I've been wanting to redesign my blog for the longest time now, and I've finally gotten down to doing it. I'm really happy with it so far. I changed the background and my logo. For reference, here's my old background image and logo:
So, I haven't really created a new character in a while, a drew this sketch several month ago and didn't think too much of it. It wasn't until I showed it to my boyfriend that I decided to actually do something with her.I have sketches with her a few other poses, but I didn't have the time to scan them. I'm planning on doing a few animations with her, but first I'd like to color her in flash.
So here's a very rough animation for the lip sync that I'm working on:
Here's the transcript:
Voice One: "Well, what now?"
Voice Two: "He's just playing hardball. Lemme tell you how it's gonna go down. In a few minutes, we'll walk in there, we'll give him our demands, and then BAM! I start crying."
So far I'm having a blast working on it. Right now I'm working on making the toddler's reaction to the "BAM!" part bigger, a lot more shocked looking.
So, its been a while since I've actually posted anything, I've been a little busy lately but now I'm back. Right now I'm working on two little projects. One is a little illustration of a pin up girl. I saw an ad on a website and I saved the picture since it was so nice, I got bored and tried to recreate it in illustrator.
Here's a work in progress picture:
The reference picture is in the photo. I changed it so she's on a beach and leaning against a surfboard instead. I've been playing around with different brushes and creating a few custom ones for this picture.
My second project is a submission for the 11 second club. I started the project super late in the month, but I liked the audio clip so much that I'm going to continue working on it for practice. I'll post a rough of it as soon as I can.
I've been trying to get some motivation to start animating as much as I used to. Lately I've just been in kind of a slump. This week a friend of mine had a birthday, so I decided to create a picture for him. Its just a little fan art of anime/game series that he really likes. The little character is a bear that makes a lot of bear themed puns. It was a fun project, and it didn't take too much time to complete.
This was really fun and he really liked it. I put his name in the final version of the picture, but I'm placing it here without it.
I'm a big fan of the new My Little Pony show, I really like the art style of it, and I really wouldn't mind working for that show.Today while sketching around I thought it would be neat to draw myself as a pony. It actually turned out pretty nice. I got the structure of the pony rather quickly and decided to add in some cute details.
I haven't quite picked out a "cutie mark" for myself quite yet. But I'm planning on doing a little ink and paint for her, so I'll think of a nice one.
I also had a lot of fun using markers for the outlines, I'm going to do it much more often now.
So I've been busy in the last few weeks, I'm still working on my flour sack animation when I have the time adding in more elements. I'll update with that later. Right now I've got a link to my group's kickstarter page!
We would really like to make a pilot for an animated television show, we've been working very hard for the last year in development, all we need now is support.
One of the practices many animators use is animating a flour sack. First off its the basic shape of a two legged creature, you can use it to practice animating weight and putting personality into a character. There are many actions you can make your flour sack do, like walking, pushing a heavy object, acting, jumping and ect.
I decided to do a jump first. That way I can practice timing, squash and stretch, and weight. Here is the rough animation so far:
I'm going to add in more frames to smooth it out. After finishing the animation I'm going to color the flour sack and possibly add in a little background, perhaps a kitchen.
Ok, so I did an animation test for "The Network", I had to do a lip sync and design two characters based on some images they gave me. Even though I didn't get the job I'm really proud of how it turned out in the end, so I'm putting it up here. (I don't own any of the images the characters are based on, or the audio file. Its just here to display my hard work)
I've been getting back to relearning the basics of animation. I've done the bouncing ball exercise a few times so I decided to do it again, but with different weights. This one is a bowling ball. I noticed that the arch changes a lot from say a golf ball. After it makes contact with the ground it bounces high up, the rest of the bounces have really small archs. The archs are also more narrow than I'm used to.
Even though bowling balls are flexible at all I did a version with squash and stretch to see how it would look with the timing.
I'll keep working on different ball weights.
The next project I want to work on is the flour sack exercise. I never got to do it while in school, so I want to do it now.
So I've been exploring illustrator a little more and trying to learn more features. I've been practicing new skills on a simple project. I went out found a leaf and scanned it in on the computer:
I took in it into illustrator and played around with a few things for a while. After a little while I had this:
In this one I created my own brush, played around with layer modes and made a new gradient.
I'll keep exploring around and posting what I make with it.
Yesterday I was browsing the internet when I stumbled upon an article written by a person named Samantha Brick. In it she details on how its hard being as beautiful since men give her free stuff and women are often jealous of her. Truth be told, she's actually kind of average, but her attitude makes her really ugly. I was inspired to draw a sketch of her. After looking at it was immediately wanted to color it.
For reference here's a picture of her:
And here's my caricature of her:
Doing this was actually a lot of fun, if not a bit mean.
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.
I'm doing a project with my boyfriend, the coder. He wants to make an old style video games so I began studying on how to make sprites. I've created my very first one, its 16X16, and there's not as much detail as I would like, but I created it for practice, so its alright for now. I wanted to get the hang on the general style and how to make them.
Its made of 3 sprites, it was actually more simple than I thought it would be. I really like it. I can't wait to make more complicated looking sprites.
So, I'm back. I wish I would have been more motivated to do projects the last few months. I was just so used to professors giving me projects, that it was hard to get into doing them on my own. But I took the time to get inspired and now I'm ready to work again.
I was on a website : referencereference.com, a website with reference videos for animators, when I saw a video series with a female ballerina. I always wanted to learn how to do a pirouette, after failing to do so physically I decided to animate instead.
I'm starting out by drawing it out in my sketch book. At first I just wanted to draw the main parts, but I ended up drawing about 45 sketches of the whole thing. I'm going to take each picture and make it into an animatic that will serve as a really rough version of the pirouette. I'll do an ink out line over it with correct proportions, then I will do the color and background.
For now here are the sketches, I'll post them as a slide show since there are so many of them.
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.
I have the adobe creative suite 3 web premium, I only installed flash, illustrator, and photo shop at first. It wasn't until recently that I discovered that dreamweaver and fireworks were also part of the package. I installed them on my computer and have been tinkering around with dream weaver. It makes learning html much, much easier. Not just because I have a library of tags or that I can use the auto fill options. I'm happy simply because I can check my work as I go. Before I would have to type out my code in note pad, then open it up in my browser to see if it worked. Now I can just write the code and see how it looks visually in the same program.
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.
Ok, so after some debate I've decided that I'm going to learn some new languages to help further my career in flash animation. I already now a little about action script, but I'm interested in learning a bit more. I bought a few books on as3 when I was still in school, and hopefully I'll get some use out of them in the next couple of weeks.
I'm using the "Foundation Actionscript Animation: Making Things Move!" book written by Keith Peters first. I've read a few reviews on the book and it seems perfect for a beginner to learn the basics of action-script.
I also want to learn HTML. During my search for an entry level job, I notice that html is often a requirement for a lot of internet based animation and design jobs. It looks relatively simple compared to other coding languages, so I'm looking into any books or resources on the material.
Anyone have any good resources?
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Ok, I learning how to make flash banners. Its something I've always wanted to learn, but up until now I didn't have the time. I created a simple one, just text and a few fade outs to test if it'll work. It sends you to my portfolio site.
