Frame by Frame

Had a pretty productive day today artwise. I decided to go out to the city today with my mom and sister for the weekend farmer's market at the Ferry Building. Originally I planned to just take BART back home after that while they went to the Cal football game at ATT Park, but since it was such a nice day and I had my sketchbook I decided to stick around and wander for a few hours while they were at the game. We grabbed some sandwiches at the farmer's market and went up to the 2nd floor of a pier were there were some free benches for us to sit on while we ate. I took the opportunity to do a couple of sketches. The first one was of the Ferry Building Clocktower from where we were sitting. I hadn't really gotten my hand warmed up yet so the top of the tower got kind of jacked up in perspective. Tried to fix it, but its still messed up. This one was a quick sketch of the terminal building from where we were sitting as well. I don't usually draw buildings or architectur...

Less than a month to go until the last Harry Potter film! Thought I'd draw all three of the characters to fill in some space in my sketchbook. It's funny if you compare this to some of my first drawing attempts at Harry and Hermione 7 years ago. You can check those out here and here .

It's been a while since I drew something outside of life drawing and animation classes. I had a hard time picking between 4 pictures to draw, and ended up with Locke (the other 3 choices were girls). I'm probably going to end up drawing at least one of those other pictures as well. Anyways, here it is (click for larger):

It is the eve of my Animation Mentor beginning, and I did a few more sketches today. I realized I hadn't practiced in a while and decided that I should get some of that in today. Seeing as I have another life drawing class tomorrow, as well as starting out in AM, it was as good a time as any to draw. I suppose I get some inspiration from my cousin's kids. I drew a couple portraits (kinda crappy ones) back a while ago, probably 3 years, maybe 4. Either way, 1 of the 3 kids was not born yet, and she happens to be the subject of most of my drawings today. I'm not nearly fast enough yet to do some real world action sketches, so these are just some random pictures we took last week at a birthday party. You might notice that there are no faces on them. I need to learn how to do faces in this style before I try or else they'll just look stupid. For some reason I can only do faces when I do them all realistic and rendered. I can't sketch a face for crap. Weird huh?

So yesterday before that mantis fiasco, I had my first life drawing session up here. I kind of liked this one better. The instructor gave some pretty good instructions. He had us start by drawing the body as just boxes in 2 min gestures. I kind of got the hang of that, but I sent a step back further today and played with stick figures. On some of them I drew the boxes over the basic ovals, and even drew in the body on a couple. For the rest of them I was just trying to convey the poses in as simple a stick form as I could. I think it was pretty successful for a first off.

Updated the logo again. I was just looking at it and thought there should be something in the upper left/center filling the space, so I decided to add a sort of subtitle or description to the logo. Then for some reason I wanted to draw a guy hanging from the g by an umbrella, so I drew him. I couldn't leave it there, so I drew a small army of stick men just doing random things. I might make this a tradition and keep adding stuff to the logo when I see fit.

More life drawings! Yea, I'm gettin pretty boring, but you know what, I can't really think of anything to write about. At least not a serious blog post. I could write a rant about something if I wanted to, but I should probably do best to keep my swearing rants to myself and free from here. Some might slip, but hopefully not soon. Anywho, had my last life drawing session today. The first two are 20 min poses, the last one was a 40. I dunno, I think I'm getting better.... This one I like. The teacher had some brown paper and colored pencils since he uses those, so I tried doing a figure shaded with a white pencil. I think this method was actually a little easier to get the hang of after a few mins. Might try some more stuff like this later.

So today I've told work I'm leaving on the 21st. I was planning on not telling them until next week, but on friday at the end of the day, my boss was talking about me leaving for school and was asking me questions about it. I decided not to ruin his weekend and just tell him today instead. Anyways, I haven't posted any more life drawings since a couple weeks ago. It's a little hard because the paper I use is larger than my scanner, and it is also inside a hard-bound sketch book. I'll post them chronologically from top down. I think I've gotten better since the batch below don't you?

With some Life Drawings! Haha...yea that was lame. Anyways, just got back from my first life drawing session ever. It was pretty cool actually. There are only three other people in my class, all dudes. One is an art teacher at a catholic school in a nearby town. One of them was actually my statistics professor back in college. Talk about a small world eh? The other dude was pretty quiet, but I think he's an animator at a gaming company. Hopefully he'll start talkin more as the weeks go on. Maybe I can get a connection out of him or something... I've tried drawing some nude models from pics off the net, but I found it hard to find a proper pose anywhere besides finished products. So this was a pretty good experience. I like the "3D-ness" of it. Having a model actually there makes it a bit easier actually. When you move your head, you get a different view instead of the same picture. My first attempts of the night sucked pretty hard, but I eventually got better. I p...

So I decided yesterday that my first full body animation test is going to be a dude lifting a heavy block. Our network was out for like 6 hours at work yesterday, and all the work I do is off network drives, so I was sketching out some thumbnails of a block lift, and pushing a block up an incline. I kind of got a feel for how to bend the spine and stuff. Since yesterday I've done a bit of a pencil test. Up until my last iteration I actually hadn't looked up any information in my 'Animator's Survival Kit' book. After consulting the book, all I did was edit the beginning frames with the U-shaped arched back. Beforehand, they were going the same direction as the other frames. Here is my progress so far with some blocking for timing. http://megaswf.com/view/c1b8f87058d9e4304084d2c5ff65ba3f.html I haven't decided yet if I actually want him to put the block on the other block, or just to fall over backwards from the weight.

So I was super bored at work yesterday and I just started sketching out a random character so at some point I could animate him, instead of my ball with stick legs. I've never really tried to design a character before, but I was keeping some things in mind when I sketched this out. I wanted to keep the body a pretty simple shape, so I settled on something thats pretty round. I also wanted to make sure that his eyes are able to express different emotions, as well as having something on top of his head to also help me express emotion, and for motion overlap. So this is what I came up with as my first version. I only did the head and the body at work. The legs, arms, and entire side view I completed after I got home. [caption id="attachment_72" align="aligncenter" width="499" caption="Version 1.0"] [/caption] After completing that, I decided that I didn't like the shape of his head anymore, so I worked on a second version today. The height o...