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.

Storyboards (or something close)

Whilst the idea was still new in my head I thought it would be a good idea to get it down visually rather than just in writing and it led to me creating one of my storyboards (I don't like storyboarding all that much so I tend to draw them really quickly and they are never understood by anyone other than me so I apologise in advance).

Tah dah. 

I know it's terrible. But it makes perfect sense to me. Because it's only the first 30-40 seconds it doesn't really look like much because there isn't actually a whole deal going on to be honest. The animation opens with a slow panning shot of the world/planet/environment to open the whole story. During this pan shot the titles and stuff like that will appear before the shot changes to focus on the character who is in a crash landing space shuttle rockety thing. The rockety thing crashed into the planet and the character gets out and begins to walk. 

I feel like it's a good start and it gives me plenty to work in terms of character design and environment design so I guess I should get started. 

Challenge. Accepted.

So I've been neglecting my life drawing for over a week now but with good reason. I was working on my end of year show (see I'm not just lazy). However, now that it is all done and out of the way (it went well by the way) I can start to focus on that personal summer project I mentioned a few weeks ago. I finally decided that it was time to sit down and really listen to the track my dad had given me for the whole project.

It was going really well and I was thinking of ideas and words that I associated with the track as I was listening to it and I managed to come up with an initial idea that my dad agreed he liked and thought that it was the idea he wanted me to run with. Great! Not as hard as I thought it was going to be. Until I sat down to begin story boarding and planning the length of the animation and such. Turns out the track is 5:42 minutes long. That's 8,208 frames at 24fps.

Nevertheless I have created a very basic storyboard for the first 30-40 (maybe 50) seconds of the animation which I am pretty chuffed about. I can start to think about environment and character designs now and really get this ball rolling.

Life Drawing: Day 8/9 (I actually did life drawing!)

So I've combined these two days together because I actually did no work at all yesterday. But today I cracked on and did 4 separate life drawings. I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself too although there's a flaw or two (maybe 5) in each of the drawings I feel as though I have developed in my line work and my ability to draw things in proportion.

Reflecting back on what I've done today I think my favourite drawings would have to be the first and the last one simply because I feel that the lines have more character. I also like the shading a lot more in these drawings. Having said that the second and third drawings seem to be more proportionally accurate compared to the other drawings. Overall I feel like it's been a good drawing day.

Life Drawing: Day 5/6/7... So I'm Not Doing So Good at This

I'm still getting back into this whole draw something everyday business and it's not easy. With me being ill I've lost a lot of motivation and I've also found it difficult to get any ideas down onto paper because all of my ideas are way up there whilst my skill set is still way down here and I must admit I can be a little impatient with myself when it comes to drawing. I like to draw amazingly awesome pieces of work okay? (But this never actually happens because I don't practice the simple stuff).

Over the last 3 days I have literally done one single drawing and that was because it was raining and I love the rain so it made me doodle a quick sketch.

After realising that I wasn't do a great job of this whole 'draw everyday' challenge I had set myself, I decided that I needed to get my ideas and thoughts into order, as I felt that this was something that was making it difficult to focus on simply practicing my drawing because I wanted everything to have a purpose. In order to get past this annoying road block I've decided that every time I have an idea I'm going to write it down or sketch it out to get it our of my system and to leave all the brain space for practicing.

Not So Much Life Drawing: Day 3/4

I'm ill at the moment, which for me means I don't want to do anything but sleep. BUT I promised myself that I would try and draw at least one drawing a day. And I tried my hardest I really did. Over the last two days I've been motivating myself to doodle whilst watching Fringe (because it's amazing) and this is what I have got.

Being ill obviously meant that I wasn't going to try and draw something too difficult like a human body, so I basically sat there wrapped up and doodled. I mainly focused on faces and trying to add a few more characteristics to them such as hair and varying shapes and sizes, but as you can see I didn't experiment much really. 

Today however, I found a burst of energy and motivation from somewhere and it allowed me to create these little doodles. 

I actually thought I was going to spend the day focusing on the body, as I'd spent the last few days on faces and eyes. However, I had a few ideas for a few faces that I really needed to get out of my head so I did them instead. I also did a self portrait (although it looks nothing like me except maybe the hair) which I'm actually really proud of because it's my first full body drawing in this style and although it's slightly out of proportion I'm still really pleased with it. 

To end the day I decided that I'd spent too much time away from Photoshop and began a more complex doodle that's going to take me a few days to finish. At the moment she's an alien but I honestly don't know what I was thinking whilst drawing this. 

Life Drawing: Day 2

Despite my lack of motivation, I actually had a lot of fun today drawing up a few images. Not only did I focus on life drawing but I also worked on different eye designs and face shapes today too, as I feel that these are something that I have never practiced with and it's about time I did.

I am very rusty when it comes to life drawing so these won't be anything spectacular but I am quite proud of how much I managed to draw in such a short time frame.

After a little bit of life drawing I did move on to doodling to some face and eye shapes like I said. I started off with the eyes and then I did the faces and as I go more confident I started to combine the eyes with the faces (but I only did a couple of these). 

Then I had a great idea and decided to do a life drawing in which I combined all I did today and this is what I ended up with. 

So it's not the best drawing I've ever done, but it still makes me feel good. I've had a good drawing session today and I'm pleased to see my own progress. I also think it was a good idea to practice drawing eyes and face shapes too and I think I'll keep doing that on a daily basis. 

To end the day I got a little ambitious and tried to do a self portrait using all I had practiced today but there's just something missing and it seems unfinished.