So here's what I got together from the Auto Show. I started with just pencil work, then by the time I got to drawing this wonderful Ferrari 458 Italia I decided to use markers. I was happy enough with the result that I went ahead and marker-ed the other drawings I liked, and this is the result. Pixar much? At the end of Cars they had a cameo with Michael Schumacher as himself, as a Ferrari. Of course, he was a Ferrari F430, which doesn't have quite the same visual effect (for me) as the 458 Italia. So what I'm saying is they better put the 458 Italia in Cars 2. And a Delorean while they're at it. No, the Stig (read: Top Gear!) was not there, but I wanted to have at least 1 'human' in my assignment, so I dropped him in. Here he contemplates how he's going to get in to this decidedly too-small Audi kart. The size was on purpose, in real-life this thing looked like it was designed for a kid.
And to be cyclical, there was an episode of Top Gear where Michael Schumacher claimed to be the Stig, so have I drawn the same "person" twice here?
Well my action analysis is actually still at the school so that's not going up this weekend. However I did discover I had the frames with me from my Stop Motion assignment we did this week, so you're getting that instead!
While I don't intend to go into stop motion (I like the forgiving nature of computer 3D much better) I am having lots of fun with the class, and I can feel how handling these puppets relates with handling a digital rig. The program we use in class is VERY limited as far as editing goes, pretty much if there's something wrong with a frame you can either delete it and hope everything else matches up, or delete it and EVERYTHING else afterwards. You can't insert frames made afterwards into a previous space.
Didn't really need to do anything crazy to fix this up. There were 2 frames during the anticipation right before the 1st swing which were slowing down the movement far too much, so I just removed them. I was going for an effect like he had real trouble swinging forward the first time he brought the club behind his head, but after I shot it it didn't really work, so I edited it to be a more straight-forward swing. I made a double swing because I felt I needed to put more energy in after the 1st still. Also, the ending is a little abrupt, needs about 2 more frames of ease-in, but too late to fix now.
Unrelated, you've probably heard about Minecraft by now, and if you haven't, well, uh, now you have. I started playing it back in July and I've built a fairly extensive castle by this point. I've been using it as inspiration for drawing landscapes, buildings, and creatures lately. I did a bunch of sketches of the monsters and this weekend I caved-in (spelunked) and scanned them so I could paint them. Here's the 3 I got so far:
1st one is actually one I made up for the game, I just call it 'cave beast' and while it might not be implemented by Notch (the Minecraft creator's alias) I hope someday I'll be able to mod it in. In the middle we have the Creeper, the exploding enemy, and the last one is the new zombie pigman found in 'The Nether', complete with golden sword! Obviously these guys will never appear in-game with this much detail, but like old games the concept art exceeding the in-game graphics has it's own charm. Something I like about Minecraft, the limited graphics (to compensate for infinite manipulability) make everything sort of iconic, like how I used to make the starship Enterprise out of 5 square LEGO bricks. And it entertained me for years.
Anyways, our latest character assignment involved choosing one of three time periods and creating 4 characters for a story within chosen period. I picked a western, so that I could have a train in the story. I love trains so so much. We needed to have a hero/heroine, someone they love (romantic or platonic), a villain and a comic relief. We needed a lineup showing their relative sizes, and a sheet with 3 poses and 3 facila expressions for each of them. So here's what I got:
Our final storyboard for this year will be using these characters, I've got the story ironed out and over this week I'll have the beat boards made for that. Yes, Uncle Sam is the protagonist, of course he's not THE Uncle Sam but I took advantage of the pun.
Basically the story will revolve around all 4 of them on a train, Sam bought some boots for Violet's birthday, Bullhorn wants to steal them to give to his own wife for her birthday, then during the standoff on top of the moving train between Sam and Bullhorn Jacob remembers that he already got Violet the same set of boots. So Violet and Jacob get off the train at their stop, Sam and Bullhorn are stuck in the standoff for eternity on the train as it drives into the sunset.
And at the same time that's going I'm working on the muzzle animation, using a character from the previous character assignment (which it seems I haven't put up here, fix that in a bit), it's like the human sync except it had to be an animal with a muzzle (dog, cat, lizard, bear etc.) but it doesn't need the whole body, so I'm making it just from the waist up. And that's due Wednesday, Beat-boards are due Friday, a Digital Painting is due sometime this week as well, along with a short acting performance. And I'm also trying my best to make some extra 3D props for a 4th year's film... WHEEE!
Character design this year is a whole lot of fun, our instructor is Pete Emslie (his blog is heres: http://cartooncave.blogspot.com/), over the past few weeks he's been making caricatures of us 2nd years, we haven't been disappointed to say the least, he did this one of me on Oct 13: This is simply a fantastic balance of exaggeration and representation, I can't decide which part I like best, the eyebrows, the chin, nose, hair shape (gracious I need a haircut when it curls this much!) anyways, it's great and I'm totally hyped for the rest of this year's work in the class.
Meantime I have to make a weight lift-and-toss animation over a whole 7 days , because I just finished an admittedly overly-ambitious storyboard assignment, which still needs one tweak and lots of scanning (45-ish panels) before you'll see it up here. Amazingly, the correction required is to add in even MORE Easter Island heads. A painting also got done and hopefully I'll get it back next week, before reading week which for once will actually involve some reading...
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!
First Character design project for this semester, we design a character (wow really?) then put it in a sequence (not animated, just the key poses) involving it entering a scene, interacting with object, encountering some difficulty involving the object, then some sort of resolution. So for mine I have created,
The Adventures of Star Platypus
Enjoy!
Come to think of it, I just realized I have expressed one of my own frustrations with this project. The door into the garage below my loft is the most tempermental door I have encountered. It seems to only open when it feels like it, and it's not even an automatic! Though the main garage door is, and has also had issues on occasion...
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
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??
