Just another sketchy page of doodilliness

Hurrah for sketching!

I took time tonight to get out my Moleskine and actually sketch in it! 

It has been too long, and I have used it for other random stuff that is not pretty and very boring and practical. 

Why on earth would I use such a delightful tool for sketching as a book for boring practical things you may ask? 

That is a very good question. 

To be honest I think it was because I was scared. There is this unspoken pressure to perform when you have lovely blank smooth pages in front of you. And instead of just going for it, which I understand is the idea of sketching - I bowed to the pressure. 

But no more! 

In your face boringness and practicality!

So here's hoping that I can keep this up. Coz then I will have a sketchbook actually full of drawings. Which, ridiculously, will be a first for me. 

Oh look, there was actually one drawing that I found from last year...

Layouts

Since I haven't had the time to do some of my own stuff, I thought I'd share with you a little bit of what we have been doing at school this week. Next week we have our layout exam, so we had a practice run this week. 

The way we've been taught, you get given the storyboards then have to separate everything out from that, so the background, characters, camera instructions and field guide all have to be on separate layers - much like it would be once you were animating. So I scanned mine in and composited them roughly in Photoshop so you get a better idea of how they will look once all the layers are combined. 

10 points to anyone who can guess what movie it is that the storyboards were taken from. I'll give you some clues. It's a black and white movie from the 60's - the acronym for it is 'NOTLD'.

It's a lot of work, but it's fun - and we only had 12 scenes to layout in 4 days, whereas our tutor told us that you could have as many as 80 in a week! : P Maybe one day I'll be that fast, but not yet! 

Wow I am behind! It has been a while since I have been on here and able to update - and I also have been at a bit of a loss to know what to put up, I've been so busy with work stuff that I haven't had much time to do anything for fun. Hopefully that will change and I'll get back into it!

In the meantime, another random oldie. As you can see I had already started coloring this with pencils, although I am hoping that I'll get a chance soon to color this in Photoshop instead, but I won't hold my breath! Hope everyone else is going well - especially as it comes up to a busy and often tough time of the year. 

Dance

It's been a busy week, but we have some results! I think I mentioned that we were working on a paired up project - an animation of a couple singing and dancing. Well, we are pretty much done on the rough animation and I have a clip I can share. :)

My very talented team-mate Jean worked on the male character, and gave him heaps of personality and charm. I animated the female character, and had a heap of fun animating a pretty girl. I was really happy with how the first half of our clip came out, Jean did the initial animation and I just had to fit my character in with hers; and because of the excellent work she did it was pretty easy and fun for me!

Hope you enjoy it. : )

Righto.

This week we have been animating a scene which is a duet - so two people, dancing - and singing. 

Challenge yes. And to make it more of a challenge, we are in teams of two people - one animating the female character, the other the male. 

I have a GREAT team mate who was working on the dance scene this week and she has done a sterling job. I am looking forward to seeing our animations together. 

Anywho, I was blissfully working away on my animation, then got to this point, and because I was so blissful - I realised that I wasn't really thinking about what I was drawing and planning it properly. So I stepped back and took stock of my drawing. 

Eck!

So I very humbly and woefully took it to my tutor's desk and asked for his help.

He did this...

Wow right?

Be-ooootiful line of action, lovely open face, and a lot more emotion expressed in the face to emphasize the words being sung. 

Wow, it's great to learn right? I just have to keep on reminding myself that, coz it's never going to end and it would be too easy to just get sad! Haha

Needless to say, I fixed my drawing and hopefully the animation will benefit from the result! Once I have an updated linetest I might just pop it up here. And if my team-mate doesn't mind, I'll pop our finished version up here too.

Right, now to finish off Ramone for the 11 Second Club next week!

Mice with their umbrellas

Phew!

It's been really busy lately. But I'm getting there (I think).

Here are just a coupla earlier, unfinished drawings I did.

I am thinking that maybe later tonight or tomorrow I will put up a couple of the drawings from the animations that we have been working on at school, it's been pretty fun this week. : )

Old man

He's hip.

He's with it. 

He's also very 'Up'-esque - but coz 'Up' is so cool - I am not ashamed of that point. : )

WIP Ramone

Some of you may recall a post I popped up here a while ago about a new character I designed called Ramone, for an animation for the 11 Second Club. 

Well here is my work in progress. I haven't finished the 'cleaned up rough' yet as you will be able to see - and I need to fix quite a bit of stuff - ie. the table and smooth out a lot of the movement. The dialogue at the beginning is what I still need to clean up - and also smooth out, coz at the moment his eyebrows are a bit jiggly and the movement looks a bit stiff - but hey! Live and learn right? It's due for school on Monday morning - so I have a heap of work to do over the weekend, then we have a week of our own time to polish it up before it's due for 11 Second Club, so here's hoping I can submit it on time. : )

If you have any feedback, it's welcome!

Busy busy

Hopefully from tomorrow I'll have some more newer pics to put up.

That's the goal anyway. : )

Hope everyone has had a good week.

Toosday

Allo!

Another day at the drawing board - literally. hehe

Here are some more old pics from ol' 2008. I really need to try and do some new versions of this kind of thing. Doing animation every day with 2B pencils means that you miss colour. 

So here are some in the meantime til I can get round to doing some new ones. :)

Hope everyone else is happy and having fun.

Elephant

Phew!

Survived the weekend. It was a bit of a tough one to be honest - but got there in the end. 

So back to another week. And for a random piece of information for everyone; it snowed today. 

In Auckland. 

Which is nuts. 

Ok so the snow was teeny. But it doesn't snow in Auckland - I think the last time was about 70 years ago or something. 

So it was kinda exciting. Unfortunately no snow days for us tho. : (

Hehe - here we have an elephant. 

Just another of the old water colours I did when in the UK. 

In the house

Last week we finally got our stuff back from our time in the UK. 

It took us a very long while to get ourselves sorted, and our very very kind and long-suffering friends in London were so helpful and arranged everything over there for us, so that we could get it shipped back. It all arrived in perfect condition and intact and we are very thankful. 

It was a bit like Christmas opening everything up again - as it has been two years since we have been back in NZ, we had forgotten a lot of what we had left in the UK. 

Amongst everything was a bunch of art that I had done while I was over there. It was stuff that I had done before starting my animation course, and it is really interesting to see how much I have learnt since then from drawing full-time!

However today I thought that I would share with you a water colour painting that I did. It was when I was trying to teach myself to use water colours, because I hadn't really used them before - and there is quite a knack to it! Didn't get to practice as much as I would have liked, but this one was one of the first that I was happy with, and which gave me more confidence to keep trying! 

If anyone has any tips on painting with water colours I am all ears. : )

Hope everyone has an enjoyable weekend!

Wednesday

And a house...

Just coz I can : )