End of Term Update - Sketchbook

A few odds, ends and pages from my sketchbook towards the end of term:

 Snatches and bits here and there. If you see a lot of "1-" next to the sketches, it's a mark that signifies that the sketch counts a a point for the day! I started a sketchbook games for myself recently where for every 100 drawings, I get one day off for other interests. So, in the work week it breaks down to about 20/day. A vast majority of these drawings were done anywhere from 1 minutes - 5 minutes each. Thank you for looking!

End of Term Update - Caricature Portfolio

Wow! It's been a while! After this update drop, I will have to dig around to see what else there is I can drop here :) First, here is my recent Caricature Portfolio for Peter Emslie:

 After the interview, I can see where I really needed to push the design and shape, and move away from the more literal shapes if I want to caricature a figure.

A Quick Post

A study of an elderly woman.

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

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.