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!

Blue Things

Sheridan revealed it's new logo recently.  Yay!  ... Nah, I'm not a huge fan of it. I would much rather see them stick with the original tangram.

Anyway, for our elective course we had to work with that new logo design and turn it into something... special. Anything really. So I drew it made up of animals. Big 'Thank You' to Patricia for staying up and helping me judging the appeal in the poses till 4 am sometime last week :)

And then here a fun little walk we did for our 2D course.  Cut-out animation, like 3D animation, allows you to work with a graph editor, which is awesome!  I didn't create the character. The teacher gave us the rig. 

Happy Pigs!

We went to the Royal Winter Fair again last week aaand... we drew the animals.  Surprise!

I wasn't able to stay super long like previous years, as I had to go back to school to get more work done.  I got a good amount of gestures and one longer drawing done in the time I was at the fair though.  So yeah, here is a compilation of most of those gestures and one adorable pig that kept on stretching!

Third Year and Its Life Drawing

Life drawing just keeps going!  Although I can't make it to extra life as many times as in first and second year, I still try.  Group film and action analysis are just taking up a lot of time, although it's fun working on them.  Anyway, here are the drawings I submitted for my life drawing portfolio before reading week.  There might be a few extra ones and there are a few I didn't take photos of either, but oh well.  That'd be all for today!

And thanks for checking out the blog everyone: it means a lot!

Villains, Heroes and Bouncy Things

We did another bouncing ball, bowling ball and balloon assignment this year.  This time we used Toon Boom.  One or two of the three had to be done using peg animation.  I used the bowling ball for that one, as peg animation allows for more precise inbetweening on super-slow bits.  I'm rambling.  Here it is!

And my "Heroes and Villains" stuff for life drawing.  The first one was very tricky in the sense of turning human poses into "realistic" animal poses in that flat 3-tone style.  It also turned out way to dark in print-form, so it's much nicer to see it digitally.  I ended up liking the second one more than I thought I would, although I had a looot of trouble with it...  After the thumbnails I ended up re-drawing it more than fifteen times before it started resembling the original sketch.  Ah, good old 3:00 am memories.

The Ridiculously Magical Third Year

I didn't post all throughout September...  Regardless, everything in this post was done in September, amongst a whole bunch of other things.  We had to design two contrasting characters for 2D class in Toon Boom.  I figured it would be fun to make trees.  Fun it was, and this became the result:

Then our animation teacher challenged us to animate good old bouncing balls.  So I did.

And finally, a little portrait/caricature of myself for a short biography we did for life drawing.  Apparently I have a large chin.  Let's not talk about the ears.

And we're currently working on a bunch of other things, including the highly anticipated third-year film project!  I have a few things for Action Analysis I could upload already too, but maybe I'll wait with that until the whole thing is finished, so I can post it all at once.  Okay, that's all for today!

OH NO, WAIT!  NARNIA 4 HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED!

Mey-Me 2013

This only took a veeery long time.  But yeah, time for a new blog-makeover, because the old one was getting, well... old again.  Gone are the gloves and some other things.  I didn't quite know what I wanted him to look like, until I started looking at weasels and ferrets.  That's pretty much why he ended up with a long neck :)

Previous Mey-Me Monster posts can be found here: 2011, 2012.
Khoebe helped with me some colour judgments :)  Check our her blog!

I've been scribbling a new one of these out in my sketchbook for a couple of weeks now.  It was hard to come up with a finalized design.  But then again, I have that with every character I do, so nothing new there!  Here's a whole bunch of my sketchbook drawings of preliminary Mey-Me Monster designs.  Sadly it just further stresses how much I am unable to draw clean, haha!

Last, here's the final version just with lines, as I like the way that one looks too.

Almost September!

I have, I believe, four weeks worth of zoo trip drawings to upload.  Actually, two weeks were from the Toronto Zoo, one week from my parents' farm (AKA "Home-Home"), and one week from the Killman Zoo.  We discovered a sign on the highway for the Killman Zoo when we were driving to my parents' place, so we decided to check it out the next week.  It was awesome!  The animals at the Killman Zoo are very well observable.  That, and they have lots of cats, including jaguars, lions, cougars, etc.  Go check out their website here.  I would love to go back there again (soon?)!

I also finished iAnimate for the summer last week.  I learned so much about body mechanics and Maya.  My instructor, Jason Anastas, was awesome and I totally recommend him in case you're thinking of signing up someday.

I'm still planning on updating the blog banner!  I'm currently working on it and hopefully I'll have it up before the end of the weekend.  Yay!

Okay, without further ado, here be animal drawings!

TAAFI Film

Yay, I'm finally posting (more) about this!  So over the month of May I worked on a short film for an Ontario animation college challenge together with Chris, Melody, Ricardo and Steve, with Mark Mayerson as our advisor. The theme we worked with was "Caught in the Act".  Before I overload this first paragraph with links to other places, here's our entry.

This was the first time for me to work on an actual production (however small it was), and it was great to see how something like that works.  We all worked together on things like the leica and the character designs and such, but the things I worked on the most were the hedgehog and the fish.

These move way too fast in GIF form, haha!

Drawing these from so many different angles was... rather challenging :)

Also, you can see the other college's entries here.

Summer is going by sooo fast!  Only one month left until third year... where we get to create another film! Whooo!

Newsprint and Sketchbooks

Together, or separately, they are wonderful for life drawing!  Yay!

So, life drawing.  I've done more of that.  But not enough.  Never enough.  Pictured below are newsprint drawings from extra-life drawing classes at Sheridan over the summer, as well as some that I drew at Brian's summer life drawing sessions.  I'm actually focusing on my individual lines more (finally).  I'm getting a little bit more straight vs. curve in there (finally), and I'm actually putting in a bit of tone (finally), although only solid areas.  As you may know, I'm horrible at shading, and I have little interest in changing that :)

So, life drawing on newsprint.  Most of these are 1 minute poses, as I tend to like those best and I have little patience to finish longer poses (that's not good).  There's a more "finished" pose in the middle-bottom there.  I figured I should put a more-rendered-something up.  Render-wise I think it's okay, but I really don't like the drawing itself.  Oh well.  Some drapery there too, because I do like drawing that, however hard it is.

Life drawing in a sketchbook has its ups and downs.  Scanning blue Col-Erase pencil drawings only has downs.

TAAFI is happening at the end of the week!  Busy busy busy!  I'll post more stuff from the short film after the festival, but I just noticed Melody posted another little something from it on her blog.  Check it out!

Animal Overload

So I figured I'd do another animal post.  Here's a whole bunch of pages and some animals from random  pages put together.  All organized by... I don't really know.  Zoo trips on Saturdays seem to be better than Fridays.  Well, today was not as busy anyway, so that was great.  I don't know what else to write for this post.  I'll keep it short.  But that last sentence just made the whole thing a little bit longer.

Cats are so hard to draw!

I Have Not Yet Drawn the Pandas

About time I posted some zoo drawings.  These are compilations of drawings from about three or four different zoo trips.  We went again last Friday, but I haven't scanned those drawings yet.  So it's super-duper busy at the zoo lately.  I guess that's good... for the zoo.  It just makes me more nervous when I'm drawing, haha!

Here you go!

I usually have very little patience to render stuff, so this ^ will probably be rare ;)

A Swift Update

I haven't posted for over a month and have therefore officially broken my chain of updating this blog at least once a month since starting it.  Blah!  Sorry.

Anyway, the month of May was busy.  Since I was working on something I couldn't really show, I didn't have much stuff to put on the blog.  I worked on a 15 second short film with a bunch of friends for the Taafi festival coming up in July.  Together, Chris, Melody, Ricardo, Steve and I had a little mini-production throughout the month of May and now I'm finally uploading a few things from it.  Not the finished thing, of course, but a few of the things that I worked on.  I'll post more after the festival has passed :)

Some combined concept stuff I did for the film:

And then I animated/coloured these two (or four, I guess).

It's not a huge update, but I should have more again soon.  Summer is going well.  Zoo-trips just started again, so I'll see if I can scan a few of those drawings when I hook up my scanner again.  I'm also busy doing iAnimate, so maybe I'll post work from that as well at some point.  I hope to update the look of the blog again too sometime this summer, as the current banner is... well, becoming old again for my taste!

And I'm finally reading The Illusion of Life!  Awesome book!

I've Never Done a Post This BIG!

Get ready for a whole lot of everything.  I have not updated in a while, because just recently I changed the URL of the blog, got a new email address, yadayadayada.  And since that's all done, I now have a whoooole lot of stuff to upload from the end of the semester (some from earlier on that I never uploaded yet either).  So, enough talk, here's a whole buncha stuff:

Life Drawing: my final portfolio and a few extra creatures, costumes and poses.  I hope to focus more on structure this summer, as I always try to create very gestural poses.  And then once I finally have it (sometimes takes me a few tries), I often never really finish it.  Gotta change that!  Anyway, here's a whole bunch of drawings.  The life drawings are somewhat in order of short to long poses.

The two storyboard assignments for this semester.  One is from a verse from the song 'Cuddles McGish'.  The leica-version of this won't really make sense on its own, so I just uploaded the boards here.  Our group came up with a wonderfully whacky version of the story for this, haha!

Then our final storyboards were television boards.  The characters were from one of our character design assignments earlier this semester, which we used to create a TV episode.  I tried out doing digital boards for this one.  Here's the whole process:

Here are two coloured versions of the boards (one truck, one pan) that were done for painting class.

Our final character design assignment of the semester.  We got to use a character that we designed earlier in second year, and I went with my walk character from first semester. Tried to push the poses, as usual.  Did not have as much trouble drawing this guy as I used to before.  Pose five was tricky though.

Layout!  Here's quite a few of the things we did for layout class this semester.  Some things are rougher than others, so I'll just post the stuff I'm happier with.

And, finally, I painted that final pan from the layout assignment for painting class as well.

I'll just say that it is really (really!) nice to have been able to sleep properly again this week!  Alright, lots of stuff coming up this summer, so I'm sure there will be more updates (zoo trips!!!)