Best of First Finals Week: Layout Portfolio

There were about 15 pieces to the end of semester layout portfolio, but these are the ones I liked most.

Favorite Layout Portfolio Pieces:
Quick Concept Sketches For Buildings

I did these sketches to work out buildings for the mini-world I would be working with for all of my layout stuff for after the first string of assignments I did with the Old-Arian temple. The whole portfolio was composed of pieces set in the mini world developed from these and some other sketches.

Horizontal Pan

This was the horizontal pan assignment we were asked to do, and it shouldn't have been in the portfolio-- but it shows the world best of all the stuff I did, so I added it.

Essentially, in this world, the strongest of the old world arian tribes have taken over the modern cities and over the last few decades have been using monoliths (the big monster species from the first assignment) to take the cities apart. New organic growth is slow to appear and the last dredges of humanity are used for farm work, if they haven't escaped to the remaining refuges the rebels have created. There's a racetrack coming up from one of the rebel faction cities!

Horizontal Pan Closeups

Staircase Homework

This was homework assignment from class. It shows the sky terrain of the world. High up above the sky, where the old arian tribes can't and won't go, there are floating rocks where some of the teens that have escaped roam. There aren't any rock chunks big enough for a town, but some that are big enough for houses. The tribes don't come up here because there are some pretty territorial beasts in the clouds.

Room Interior

What a bedroom in a rebel city might look like. Dirty and metal, but homely. There's a happy couple that lives here. They don't get to be home often to be together, but when they are at least home is nice.

Environment Scaling Homework

The homework was to keep character consistent in size throughout a space. I used my derp tadpoles because I was in a mood for a giggle in class.

Down-Street Homework


Another homework piece! This is the racetrack I mentioned earlier in the post. It's dangerous and made of junk. Dangerous because it's made of junk, I guess. Mostly put together by the richest of the rebel punks in the new cities they've established. Panels fall out frequently and cars fall out or get pierced by pieces of falling debris. The tunnel is based off of my derp tadpoles! At night, the eyes act as giant projection lamps to keep any incoming strangers highly visible to anyone on watch. I really tried to push flow more with this one, as I need to work on my composition.

Mood Landscape Layout

This was originally done for painting, but with the intent of practicing natural layout environments. The creature in the back is called a Seaslug, and it is generally harmless, except when it's eating. The about-to-be-consumed cities have antennae that stick out with broad signal-beacons for communication with one another at that great distance.

Three Point Perspective

Mostly done to try out my knowledge of three-point perspective and focal points. I really warped the perspective a lot while I was making this. It's also what some of the rebel cities on the cliffs might look like.

The Two Cities Homework

The homework this piece originated from was my house on the hill concept, which turned into cities based off the story of the two cities-- which ended up not having any hills. I like this one the most for mood.


In the end, except for the horizontal pan, the painting layout, and the concept sketches, I drew and photoshop coloured all of theses pieces in a day. I learned a lot and had so much fun :) Most of it had tadpoles and an attempted Tekkon Kinkreet style incorporated throughout.

Thanks especially to Tim, Jason and Andrew for teaching me for the layout pieces and always giving me advice! And to Richy for the invaluable photoshop tips and composition support. :)

Best of my Finals Week

Hi! There are my favorite pieces of my first semester's end:

Animation:
Ball and Tail Assignment


It was a lot of fun imagining what the tadpole might do, and then creating an environment around that path. I was imagining the tadpole from my expressions assignment.

Character Design:
Expression Clean Up


Just a cleaned up version of the expression sheet, but I like it nonetheless.

Artist Bio Assignment: Tekkon Kinkreet style character design

I chose to do a Tekkon style character because I'm obsessed with the movie right now. Enjoying it immensely while I take on layout as a focus for a bit.

I also wanted to put some of my bone drawing sheets up, but the PDFs aren't cooperating with the text. So I will post it later when I can get it going.

Layout Portfolio is next, I really liked it the most of the stuff I've done recently.

Assignment Dump

Some rough stuff!

Three Panel Layout Story:



Rough expression sheet:



I really need to scan some of my sketchbook pages, these things are everywhere in my books...Actually, I think I like a lot more stuff in my sketchbook than my actual assignments.

Based off of the expression sheet, I did a quick key run, and then a semi-cycled thing...Sorry none of the animations are looped within the video! For some reason youtube stopped taking the previous format of video.

Feed the tadpole:


Loopable fly eating tadpole:


Also, my cleaned up book page turn:



Thank you for looking!

Assignment Dump

In no particular order:

Cloud Paintings!

Character Posing:

Full First Assignment Package

Finally done shooting all of the animations. I added in a few extra animations to test what I had learned. It's still a bit choppy, so I will work on the fluidity of movement next.



I ended up using the goddess that appeared in the layout assignment for my pendulum sequence too. Here's the re-framed new angle for the layout assignment:

She's a little smaller now, and the space bugs me a bit still, but I learned a lot and that's what counts.

Finally, here's my first character rotation clean up:


He's still too simple and generic, but I will work hard to avoid that next time.

Thanks for reading!

Update Dump

I finally finished my balloon animation earlier this week. I am pretty happy with it, and Michel (our animation teacher) has been infinitely patient and helpful when it came to letting me know what to fix, whenever I could find her.

All that's left to do is to re-shoot the Bouncing Ball and the Bowling Ball on the final BG, to add a few frames to the end of the bowling ball to make it roll off screen, and to add a single frame in before the balloon contacts the box to cushion the impact a bit. All in all, I am happy with it, I and I am looking forward to animating the marine animal project!






Other than the animations, I've really enjoyed working on some of the assignments for Layout and Character Design as well. I'm not very capable with cartoony styles, so I studied the Character Animation Crash Course to get a better grip on it. The result was 'cool cat', my kind of generic lion character for rotations in character design. He came after developing a few other stereotypes and archetypes in lion prides.

After that, we had an some homework from layout class to draw some characters in any situation, with a partial environment.

I had no idea I went in all the wrong directions, but here were my favourites:


Happy Bear


Snooty Poodle


Eager Bird


Girl in Prayer

In the end, we were to choose one to develop into a proper environment. I ended up choosing the girl in prayer, and developed a temple that I had imagined she would travel to/from.


Concept/Sketchy Image


Grid




Final Temple


Something about the temple bothers me, but I can't quite figure out what.
I'm sure I'll understand as I learn more about developing environments.

I find that a lot of information about the place can form itself while you're cleaning up work. I imagined that this is the temple of a earth goddess, a goddess of creation. Bottom half of a snake, like the chinese creation goddess. Behind her, a pantheon of gods were immortalized in gargantuan white sculpture. The aquaducts behind her fill her prayer pool with every rain fall, and in times of heavy rain will overflow the pool into the pit surrounding it.

I imagined that monks and priestesses like the girl I drew would maintain the temple, removing debris but not allowed to perform repairs, as decay is a natural part of the cycle, because eventually even gods must fall. Then I thought, since she's so tiny compared to her environment (my praying girl is the red dot infront of the statue), that I might have to add a monolithic creature to suit it-- A creature that has come to take on the goddess. Just like a boss fight :)

It was a lot of fun to work on, and I'm looking forward to developing it more in the coming assignments, as we are to do different camera angles and framing in the place we've made.

During the weekends, when I'm with my family, I like to doodle creatures. I imagined a giant fluffy mount that I could ride down the street. Complete with little signals on his saddle like that man and his horse I saw on a show once. After I finished figuring out what I wanted him to look like, I had to draw his skeleton in, just to get a better idea of how he'd move and how he could be articulated.



Thanks so much for reading through this!

I really hope to improve on all of this very soon.

Some Final Animations

I found out that the class I thought was going to be animation was actually character design. I got some practice in a cartoon style, which I will try to add when I get to my scanner.

I did revise my animations with the help of Hoon and DQ, though!

I managed to catch my animation teacher today, and showed her my bouncing ball animation and new pendulum animation.

Bouncing Ball:

Need to add my name to the background, and to erase the bouncing ball when it disappears behind the windowsill. Michelle suggested tuning it into a bouncy creature, which I might do.

Pendulum:

Did this after watching some of the Animator's Survival Kit Lectures. It taught me alot about spacing and how to determine where to put things. Still need to work on my timing, though. After I finished the pendulum, I realized how easy it would be to make it a turning cylinder, so I tried it. I was only able to do it because my roommate is awesome and gave me an amazing compass.

Happy day :)

First Day of Class!

Lecture was fun today. Everyone gets the same Tuesday lecture, so it was good to see some friends outside group E.

Here's a quick ball exercise I did after the lecture, to practice for the upcoming assignment:


Sorry for the sucky quality. I snuck into group C's animation principles class to use the flipbook stations, and their blinds were way open. It made getting a good shot hard with the cameras. And then I ran out of tape, so I couldn't keep the pegbars secure.

I learned a lot. A second year named Nick helped me with how to log into the school system and how to use flipbook! He also corrected the timing, and showed me how to flip and roll the pages to animate! I might want to add the internal circles next.

I am hoping to finish a few other exercises tonight.


Edit:
And I did! In order-
Animations I did after this post:

Rough pencil test for the ball animation:


Rough Pendulum Test:


And then a VERY quick bowling ball test to see the path it should take:


I am ok with the first three. There's a lot to adjust, but I can address them when I get to my first animation principles class :) The last one is really painful because the ball shrinks as it moves, goes to fast, and on a poor path.

It's just a rough though, so I am happy.
OH! Also, sorry it's all so faint. It's all in blue col-erase right now so I can see the movement. Except the first practice, that was penciled in :)

For a first day of animation, I am so happy! The thrill of seeing my drawings move for the very first time was great. I got to work with so many great classmates today, and the only class we've had (at least, group D and E to my knowledge) is the lecture this morning!

Good day :)

Status Update

Ahh, I haven't posted at all. So sorry.

I've been drawing... everything I can. Two days ago, something suddenly clicked when it came to internal structure, so I thought I might post some of my sketches to show what I've been doing :)

I need to keep working on everything.
I feel like I'm on the verge of learning something important.

Something from back in June. Early practice stuff.





Sketches on the bus throughout July.



Animal studies from an art show I attended with friends earlier this month. Thanks Cecilia!




About a week ago I saw Nicole P Martin's blog update. I died. And was so inspired. Stared drawing physiques similar to one of the sketches she made.





Then sketches from the last few days:

The above study was awesome. I really need to study skeletons more. I really liked drawing through the figures to try and get an idea of the volume and structure.

When I'm done drawing, I like doodling little derpy things like this.

Thanks for reading!

Other Hobbies

This week has been a lot of fun!

This weekend, a few of my young friends and I inadvertently went to the Silver Snail's 35th anniversary for our comic book shopping. Awesome! 

Got a lot of the Authority Comics, which I love so dearly, and had a generally pretty enjoyable weekend. Interesting things happened.

Today I was feeling lucky, so I thought I might share one of my other hobbies:

I collect and distribute 4 leaf clovers! :) 

The envelope is an art project I'm doing that incorporates that hobby. 

Here are some pictures of some clovers I found today. Sorry for the blurry top photo, I couldn't focus the camera on them for some reason.

After I find them, I dry them, laminate them, and give them sporadically out to strangers and people who have helped me.

  

Finally, here are a few sketches from the weekend:

One from an AMAZING Sushi Bar we went to, Momiji Sushi bar. And some hands.