Some sketchbook sketches

I realized last night that I have very little from my sketch book on this blog!

These are doodles from yesterday and today:

 

I drew this way a lot last year, and I think I want to keep doing it this year. It's just like layout drawings, feeling out the surfaces and carving with the lines. I have to watch my structure, though. I need to draw from life more often and with the same attention as I do these kinds of free-hand doodles.

After I got into the scanning room, I played around in photoshop for awhile with the old man sketch:

I really need to watch my use of saturation, everything is too much too often, I think.

Thank you for your time!

Quick Update

I'm in a really strange, murky place.

Days and hours seem to knit together, and time and time again I look into my sketch book and drawings show up that I only half remember drawing. Some of my friends seem to be feeling about the same. Thank goodness the spring is here, (or at least it's been better weather lately), maybe it will clean out the hazy, foggy filter that has been looming over my above mentioned friends and I lately.

Thank you to all those that drop by for a visit to my blog! I really appreciate the visit.

Below are a smattering of assignment work that I've worked on since my last post:

Painting

Mastercopy - I finally got to put my precious Tekkonkinkreet artbooks to use. I love this movie so much.

Still Life Study
Learned a lot from this one. Still life painting terrify me, actually, there is a certain exactness about them I find intimidating. That means, probably, I should pursue it more aggressively.


Character Design

Character Timeline

This was a lot of fun to do! Taking a character through his lifetime was a great exercise. Doing lineless art work was gratifying. I was trying to find a fast and effective way of animating with the bare minimum brushstrokes, designing for quick work in flash. In the end, going through the process I found this kind of look took too long to animate and process fluidly. I will try again in the future to design for optimum fluidity and performance flexibility for flash projects.


Layout

Texture Assignment:

Realistic Texture

Unrealistic Texture

Artist Texture

I really adore crabs. These were inspired by creatures called Tank Crabs my dear friend Joe Z. created. The texture is all just scanned paper, and the colouring was very fast to do. I am still trying to refine the process to get more flexibility and speed out of photoshop.

Big Versus Small:

Meeting Crab Mountain
A giant, living crab. A thousand year old version of the large crabs above. The centaur character has come to fight. The blocks that run along side him towards the crab acted as beacons, which in the night time glow blue. This picture feels really washed out, so I need to watch my contrast in the future.

I found that making layouts is so relaxing after the block in. After getting the main mass established, it's all just carving out the details. Getting into the rhythm and then stepping back once and a while to see if it reads and if the details run along where the eyes needs to go kind of forms an ebb and flow feeling to the clean up in these kinds of layouts. It's a gratifying process and I think I will stick to it in future work.


Animation (Digested in Digitools)


Character Walk with Panning BG

I really need to work on my clean up! Overall I enjoyed the process, but I want to tighten my work up more. There is extra animation to go with this, and I am having fun refining it.

Thank you for your time!
Alison