Cat Color wip

I usually do a character turn around that has been fully colored by this point in a project, but it simply sort of slipped my mind. I was having a lot of fun doing the animation for her, so now I'm working on a turn around for her. I think I'm going to make her look like my sister's cat, Grey. She has long grey fur and bright green eyes. I think I'm going to add less fur, but keep her color.

I have her head done so far:

I'm going with a vector look since I'm not going to do cut animation with this. I'm using the pencil tool for my rough animation, it is really messy but I'll use the pen tool for my clean up.

rough cat animation

So earlier this week I did a little work on little cat I mentioned in a blog post before. So far I like it, but I'd really like to push the reaction a bit more. I think I have trouble with just letting loose. I want her reaction to be a bit bigger before I start smoothing things out and cleaning this up.

I like it for the most part though:

Procrastination Creature, Illustrator

So I created this today. I call her a procrastination creature, mainly because that's what I've been doing lately. After a really frustrating night and morning I just sat down and started drawing on Photoshop  After a while I came up with a frustrated looking creature thing:

I decided to color it, and to try and see how fast I could actually finish something. Its been a while since I've actually had a deadline for something, so this was really fun for me. I got it all done this afternoon. I did the color and inking in illustrator to try to learn a few new things. I created a few new brushes and tried them out. I really like the lines it gave me, I'll definitely use them again.

Expressing an Attitude

As usual, I'm trying to improve my animating skills. I know the basics of animation well enough, but I haven't really tackled character acting all that much. So I cracked open a few of my animation text books to practice. One of the many books I own is "Character Animation" by Preston Blair. On about pg 150 he goes into expressing attitudes with your character.

On that page there's also a little illustration of a bear doing a take:

I really like how much emotion and how dynamic these poses are. Along with looking a different acting references, and getting more into acting myself, I've started a new animation project.

I'm going to try to animate a take like the bear above. It going to be sort of a challenge for me to try make it believable and not just copy the actions. I've already started, I'll get more into it after I've completed my Valentines gift for my boyfriend.

Here's one of the beginning frames:

I went with a little cat character and decided to go with her reacting to seeing a can of tuna. The animation is going to be really simple, I just really want to make it look like she's really happy and excited to see it.

Animation Practice

I wanted to animate something today, something to just do a little practice. So I animated a little flag waving in the breeze. Its not completely done yet, but my hand started to hurt, so I'm taking a little break. Here it is so far:

I plan on making it flag for a few seconds then making it stop. Maybe I'll add some clouds or a little background.

Victorian sketch

I'm trying to get used to sketching on a tablet and photoshop. I usually draw in my sketch book, but since I don't have a scanner available to me right now I figure this is a good time to try and work on my photoshop skills. (Or at least getting comfortable drawing in it).

Yesterday while browsing buzzfeed.com, I saw an article on flirting techniques in the Victorian Era. It was really complicated but also very interesting, but what really caught my eye was this picture:

It was the first time I saw a black woman dressed like that during the Victorian era, not to mention her dress. I just thought it was really beautiful and ornate. I drew it much like she's posed in my sketch book but decided to have a little more fun in photoshop:

I took a few creative liberties with her pose, I started just drawing a female body just in the pose and just started to make the dress later. I really sort of like this, I think I'll try to do something with this in photoshop or maybe illustrator. Either way I'll take the opportunity to learn a few new techniques.

Character Color wip part1

I took some time to do the color for the female character sketch I posted a little while ago. I like to start with the head first and the body second. At first I tried making this head:

After a while of messing around with it, I got this:

I didn't like it as much as I thought I would, so I decided to try something different. On the sketch there was a different face I drew:

I didn't like it as much, but I gave it a try, and after a while of trying out a few different things I got this:

I think it looks much better to me. It still needs work until it looks like I want it to, but its a nice start.

I'm trying to keep things sort of simple so if I animate her it won't be too difficult to color her. I'll probably keep the eyes are symbols though. I'll have to do something different with her hair. It works in the sketch, but its already proving to be difficult to recreate.