Life Drawing

Hey guys,
I had a rather successful time at life drawing last night. I like to think the videos I watched over the weekend on Sycra Yasin's youtube channel and having started the Pencil Kings Figure Drawing Challenge have something to do with that, lol. Sycra's video on drawing shoulders was very helpful. The proportion practice from the figure drawing challenge has been even more helpful, since that's something I've struggled with for a long time. Lol, looking at these, I feel like I was replaced with someone who knew how to draw. Hopefully this improvement won't turn out to have been a fluke.

Cougar Studies

Hey guys,
I'm thinking about animating a big cat test and did some cougar studies for practice. I did these using Mischief (www.madewithmischief.com/), as my trial is going to expire soon and I haven't used the program enough to make a decision on whether or not its worth buying. Do any of you have experience with Mischief? The infinite zoom continues to blow my mind and its been the only program where I feel like I can really (comfortably) draw digitally. That being said, it lacks things like pressure sensitivity controlled opacity (they say that's on their to do list), the ability to make selections that aren't squares, and only have a few brushes. Have any of you guys tried painting with the program or anything? Please feel free to let me know how you like it if you've used it!

Badgers and Bears!

I'd like to do some Welcome to Nightvale fan art and decided to depict the characters based on animals typically found in desert places like Arizona (since Nightvale seems to be somewhere in the US). I imagined Cecil as a badger and Carlos as a black bear. Before trying to design either of them it would help to learn how to draw their respective animals, lol.

I like the direction that the top right drawing on the second page is headed in. I want their designs to remain animalistic enough so that walking/running as quadrupeds would be believable and plausible. I'm also unsure of how much clothing I want them to wear. At first I was thinking of a Blacksad level of characterization, but after looking at some pages from the comic I decided that would be too close to the human side of things.

Moon Animate Make Up Roughs

Hey guys,
Not too long ago I found out about the existence of this fun project, Moon Animate Make-Up and asked them if I could participate. Last Sunday I was given a shot and finally have a rough version of it animated. I have never animated effects before so everything about this was new. I still don't feel like I have any idea what I'm doing, lol.

Roughs

The rough pass of my umbreon jump exercise is finally "done". The proportions ended up being closer to the fox I used for ref than the pokemon itself, but it'll have to do. I want to draw my own version of umbreon anyway. Unfortunately, the tie down stage is the worst for me when working digitally due to feeling like I can't see well enough. I'm going to try saving each frame as a jpg and drawing over them in Photoshop to see if that's any better than trying to do it in TvPaint. We'll see how it goes.

Anime Study

After drooling over amazing fight scenes with crazy camera moves from various anime shows, I decided to try doing a study of one. I picked a shot from the fight between Ryuko and Satsuki in Kill La Kill and redrew most of the frames. It was an interesting experience and I'm still ruminating on things I've learned from doing it. The exercise definitely pushed me to use more foreshortening than I've ever used when drawing, let alone animating. It also seems like as long as the arcs of the main action are reading, then everything else can be kind of crazy?

More Umbreon

Hey guys,
I have another update on my test. I spent the morning analyzing a Milt Khal pencil test of Anita from 101 Dalmations (http://vimeo.com/68775277 the part I studied was her laugh from f43 to 69) and then wrote a bunch of  notes trying to apply what I'd learned from that to my animation. One of the main things I took away from it is that almost every key that Milt drew has some form of opposite action. All of his overlap is worked into the drawings through which enables everything to work together once inbetweened. The amount of information he included in each drawing was amazing! He was predicting where each thing would be before and after the current drawing and drew it accordingly. For example, he had a key where the head was at it's extreme up rotation, the next key had the head "translated" down but still rotated up. The key after that was the extreme down rotation with the head "translated" up a little. He placed the nose on the middle key in such a way that it's spacing worked with the previous key to create an ease out in anticipation of the next key being the extreme down. The chart between the middle key and the end key called for a single inbetween exactly half way between the two. Even when working on extreme drawings, he's still looking at what's going on with other parts of the body that haven't arrived at their end points yet. This may not sound impressive since its so easy to playblast our work, write down what's wrong, and fix it, but they didn't have anything like that back then. There wasn't a play button for them to hit to check for mistakes. Milt's fantastic grasp of the principles of animation in combination with his draftsmanship truly make his shots masterpieces. o_o

Ok, on to my animation. Lol, it seems so piddly in comparison but I imagine even Milt didn't start off being amazing. I want to continue working on it and fixing things, but it's Sunday and I spent the entire weekend animating and studying animation. At this point I NEED to do something different or else I'll arrive at work tomorrow feeling like I didn't actually have a weekend.

Umbreon Update

I spent the day reworking my umbreon animation. It's much better than before but still has a long way to go! The lack of weight in the jump is annoying me, and I am suspecting that I might lack the drawing skills to really achieve the tight spacing that I want. =(

Life Drawing Dump

I really need to go to these sessions more often!

Update

Here's an update on my Pokemon test. There's still a long way to go and plenty of things to fix!

What's this?

I decided to give my idea for a 2d test a try after all. Here's a look at my first scribble pass. Lol, I don't think this can even be called blocking. It's super messy and pretty much only consists of the main story telling poses. Aside from not knowing how to use TV Paint Animation Pro, I'm having fun working on this. It's awesome to be doing 2d again though I wish it was on paper instead of digital.

Fox studies

Today I came up with an idea for a 2d test featuring a pokemon. Unfortunately, there's a very good chance that this will end up being one of my infamous ideas that never actually happen. I did some studies though in preparation for it.

Painting Update

I took another look at my painting today and decided that there were things I could do after all, lol. I noticed that me edges were very messy and that other people's paintings always seem to have clear edges around their figures, props, etc. So I re-watched some of the masking lessons from the Magic Box and took another stab at my piece. I think it's already looking much better! The line art is back because I flattened everything before creating the masks. Once everything's been painter over/touched up the lines will be gone. I still need to create her necklace too. Originally I wanted a super simple, stylized background but its looking like that's not going to cut it based on how nicely the foreground is coming together. The figures behind her should still be ambiguous but more fleshed out than they are now. I should also probably work on adding more of an indication of the environment too. Lol, as usual this is becoming much more complex than originally planned for.

Things to do tomorrow
Clean up the band and brim of the hat
Mask off and clean up the face
Take a pass at her hair

New Painting

I had such a great time at an electro swing party on Friday with my lady-friend that I decided to paint a picture for her. Here's a look at what I have thus far. Tomorrow I need to add her necklace and then it should be done (since I don't know what else to do to it).

Cloudy 2 Reel

I forgot that Cloudy 2 came out on dvd last week! Here's a look at the shots that I did. I was only on the show for a month, but was SUPER happy to get to animate Steve. =D

Jocelyn Cofer Cloudy 2 Reel from Jocelyn Cofer on Vimeo.

Color Comp Pt. 1

I've got one out of four color comps done. I feel like I spent too much time rendering the neck rather than trying to get the whole piece to the same level. I'll try to avoid making the same mistake again.

Ballerina Life Drawing

Hey guys,
There was a life drawing session after work today and we go to work with a ballet dancer! Every single one of her poses was fantastic! I hope we'll get more dancers as models in the future. =D