Pencil test for Guild class

I signed up for a traditional animation class with the Local 839 Guild up in Burbank on Monday nights!  It's a lot of fun getting to pick up paper and pencil again.  Here's the latest assignment pencil test:



My professor Alex Topete gave us model sheets for Darla Dimple from Cats Don't Dance (an excellent movie if you haven't seen it) and an audio file from "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"  I had a lot of fun pushing Darla's facial expression as she manages to shut off her alarm clock by pure fury. 

On the side I've also been helping out a friend with his short film so hopefully I'll be able to post my shot for you from that soon as well.  Meanwhile it's crunch time at work, we're shipping in October but we have to pass certification much earlier.  Hopefully things will cool down in a couple weeks!

POTC sketch

For my sister, she's a big Johnny Depp fan. :)

Contest Entry

So one of the online games I play has these drawing contests on their forums every few months or so.  Figured I'd give it a shot for some in-game currency.  Mostly it was an excuse to keep drawing and trying out new stuff.

This time I tried a technique that one of the panelists at last year's Comic-Con demonstrated when coloring in Photoshop.  Basically they start out "flatting" dark shadowy color, and then layering it up on "screen" until it reaches its lightest highlights.  At first I didn't see how this would be possible, I mean, if you want something red, shouldn't you start with the midtone red rather than the dark murky brownish-red of the shadow?

But after a little experimenting with my color palette it did seem to work out alright.  My question now is how to keep all those shades of brown organized!  They all look the same on my monitor, it's only once you start building up layers that you see what different colors they turn into.

Anyway, here's how it turned out:

The Promise of Living

Yet another card design, this time a thank-you for some members of the Angeles Chorale who have been working tirelessly to put together our concert taking place this Saturday!  I was inspired by one of the songs we're singing entitled "The Promise of Living" by Aaron Copland.  Had a little fun with custom Photoshop brushes to make the field, and heavily modified an old photo I snapped along highway 5 for some cloudage.  Someday I might learn how to paint clouds by hand... but why bother when I can take pictures?  God does a better job painting clouds than I ever could!

The composition is a little wonky because the finished card will have text.  But who needs the rule of thirds anyway. ;)

Crunch time at work.  It's nice to draw and do something completely different now and again.  Have you seen the extended trailer for MOH yet?  You can catch it here:

http://www.medalofhonor.com/

My shots: the shepherd (and goat! :D), the ATV, and the floor collapsing (which was quite a challenge). 

ArtRage tryout

I discovered a cheap, simple art program called "ArtRage" that tries to simulate real-world tools such as paint brushes, pencil, marker, etc. They have a 30-day demo so I tried it out. Overall it feels really nice! You can control how much paint is loaded onto the brush, add thinners, easily control the rotation of the canvas and the drawing implement (very useful!) and all sorts of intuitive settings. And for $40 it's definitely affordable. I just wish I knew how to paint better. :P  Anyway here's how it turned out (I got too lazy and didn't do a background):

I've been fascinated with birds lately since there's a freshwater marsh across the street from my work, and I recently picked up David Attenborough's "The Life of Birds" BBC series so I've been watching and sketching.  Maybe I'll post a few sketches that I'm happy with later.

Work has been busy as we prepare for yet another demo, but there's some fun stuff I'm working on :)

After-Christmas Christmas Specials

Ah well, so it's a little late... but the 12 days of Christmas go until January 6th, right? So there's still time to squeeze this in!

Everybody knows and loves the Peanuts holiday special, "A Charlie Brown Christmas." That goes without saying. And who could forget "How the Grinch Stole Christmas?" But I figure, as an animation afficionado I should point to some other cartoon Christmas specials that may get overlooked from year to year, but are nonetheless entertaining! Check them out if you're in need of a little post-Christmas holiday cheer. :)

Prep & Landing - this is 2009's freshly unwrapped special from Disney, and is quite fun! Hulu's only got it until January 1st though, so check it out soon!

Phineas and Ferb's Christmas Vacation - If you've never seen Phineas and Ferb on the Disney channel, I highly recommend it! It's one of the few current cartoons both me and my husband both enjoy watching. Their Christmas special is just as slick as any of their other episodes.

Olive the Other Reindeer - Ok, so the animation's not Pixar quality or anything, but this is an inventive special for the younger crowd produced by Matt Groening of Simpsons fame.

'Twas the Fight Before Christmas - Ah, the Powerpuff Girls. :) What would the holidays be without a little bit of baddy bashing?

The Very First Noel - I saw this cute film at the Religious Education Congress a few years back and fell in love with their character and art design! It's a neat way to introduce kids to the Nativity story. You'll have to get the DVD from veryfirstnoel.com to see the whole thing, but I'd say it's a worthy investment and supports independent animation. :)

What animated Christmas specials do you recommend?

End of 2009 already?

How time flies! Work has been busy, and a side project has been keeping me busy in my free time as well (as any YouTube followers may have noticed). We finally released a trailer for the game I'm working on, which you can see here:



My main contribution to the trailer was the ATV shots (a few other random things as well). There will be lots more to see later! I'm really hoping this latest effort does well. The team is enthusiastic and of course we have something to prove since Call of Duty currently leads the pack in FPSes.

Anyway. Like last year I found some time to draw a card for my mom's birthday (which falls near Christmas). I went for a sort of classic storybook style this time:

Frogs!

Every once in a while I do a little sculpting with Sculpey polymer clay, just for fun! This latest project was a gift for my sister's birthday, very much in the style of Tim Cotteril's bronze frog sculptures (which I can't afford :P)

Here's a couple pics, sorry the first one is kind of dark:




He's got an inner skeleton made of tin foil and 1/8" armature wire to add stability and help it bake faster. The metallic sheen was created with a mix of red and yellow Daler Rowney Pearlescent Liquid Acrylic Inks, with black enamel for the eyes and legs, and gold spray paint for the toes. For the spots I also used black enamel but quickly dabbed up most of the paint with a paper towel to create a faux patina look. Coated the whole thing with some Sculpey glaze for a nice shine.

I think he looks pretty happy hanging out in the backyard :)

BTW, "Santa Rocks" is on hold as a side project came up which offered me a chance to do some 2D animation :D It won't be anything spectacular but it does get me drawing again! I'm excited to haul out the Wacom and *gasp* even a pencil and sketchpad!!

13 Unique Wonders

I thought I'd make a birthday card for my grandma, and this is how it turned out:

My grandparents are big fans of Mah-Jongg, and often host games at their house. The hand I put on the birthday card is one of the highest scoring hands you can get in the game, due to the difficulty of drawing the right tiles. My grandparents actually have pictures of their lucky hands in photo albums to show off to other Mah-Jongg players. Hey, I'm impressed! :)

This was the first time I tried "inking" the outlines in Flash. I've seen some other artists get very nice results from changing lines into fills to adjust the shape of the outlines... but I got lazy and just left them as lines :P Overall I was pretty happy with the control I had over the shape of the lines, even though it probably ended up taking about twice as long as it would have taken had I inked them freehand in Photoshop.

I keep telling myself that someday I'll learn how to render! Y'know, light sources and textures and all that jazz. I guess I get too impatient and want my illustrations to just be finished already. Maybe that's the animator in me wanting to move on to the next drawing...

Santa Rocks - OMG no more stepped keys!

So I took a chunk of the animation I'm working on and weaned it off of stepped keys, finally. I hadn't touched this for a while since things got busy with my choir's concert and work stuff.




I always dread the transition between stepped and spline, because it's so hard to keep that snap and spark to the animation once you start in-betweening. It's also when I start noticing that the cheats I did to capture certain poses don't work once I need to put a breakdown in between the two keys. What do you guys think?

Quote of the moment

"If you can turn down the sound and tell what's going on, it's animation. If you can turn down the picture and tell what's going on, that's radio." ~Chuck Jones

Not sure if the quote is exact, Eric Goldberg quoted it in the Animation Podcast. Regardless, I think it's worth thinking about!

"Santa Rocks," Part 2

I've added keyframes to try to define the scene more clearly and work on anticipation etc. Unfortunately this rig is very rudimentary so it doesn't have any fancy controls like squash and stretch (dammit Jim, I'm an animator not a rigger :P). I'll just have to make due with what I've got! Hey, Toy Story didn't have squash & stretch, did it?

I tried to capture some of the frantic excitement as he tears open his gift. What do you think? Does he look excited yet? Haven't focused on fingers much yet except at the very end, so the hand gestures are non-existent for the most part.



I know I know, I keep messing with the face. Eric Goldberg says it's ok. ;) As an experiment, however, I did try muting all the head controls to see how it looked without any facial expressions. Other than the creepy dead eyes, it actually still reads pretty well IMO. I promise when I start polishing I'll leave the face alone.

As usual feedback and critique appreciated!

Eric Goldberg on the Animation Podcast

Some interesting quotes I found relating to my question on blocking/posing:

"My approach tends to be feeling first, anatomy second. In other words, I like to draw everything that has a sense of give to it, and a sense of life and everything that will support the idea of a pose, and then build the anatomy on top. I think part of the difficulty with CG these days is that you're already starting with anatomy, and so you're already somewhat limited in how you can engineer everything to support a point or to support a thrust, so on and so forth, because you're already dealing with kind of boned and hinged characters."

"There's very little that I draw without at least some loose framework underneath. And I tend to start, you know, with what I think are the most compelling aspects first. I will almost always start with the face... The first thing I draw is the bridge of his nose, and his eyes sitting on top of it, and then the mouth underneath. That eyes-nose-mouth combination is the central focus, and I can put the eyes in any shape and expression that I want... THEN I draw the cranium behind it."

"Typically in CG, you layer things: you do the gross body movement, then you put the facial on top, and the legs on top... it's one reason a lot of CG walks don't work very well. It's because they do the torso first, and add the legs, which is crazy! It means that no walk actually has a push-off, and so all the walks look floaty. As opposed to the way you would do it in hand-drawn is actually conceiving the push-off thrusting that torso forward. And so, it's the kind of thing where it's kind of bass-ackwards, if you will, in the way that CG is done a lot of times, although strides are being made in making it more organic, definitely. But it's not a natural thing for CG to do unless you conceive it that way from the outset."

Holiday drawings

This was a birthday card for my mom (her bday's on December 22nd):

Had a little fun creating a confetti brush for Photoshop. :) And some fanart for Dragonfable:

Animation styles

So I've started up a short piece of animation (about 13 seconds, just shy of a 181A film) to practice acting and dialogue, something I don't often get to do at my job. I suppose if it turns out well I could put it on my demo reel, but I'd like feedback from other animators along the way to get it up to a good quality. I'm in the layout/blocking stage on the primary character:




The camera operator is an unseen third character (hence why the main character sometimes looks at the camera). I'll add some hand-held camera shake and a blinking "REC" overlay when I'm done with the animation to emphasize that.

I know at A.M. they start full body acting without any facial expressions - they have a rig with arms and legs and a head, but no face. I've heard that it's a good habit to get into when roughing out animation: make sure the body movement tells the story first, then add the facial expressions afterwards. I can see the merit to that, you don't want to get lazy with the body motion and rely on the face to sell the shot. At the same time, a viewer's attention is drawn to the face and eyes in particular, so shouldn't the facial emotion at least be considered when blocking?

I tend to switch work styles depending on the shot, although for acting I prefer to begin by setting keyframes on the entire body (as above) rather than working on parts at a time. Perhaps it's the traditional animator in me. :)

Hand-drawn animation was getting a swift kick in the pants when I started college, so I only really got a year's worth of training in the craft... and probably not the best training either. But I seem to recall wanting to draw the entire character, face and all, when roughing out the keys. Is that bad? Glenn Vilppu always told us "there are no rules, just tools."

ANYway. Guess I better get back to animating!

Getty Sketches!

Whew, finally some more stuff to post! Alina and I went to the Getty on Sunday to check out some Bernini sculptures. I was completely blown away by how much detail he was able to carve into the marble; I mean, he had 5-o'clock shadows on faces, lace and buttons and embroidery on clothes... it was amazing. There were a LOT of people there; we had to kind of push our way around to find good spots to sketch from. But it was so nice being able to get out and draw on location! I can't even remember the last time I did that... Anyway here's the result:

I love this guy's hair, hehe!  It took a long time to draw because of the complex shapes and the sheer amount of hair, but I think it was worth it. :)

King Louie XIV... Yeah.  Stately and regal, you'd expect a perfectly timed breeze to come along any second and tousle that flowing hair.

You should have seen it

I was driving back to work after picking up my wedding dress from David's Bridal, and saw the most amazing sunset taking place... I knew I had to go watch it. I wanted my camera so badly right then, it was spectacular - misty pinks and purples in the mountains, a bright orange glow where the sun was sinking behind them, brilliant yellows and whites in the clouds, and the clouds, my God, no words to describe how awesome they were. Why did I leave my camera at home?!

As soon as I got to the parking lot I scrambled out of the car, grabbed my DS and ran out of the garage - luckily EA is positioned right near the coast, so when I stood overlooking Lincoln Blvd I had a great view!

It's times like this when I realize just how very mortal and inadequate we are; as I stood there trying to capture the sunset on that tiny touchscreen I knew I had no hope of really portraying what I saw. Honestly I don't know how some people manage to paint sunsets so well, the light is constantly changing, the colors blend together and the clouds metamorphose into different shapes. How can you freeze one moment in time when the moments are so fleeting?

After a few frustrating minutes I decided that while I couldn't immortalize the sunset through my limited means, at least I could experience it. If I couldn't share it with others, at least I could share a moment between me, the sky and the creator. There was something neat about "painting" on my DS while the sky was painting itself with its own palette of brilliant hues. I felt as though I was watching a true master at work, and I was but a lowly apprentice just starting my journey.

Oh the wonders of the internet! I managed to find a couple people who took some snaps of last night's sunset on Flickr. This guys was in Venice Beach, however, so his view was marred by all the palm trees. Too bad for him :P Still, you can kind of see the range of colors and the cloud formations:

http://flickr.com/photos/77392960@N00/2761568607/
http://flickr.com/photos/77392960@N00/2762326802/

This guy got more of the pinks and purples:

http://flickr.com/photos/jt3_11/2762046178/

More Colors! stuff

Still doodling around on my DS, I like that I can pick it up whenever I want to; it's helped me get back into sketching, even if it's not my best work.



This one was done from imagination... yeah. I guess I need to work on being more imaginative. :)



The smog in LA makes for some interesting colors at sunset. Drew this while Tommy was driving us to a friend's house up in the hills to the north. Didn't really have time to get any detail on the hills though.



Crappy sketch of palm trees on the bus ride home.



Some fanart from the French series "Wakfu," which a classmate of mine is working on. Figured I'd see how the DS handles more cartoony work. This was one of the times I really really wanted an undo button; inking the black lines on that tiny screen is hard!

Colors! sketches

As promised, here's a few of the sketches I've managed to crank out on my Nintendo DS using "Colors!" It's been tricky getting used to the controls and drawing on a tiny screen, but I guess they came out alright.

This first one I drew on the bus; the fires were still burning over the hills which is why the sun was all red.



The second one I started sketching out while we were waiting in line for the Dark Knight. This was the theatre across the street from ours. :)



While it's definitely not as natural for me to draw with a tiny stylus on a tiny screen, I do enjoy being able to use color without dragging around a box of pencils or a paint set. It's clean and organized! But if the battery runs out, I guess I should bring my trusty sketchbook for backup. And it definitely won't replace my home computer and WACOM for my more polished pieces, for sure. But it's a fun little toy to mess around with.

Colors!

So I just got my hands on a homebrew program for my Nintendo DS called "Colors!" (yes, the exclamation point is part of the name). It's a pretty basic paint program, but it's nice that it's pressure sensitive with the DS touchscreen. Pretty cool having sort of a miniature Cintique in my pocket that I can bring on trips! It'll take some getting used to, though. Not quite ready to show any Colors sketches just yet. I still have to figure out how the wi-fi thing works anyhow...