Personal Project - Update

First thing I'd like to put out there is that my client and I have finally come up with a name for this project; No Return.

I must admit that I've been slacking on the project front all summer, bot nonetheless I am determined to work on this for as long as it takes. In order to move this along a little and actually practice with animating I went ahead and designed the simplest environments (the space environment) in order to begin doing test animations.

I WILL start this today and begin to animate this thing. Finally.

Life Drawing - Digital Challenge

Over the past month I have been working on my drawing skills a lot and I feel as though I have made some really good progress and that I have developed my skills further than I originally set out to do. This made me want to improve my digital drawing skills too, as this is the main medium that I use when creating animations, so it would be useful to hone this technique down to a 'T'. But the result was far better then I ever imagined it would be and I am really pleased with myself and with how much I have developed over the last 9-12 months.

I was really chuffed with the initial drawing to begin with because I's actually managed to get my lines nice and smooth (even if I did have to draw out a few rough outlines first). I'd also managed to draw everything in proportion and actually make it look like a face, which is something I personally find extremely difficult to do, but I guess a month of life drawing has paid off. Being as happy as I was, I decided that I wanted to push myself further and add colour. However, I also wanted to figure out how to use my Wacom tablet to its full potential at the same time and also see how well I could actually use Photoshop. So this meant that I was going for detail. A lot of it. 

After a while of figuring out what colours to use for the skin tone and such I began to make small marks of many different colours across sections of the face, which I then blended together until they all merged smoothly (sort of). I also started with the eye, however I got the colours all wrong at first and went back to dull the colours to fit with the tone and mood of the drawing. 

By this point (after around 10 hours of drawing) the piece was going really well and I was really happy with the result. I was also getting quite excited because all I had left to do was the hair (easy, right? Wrong.). I was really baffled on how to approach the hair, as it wasn't possible to do it the same way I had done the rest of the piece. I thought the best way to go about this was to experiment with different brush strokes until I found one that I felt I could work with. 

However, I didn't find anything and so I resorted to just drawing instead and I ended up with hair. 

Although it was a very painstaking task I stuck with it and completed the rest of the hair in the same way, finally adding the collar of a jumper to finish the piece off. Overall, I am really pleased with my outcome and it has given me a boost of confidence in myself and in my work and I have also proven to myself that my skills are a lot better then I think they are. 

Life Drawing - August

I've been doing a really really really bad job of keeping up with this and I am really sorry. But now that I am settled into my new house and I have a lot of free time on my hands I've been busy with the sketches and I've done quite a few (even if I haven't managed to do one every single day).

I'm really pleased with the progress I have been making with my drawings. Hopefully September will be also be a productive month...

So it's been a while...

So it's been quite a while since I last posted anything on here due to me taking a well deserved break from all things animation and moving into my new house! But I am back now with a goal to get this personal project and my life drawing moving!

So whilst I've been thinking on how to best animate my very complex 5 minute animation I've been working on my life drawing in the background in the hopes that it will get me back into the swing of drawing and get my creative juices flowing.
So far I've just under a weeks worth and I'm actually quite surprised with the quality of my drawings and how much I have improved since the last time I sat down and actually had a life drawing session. I obviously have many improvements to make though such as actually drawing faces and I am going to push myself to do that slowly.

I WILL get some animation up on here in the near future.


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Storyboards (Actual Stroyboards This Time)

Before I could go out and start to shoot some reference videos with Lauren, I actually needed to make a storyboard that was understood by her too. So I did and made a million mistakes but here it is anyway.

Okay so they're a bit of a mess, I'm not into story boarding all that much. From here we were able to create reference videos of all the movements and actions the character is to make during this scene. 

It's been a productive week.

Space Pod Ship Thing...

Whilst my friend Lauren has been working away on the environments for this personal project I have been working on the space craft that the character will be introduced to us in. So it turns out I can design space suits alright but I have no such talent when it comes to design the space shuttle to go with said suit. I have been struggling with this for over a week.

I even had to ask Lauren to chip in a doodle some ideas to get my own ideas flowing. But this seemed to work eventually and I have finally come up with a solution that both the client and I are happy with.

This is what I started with. I know it's a mess. But I thought about how I wanted the ship to appear and how I thought I could get away with it being simple, as the main focus would be the character. However, this wasn't entirely the case, as I soon realised that it was too simple and just stuck out like a sore thumb. 

But it was all okay after a week and 2 days of ripping my hair out I came up with this and got the thumbs up from the client so I went ahead and created it. Admittedly it isn't quite as detailed as the suit, as like I said before it's not the main asset of the animation. I also thought that it would be okay to skip on some of the details, as we won't be actually zooming in close to the space pod at all throughout the animation, so you wouldn't even see the detail. 

Overall, I'm really happy that I have managed to create something like this, as it is way out of my comfort zone and I've never focused on so much detail at one given time.

Now I can start to do some test animations. 

Character Design

So today I really wanted to get on with designing some element of my animation in order to get the ball rolling so I decided I'd do the character first, as I'm not all that great at character design and drawing the human body. But this didn't appear to be the case today and I managed to draw an epic character (if I say so myself).

Once it was complete and I was really chuffed with myself because it's the first time I have ever created something this detailed on the computer. I showed it to my 'client' who likes the design but doesn't feel the character is feminine enough so I will have to fiddle around with the colours a little. I also want to draw the character from other angles too just to get an idea of how she will look from different perspectives.