Janelle WIP part 2

So I think I got the hair to look pretty neat so far, probably going to still mess around with it, but I think its time to coloring and tweaking the face. I already know I'm probably going to redo her nose and probably do something new to the eyes.

Here's my progress:

Janelle Monae WIP

Ok, here's some progress on my Janelle Monae picture. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I'm going to tackle her hair. It look alright, but still a lot to do. Decided to play around with gradients and clipping masks to get the look I want.

Primetime WIP

I've decided to get back to work getting better at animation and illustrations this year. I'm working on an animation project as well as this one.

I'm a really big fan of Janelle Monae, I went to see her in concert late last year and it was a blast. Her music inspires me so much, and I find myself drawing little pictures of her in my sketch book sometimes. This project started as doodles I drew while watching her video for "Primetime". 

Here's the sketches:

And here's the line art for the second on so far:

I'm going to color this work with a few new things that I've been trying to learn. I think it will turn out great.

Flapper Dance

Wow, its been a little bit. But I'm happy to post an update. I've been working a whole lot which leaves little time for me to work on projects and practice animation. I've been trying to make more time to keep working at it. I'm planning on buying a scanner soon which will make daily updates much easier. I can't wait to put up pages of my sketch book and little doodles and ideas I come up with at work.

So on to my current project:

I saw this gif-

And was inspired to do a little animation of it. I'm having a lot of fun with it so far and its making me think a lot more about animation. I'm working on it now, but I'm still pleased with it so far:

I'm really excited to work on the secondary actions, but before I do that I'm what to work on this a little bit more. I want to add a little more motion to the body before I move on to adding in other things.

I also want to design what she'll look like in the colored version of it. I'm thinking either black and white like the gif or more like the "Almost There" scene in "The Princess and the Frog"

I'll post more on this project as I work on it. I'm really excited to be working on animation again.

Face Animation practice

I had a day off today, so I wanted to do some animation practice. I haven't done too much work with squash and stretch in the face so I animated a little face changing expressions. This practice was really fun and taught me a lot about how stretchy the face can be.

I really miss having more time to animate like I used to before I started working. I was so immersed in this I really didn't notice the time just passing by. Hopefully I'll be able to do more soon.

Progress on Daniel Tiger Character

So last month was very busy, I've been working a lot lately and when I haven't been working I've been resting or spending time with my family and friends. As a result I didn't get too much done on my two projects. I was off today so I decided to get back to work on them. I worked on the Daniel Tiger character today since I was still in the beginning stages of it, so it was easier to continue working on.

I got a lot of work done on his face. For the longest time I had trouble with getting the details of the face, especially the head the way I wanted it to look. In the show many of the characters have curved lines around their heads and I wanted to replicate that, but I didn't know how. I played around a bit in illustrator and I finally found a way that isn't so hard to do. I created a shape with the pen tool and added a ton of anchor points around it. When I got the number of points I wanted I did effect
Right now I'm still messing around the with face patterns and the fur texture I picked out. I'm not quite satisfied with it yet, but its off to a good start:

Knight Sprite

I'm still working on the video game project. Today I wanted to create a test sprite for the generic enemies, they will be knights. We chose them because we can reuse them with different colors and maybe different weapons. It took me a little to get the body the way I wanted, but I really like the way it looks so far. I'll post a print screen picture because the sprite itself is really tiny.

Font facing walk cycle

I wanted to practice animating a walk cycle facing the front of the character. I just made a simple little character and concentrated on the leg movement. I'm thinking of exploring more of this. I'm researching female walks, so I'll try it next time with a female character.

HTML: Day 1

Its only the first day of learning html, but so far I really like it. I'm finding it to be really simple to understand. I tried to learn it years ago when I was still in grade school, so most of the basic terms are familiar to me. I can create a simple web page now with a heading, paragraphs, links to other websites, and pictures. I learned all that in about an hour and thirty minutes. Imagine what I can learn if I keep going for a few months. Here's how it turned out:

Like I said before its really, really basic but everything worked fine. Even the link. I'm going to learn more advanced html, but I'm taking my time to understand the basics before just adding random tags and attributes all over the place without knowing what I'm doing.

Animatic assignment

I've been working in my Digtal Ink and Paint (pretty much a class in Flash) for a few weeks now. So far we've created characters, painted them in 3 different styles in Flash, and created a storyboard for a 15-30 sec movie. I'll post the character in a little bit, but I do have my finished animatic now.

Feedback would be GREAT!



(I feel like its a little rushed and the pictures could be better, I'm also pretty new at looping music for a soundtrack, but it should be ok if the video doesn't loop)