December 17, 2011

Semester 1 Final Assignment... Dump!

Yes, I 'm going to post an assignment dump!  Never thought I would do that, but I didn't want to divide them all up.  Here is my work from the past couple of weeks for which I haven't had the chance to upload yet.  Schoolwork kept me busy, and I've pulled four all-nighters in a row this past week (with 3-5 hour naps during the day).  Not the best idea, but I didn't want to submit so-so work.  My dad came by last Sunday to bring me food (CANDY!!!) and wish me good luck for my final week this semester.  Love you mom and dad!  Here's the assignments you guys!

My artist research profile character for character design class (wow, that's a mouth-full).  The artist I choose was Eric Goldberg, and I had fun coming up with a character in his style.  The design of this guy was mainly based on the Genie in Aladdin :)
This is my demo-reel for digital tools class.  I haven't really posted any work related to that class, but this video includes a nice amount of work we did in that class over the semester.


Here's my horizontal pan for layout!  I really wasn't quite sure how to tackle this project.  Especially since I had to pretty much do the entire thing the night before still (aside from the brainstorming process).  I like how it turned out, but if I had done it traditionally instead of digitally, I would have been able to add more detail and objects like I originally planned.  Drawing with a tablet is just... different: it takes longer to get the line you want.  Oh well, here you go:


These are my layout portfolio pieces.  I really wanted to submit more, but this is all I had (time for).  I don't like the ones I did early semester as much as the later ones, but hey, that's a good thing :)  I used two painting-layouts as well, just so I had a few more images to submit.


And finally, here's my ball and tail assignment.  This thing took up a lot of time, so I'm happy I started this one quite early :)  After seeing many other people's, I noticed that I should have kept the tail moving even after it finished its curve over the ball and hitting the ground.  Good to know for the next tail I'll have to animate :)  I don't have much else to say about this one, so I hope you like it :)

December 15, 2011

I'm Learning How to Paint!

My final painting assignment for first semester...  Mood landscapes!

I knew that if I wanted to do a good job on this assignment, I had to be painting something I wouldn't quickly loose interest in (and I also didn't want to paint trees).  Sooo, I sat on my bed and flipped through the Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon artbooks.  Both (mainly Panda) inspired me to come up with a whole bunch of thumbnails based on their art-styles.  Here's my entire process work for the project, including th final two paintings:
A HUGE thank you to the following people for helping me through the painting process (and the countless amount of fun, late hours spent in the painting room):

Tim Melnyk taught me some amazingly awesome things on how to make my painting better!  Without him, the paintings would not have looked the way they do now.

And there's so many more people who gave me helpful tips and advice:
Alison Chan, Bryce Jones, Jason Lum, Jean Liang, Khoebe MagSaysay, Richy Truong, Johnathan Chan and Doug Tam.
There were plenty more people walking around who helped me as well: I haven't forgotten you: thanks!

Not to forget: my roommies also helped me through the frustating moments of coming up with good thumbnails :P

December 09, 2011

Bones Bones Bones... and Soup

"Boooooooones!!!"

What are they?  Yeah... I tried to answer that in this project.  Not sure if I succeeded, but at least I know what suppination is.  I really wish I could have included more text and that I could have planned out my page design a bit more, but I simply ran out of time.  Oh well.  I'm happy with the drawings I did.  Plus, I acquired knowledge on how to draw a pelvis (better than I used to be able to).  Man, I have no clue what to write in this post: just look at the images and...  uuh...  Yeah, whatever.








November 30, 2011

9-Hour Film

So my friend Luke and I worked on a 24-hour film together during the fall reading week a couple of weeks ago.  Since we both had lots of other things to do, we cut it short to about 9 hours, but we still managed to create a short video in that time-period.  I hope you all like it; it was fun to see this come together!

November 29, 2011

Expressive Radios

So for my character design class I was assigned to create a character's face to use for a variety of expressions to draw.

For some reason I choose to draw a radio :|

I learned that drawing a radio with a stretchy face was not an easy task.  Now I am done drawing said radio with a whole bunch of different expressions.  It was fun, but very frustrating.  Getting the face to look right was hard: especially the cassette-tray mouth.  I did, however, learn a few nice things about squash and stretch that will come in handy.  I also digitally inked these, which took me much longer than I expected.  Overall, I can't complain about the outcome of this assignment, but there are a few things that will continue bugging me as I look at these.  I like them though!

November 23, 2011

Oh, Good Morning Textures!

These took me so much longer than I originally planned.  It was an interesting learning experience putting these four small texture paintings together.  I really wish I had put a dark-to-current-colour gradient background behind the peacock feather, but there's not much I could do about that after pretty much finishing the whole thing.  Good to know for next time.  I'm starting to get a better grip on gouache though :)

Yes, I was up until very late finishing these.  Time management: I need to look into that, again.

November 17, 2011

Royal Animals

They just don't stand still!

Well, here's my animal portfolio for the Royal Winter Fair that we went to exactly one week ago.  Eighteen (good) gestures and six studies is a lot of drawings to do in one day.  I like some of the drawings, while there are a few I simply wish I didn't have to include.  I didn't have much choice though, since we were not allowed to draw from photographs or anything: I had to stick with what I had.

Here are all the drawings.  Let's see if you can pick out my least favourite of them all:

Yes, I strongly dislike that one pig study.  Ugh...  It was interesting to work with different media, but I think I might want to bring some toned paper, when we go to the Toronto Zoo next semester.

November 15, 2011

Whalimating the S and C Curve

Rayman Origins comes out today!!!

Aside from that, my next two animations for animation class were both practices for the S and C curve.  The S and C curve is... difficult to explain without images, so I'm not going to try it here :P

I'm happy with the way both of these animations turned out, mostly.  I'm not really satisfied with the candle in the book page flip animation, but since it was extra work, I won't be marked on that anyway.  Also, the book page flip animation is a bit dark, so I apologize for that.



Now here is the marine animal.  Man, did this one give me trouble.  I have restarted this roughly nine times, and ended up going with number eight.  I might do a compilation video of all the different pencil tests I have saved for this one, so stay tuned.  The whale is a beautiful, graceful animal, I realized.  It moves very fluidly, and its size is breathtaking!



Originally the background was much darker, but the animation didn't show up on it very well.  The artwork of this is not mine: it's my teacher's, Michelle.  I just coloured it :)

November 06, 2011

Shark-Bites and Grape-Toes

While I don't really have an issue with shark-bites or grape-toes, there are plenty of things I need to work on to make my life drawings better (I just thought it would be a cool title for this post).  The main thing I need to focus on is closing up the gaps between my line-work (surprise!) and add more contrast to my drawings, as currently all my lines are getting on the dark side, where the cookies are.  Getting better at shorthand hands and feet is also on my to-do list.

Getting my first life-drawing portfolio back was fantastic.  I really like knowing what I have to work on, and looking back at my drawings, it definitely makes a lot of sense.  Here are the ten drawings I submitted.  If you look closely, you can see the red circles around the areas I need to work on.

November 05, 2011

Layout in Perspective

This assignment was very fun, but not the easiest to do.  Drawing up and down shots can be a bit challenging to get right.  And shading...  I really need to work on that.  Either way, here is the assignment: hope you like it!  And yes, it is related to this post :)

November 01, 2011

Fluffy Shape-Shifters

Two posts in one day!

These are the clouds I've been working on for our painting class.  Gouache is a very unique type of paint, but I am still trying to get the hang of it.  I find it hard to paint different levels of opacity, let alone clouds.  Nonetheless, I like how this turned out, and I'm excited to paint more with the medium.

(Digital) Thumbnaaails!

The Posing of a Character

This assignment required us to pose an original character in eight different positions.  Because of that, I didn't start doing my poses until I had a good idea of what the character's proportions were.  I still had trouble drawing certain poses, but I'm glad they turned out the way they did!

Oh, and I'm starting to get the hang of clean-up, little by little :)

Today we also practiced some quick expressions with our character, so, for those of you interested, here's some in-class work related to this character.

October 25, 2011

The Origins of a Thingamajig

I am so excited for the launch of Rayman Origins next month!  It's been very long since a good Rayman game was released, due to the Ravin' Rabbids franchise introducing a whole bunch of minigames.  Rayman origins goes back to the classic 2D side platforming style and it is completely hand-painted!  Everything looks gorgeous!  And it's multi-player (four players!!!)

Anyway, onto the artwork.  I've been working on this piece for three days now, and I just finished it an hour ago.  I wanted to capture the same style the game has, so that's what I based it all on.


I figured I might as well show my process work for this one again.
 Roughly sketched the whole thing out.

 One of the first pieces I digitally inked: it was a neat learning experience.

 Colouring the characters was fun to do: just stay within the lines.

 All of the characters done and coloured.  Onto the shading part.

 I found that shading without a smooth transition between colours gives a very nice, stylized effect.

 All the shading is done, while I'm still figuring out what to do with the rest of the image.

And WHAM!  There was a background!  Rayman's pupils were evil, haha!

For those of you interested (should be all of you!), here is a cool trailer of the game.
Rayman (Origins), Globox, Teensies and the Lums were created by Michel Ancel and belong to Ubisoft.