Friday, February 22, 2013

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.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

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.