Sprites!

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.

New Project: Ballerina

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.

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.

Dreamweaver

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.

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.

Learning new languages

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?

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.