Wait, Only One More Year to Go?!

Not sure how I feel about that.  Third year felt very different than the first two years though.

I'll be posting my contributions to our third year film soon, but I have to wait a little longer with that.  There should be storyboards, concept pieces, layouts and animations posted sometime... in the summer?

We had a final assignment due for life drawing which I could post.  However, with my sleep deprivation and limited available time due to having to finish the film, I really couldn't get the assignment to come out like I wanted it to.  I even restarted halfway through until I literally had to get back to school to submit it.  Oh well, I learned something from it, and that's what counts.

Long story later: I'm not posting that final assignment, although here's my final life drawing portfolio of third year.  I did quite a few life drawings in my sketchbook this semester, so I included some of those too.

New Things Don't Always Work

Our life drawing assignment a couple of weeks ago had us do four character designs based on costume drawings from class.  I wanted to try something different than the usual duo-tone style I often use, so I did a more painterly approach to the whole thing.  I was very much inspired by the awesome work of Corey Loftis, so I tried to work with basic shapes for all of them.  I couldn't really get them to come out the way I imagined it, but there are parts of these that turned out alright.  I did not have too much time to finish the chef, so that one is a bit rougher than the rest of them.  Yeah, sooo... here they are!

And life drawings from before the break.  Some of these were in my portfolio and some of them were not. Yup :)

"Tiger Forever"

So yeah, this is the post I had originally planned to write at the end of last semester.  Then sometime during the winter break.  Then sometime in January.  And now it's the end of February and I'm finally ready to post my action analysis!  I learned so much from this though, and that is awesome!  Here is the final thing:

Yup, an upshot of a striped tiger sidestepping: no big deal (extreme sarcasm).  I've never done something this hard and I had a lot of difficulty drawing the tiger from this angle.  Part of the reason I went with a tiger was because I wanted to force myself to learn more about feline anatomy, which worked out well.  I had quite a bit of group-film stuff to work on, so the action analysis became kind of a side-project during the last two months.  Whenever I had some free time to work on it I would slowly progress this thing, hence my friends started naming this "Tiger Forever".  Anyway, I have a lot of people to thank for this assignment.  People helped me by explaining how rice paddies work, how to get more appealing poses, how a cat would act, what colours to use, etc. etc.  The list goes on and on.

I did a lot of little character development drawings at the beginning of semester 5, so I put a bunch of them together here:

Then here is the workbook for the layout.  I made quite a few changes in the end, but it was a start.

Concept drawings for the final look of the whole thing:

Then the rough layout.  This one changed quite a bit before ending up with the final version.

The animation itself took the longest.

Originally the tiger was going to be a white tiger, but since the whole thing ended up being an upshot, I figured it was better to show the tiger's belly as a separate colour for readability.  And then suddenly the tiger became orange!  It actually worked nicely with the colour scheme of the background, the final painting of which is here:

I ended up breaking this down into about 50+ levels, meaning After Effects was not too happy with me.  Neither was Photoshop, actually...  Oh well :)

Faces! And Some More.

Yup, haven't updated in a while!  Still working on the action analysis, but I'm hoping it'll be done ultra-soon.  I figured I could upload some sketchbook drawings.  Most of these are caricatures I drew in the Oakville mall with Josh, Neo and Allen during the last week of the break.  Some of these are actually from an older sketchbook from last semester.  And even less of these are from people on the internet.  But they are there too.  Apparently I find it hard to draw women appealing, more-so than men.  I just realized that as I went through these.  Gotta practice more!

Here's a character I'm currently developing to animate in a lip-synch together with Josh.  We'll see whenever we get some time for that :)  Either way, this character's not quite there yet.  I'm mainly trying out expressions at the moment, as I am currently pretty fascinated with and trying to improve on using simplistic, but still structural mouth shapes.  Tricky, but fun!

And here's a thing from the beginning of... last semester!  I don't know why I didn't upload this before, but I just came across it today.  It was my pitch idea for the 3rd year group film.  It didn't get chosen, but I love what we're working on right now (an idea that came from the brilliant mind of Patricia!).  The main logline of the story was that a salamander realizes his selfishness as he services a heron.  Here be some of the concept sketches I did for the pitch.

Pressing a Button

Suddenly semester 5 is over.  Wait, what?!  Where does the time go?  Looking back, this has probably been the busiest semester for me yet.  I had planned on finishing my rough animation for my action analysis by week 12 so that I had two weeks to do clean-up and colouring.  Things happened, and of course I was unable to get even close to finishing the animation by that time.  There was so much stuff due that I could only work on my action analysis until all the other stuff was done, and at that point I was just burned out.  Luckily I've been catching up on sleep again and I'm working on spending a proper amount of time on my "AAA" over the break.  Until then, here's some other assignments!

The Creature Transformation, yay!  I wasn't able to spend too much time on this, but I fixed a few things up before uploading it here.  I was going to make the first panel be the bird zapping the guy, but you can probably tell that I ran out of time :)  Blogger made that green very saturated here: not sure why...

And then my life drawing portfolio for the end of the semester.  Actually, I just realized that I didn't take photos of all the things required for the portfolio (pastel, ink and sculpture), but here's quite a few extra "regular" life drawings.  Lots of short ones, of course, because I like those a lot.  Sadly, there was literally no time left for extra life as I got closer to the end of the semester.  Oh well, this is what I had:

And then a quick, really short 2D animation lip-sync with one of the tree characters I created earlier this semester:

Aaand, that's all for now!