Muzzles, Beaks and the Progression of Both

Hellowww!  So this was our first character design assignment for second semester.  Basically we had to design two characters: one with a muzzle, one with a beak.  After a bit of thinking, these two characters became a peacock and a badger.  I studied a lot of Kung Fu Panda 2 peacocks from the awesome Nicolas Marlet.  I really tried to stylize my peacock character and ended up over-doing it just a bit.  It was hard to show that basic shape from different angles and especially to make a pointy chest look normal as opposed to a rounded, flowy chest.  I also wish I had some time to really finalize the feet and the feathers (tail).  As for the badger; he was a lot of fun!  I still have trouble drawing chubbier characters, but lots of people gave me lovely tips for this guy.  Well, hope you enjoy:

Here's a whole bunch of progress work from my sketchbook.  There is more, but all of that is mainly studies and such.  Anyway, here you go.



Animation²

So, first of all... sorry for not having uploaded anything for over a month!  That leads me to something else: happy (very belated) 2013!  Okay, on with the actual post.

So this is a human lip-synch that was our first animation assignment for second semester.  It is literally a mouth synching with a piece of provided dialogue.  I had quite a bit of fun with this.  The process of analyzing the dialogue track frame-by-frame and then putting it into an animation is rather enjoyable!  Okay, here it is:

And this animation... well, it's not my best, but there are a few things in it that I like.  This hopefully would've been better with some more time, but oh well.  This is the last animation of first semester.  It was my first time animating in Flash, and, well... it shows.  It was rather tough to get used to drawing in Flash.  Especially since this was during the last two weeks of the semester, meaning it was very busy!  The keys are all drawn in full, but a lot of the other stuff is still really rough; some frames don't even have a body.  I wish I could have put in more moving holds, since the character freezes in several poses before moving onto the next poses.  Oh well; it was a good learning experience.

I should give some credit to Steve and Ricardo for helping me along in Flash and animating.   Steve's Tumblr can be found here, and Ricardo just set up a new blog that can be found here.