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!