, and the texture of the water (foam-ish stuff) needed absolute reworking which involved a boat-load of erasing (see what I did there? yes I know it was awful). But I like it now, and suffice to say I don't really have time to rework the water AGAIN, so this is it.

Tune in next time to hear the punchline for the joke in the subject!

Next post may or may not include aforementioned punchline.

Yes, more Easter Island Heads

Probably at the addiction level now, this is the 3rd assignment I can think of that I used easter island statues for, but whatever. Storyboard! This is the 1st assignment, we needed to make storyboard beats for one of 2 poems we were given. Beats differ from boards in that, well first of all there should be a lot less beats than boards. Beats basically describe all the action of an entire scene with one image (picture worth a thousand words pretty much taken literally) as opposed to boards which go into much more detail as to how the action happens and how the viewer sees it.

However, as with everything in art, composition/viewpoint is still very important in beats to get the mood and/or message across even if, when moving from beats to boards, the composition changes completely.

So my interpretation of the poem goes like this: these two body-less heads feel like a bunch of nobodies, but when the see what they have in common they feel happy being what they are (especially since they can do a cool totem pole trick!). But, if the statues with bodies ('somebodies') catch them fooling around things would be bad. Still, whenever they can they enjoy their time together, and mock the somebodies who's proud demeanor seems dull to these fun loving nobodies.

And now to reduce what I just used 72 words to describe into 4 images:

Now that that's out of the way, it's time to work on some wave animations!

Scary rocks

So STILL not done that digital painting I've been going on about, but I do have this line work for the first actual painting assignment this year!

Really happy already with this, the rocks were originally going to be more jagged, crumbly and pointy but inspiration switched me towards the big precarious boulders like you see in the deserts and canyons in the US. One things for sure, that temple in the center would not be a safe place to be!

At the same time I'm about to start up my Wave-Boat-Sac animation, and the first phase of storyboarding project 1 might get up soon as well. Depends actually, I'm getting an urge to finish up that digital thingy and I might just fall on that. Tune in next time to find out!