More TLP

The Little Prince is in the news!
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/the-little-prince-the-new-film-of-the-boy-who-fell-to-earth-9949079.html

Posters

Hey guys,
Pixels posters have been released! The Pac Man one looks pretty cool. I wish we could see the face on the centipede one though.

The Little Prince

Hey guys,
Check out the trailer for the film I worked on in Montreal. The Little Prince is one of the most sincere, heart felt movies I've ever had the privilege of working on. The crew was fantastic and the project itself was a great experience. I really hope it does well next Christmas!

Chimp Skulls

Studies for a painting I plan on doing before I start at Sony. I hope to do another fancy animals piece while I still have a bunch of free time.

New Character

Hey guys,
My recent visits to the gym and interest in martial arts has inspired me to come up with a new character. She doesn't have a name or back story yet. All I know is she is a tree kangaroo and is in martial arts training for a style more suitable for larger/heavier animals. It would be great to do an animation test with her too! Lol, I'll add it to my ever growing list of art things to do.

A Couple of Drawings

Hey guys,
I have two more drawings to share. Sadly, life drawing has been cancelled until the fall so no more model sessions on Tuesday nights at work. Some friends have started an unofficial lunchtime sketchbook club though, which is turning out to be really fun. It's super inspiring to see my peers drawings. I still have so much more to learn!

Abandoned Painting

I haven't drawn this guy in a long time! It would be great to streamline his design so I could do some animation tests with him. There are some shots from Space Dandy on vimeo in rough animation form and that inspired me to try to some of my own anime style animation. I never got that far though. Rather than coming up an existing with a character to use, I remembered Dae Dae and did a sketch of him. What was supposed to be a quick coloring job turned into an attempt at painting...which was later abandoned, lol.

Some Drawings

A random slug guy and an old man! I kind of want to color the first one since I have very few pieces that aren't just line art. It's time for bed though, so we'll see if I still feel that way after work tomorrow.

How Did You Find Me?

Drawn while listening to one of my favorite episodes of Welcome to Nightvale. It's really nice to be drawing for fun again!

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!