Life Drawing & Jam and Inspiration

Professional Practice

As previously stated some of the areas  I need to develop were timing, Life drawing and Digital drawing. In order to develop some of my drawing areas I began signing up for the Wednesday Life drawing class. Though after seeing Ritatsu doing life drawing with his tablet and laptop this week it seems like a great idea to do the life drawing digitally. However, I predict that setting up will be rather tricky.

Life Drawing

So after my first class the first thing i noticed was how I drew the knees, no matter what angle I had always attempted to create the knee cap and this limited the angles I drew at and within some of these drawings can consider how the knee cap looks while the thigh and calf are together.

Another advantage which came into consideration is with life drawing the issue of muscle memory becomes less of an issue. For those who are unaware of the term It is the concept  of you repeat drawing something over and over and this causes your muscles to remember how to draw that particular item however the moment you attempt to draw a new pose or something different you are starting from the beginning. The point of this is to learn the fundamentals and build upon it over constant drawing of the same pose until it works.

 Some 30 second poses

 Continuation of 30 second poses advancing to a 10minute poses

Finally for that day the pose was extended for longer however after chatting with the supervisor of the class i was advised toward doing some focused drawing. This lead to me focusing on the hands and some of the feet. As I don't have to much trouble drawing hands at a large scale i used this opportunity to develop the hands at a smaller scale instead.

The next class was postponed to earlier this week and the focus was a two hour pose with a color study. Though I did not get as far into coloring as i would have liked.

Above are are the drawings produce from this class, However due to the size i am unable to scan the piece and was required to take a photo instead. My attempts to fix the values in Photoshop only reached a certain level so in case the first picture did not preview well i decided to create a grey scale of the piece.

Abertay Animation Jam 2013

Last weekend I took part in The Abertay Animation Jam 2013 though the reasoning being to have fun working with others. This event aims as a way to celebrate all things animation and participants were to aim to create as much of an animation in under 20 hours to a theme provided on the day. We then would all take part in a viewing of the pieces.

It has helped toward two areas of my 3D abilities for one I got to try a new method toward animating and timing. For the event I paired up with Tabita A. Ceolin and we spent time going over the timing of walk cycles which I acted out and timing.

 

Above is the short animation Tabita and I created, We used a Educational rig for the project which was called Toon Boy and was modified to have a vampire character version. The story was developed by Tabita and she work on the animation of the Toon By at the start of the animation. My part on the animation was Animating the vampire working into the scene and toward the camera which is to represent the boys view.

 The Story

 The story itself was having a young boy in a cave looking around wary, He hears a sound behind him and is drawn to two glowing eyes coming toward him he points a torch toward the eye and the vampire becomes more distinguishable. This cause the boy to faint and surprising the vampire the vampire contemplates for a moment and then pull out his glasses and a book labeled "How to smile"
The boy wakes up and then sees the title of the book. The boy then reacts by hugging the vampire.

Another area developed from this event was towards Rigging & Skinning for the first half of the event I spent rigging a book for as a prop, However there were problems when skinning which I got help with, from this I learned how to skin with the component editor over the paint skin weights tool, along with the best time to use them,  The component editor is great for precision skinning which  in terms of characters id link toward robotic  hard surface characters. While Paint skin weight can go toward organic characters.

Exposition

Finally  below are a few concepts I have drawn toward my exposition. The first set of drawings accompany the description from my last exposition post. After this concept i began to try expand on the idea of having character interacting with the words themselves.

 Original Concepts

Picturing the layout of the exposition and what other method i could have the characters interacting with the words.

Expanding on the concept, having the characters acting to their own personality and how to make use of the letters that are present with the character.  In-terms of these concepts I don't want an image with text slapped over it. I want the test to be part of the environment or even a prop to my characters.

Inspiration for this area of the project mostly come from "The Art of Books" At this stage  "The Art of Tangled" and "The Art of Brave" are my current interests. Preferably for their Storyboard Pages and their Character concepts that are used more toward decorating the page than acting as a content image.