I've Heard Enough About The Shepard

My display's on the fritz again. Not only does it mess up color saturation and slow down explorer to a grind, it also rearranges all of my desktop icons Every. Single. Time. I log on. I have no idea what anything I post looks like on a normal screen, but on the bright side, at least I'm not in front of a light table, going slowly and perceptibly insane. 

The kitchen painting assignment is weird in that it was done almost entirely with the lasso tool and gradient. It was also more than 60 layers, so the computer was more or less venting super heated steam towards the end. 

It's pretty obvious now that this pan is less of a pan and more of a tracking shot. It also became obvious that this pan also didn't fit the criteria of the assignment. Since I'm not going to be getting any kind of walk cycle to work on a cityscape, we'll call this a learning experience and weep softly over the mark later.

And sketches (not really). The color of the week is: Purple.

Lily of the Valley

We have an animation due in less than 50 hours, and I've put about as much work into it as I have towards my dream of becoming an airbender. 

This is my lift and toss character. He's a magician, though he's more of a Geller than a Houdini. From my experiences at unsuccessfully animating him, I can honestly say that I prefer my good friend the Bouncing Ball, who was a far better conversationalist. 

Here's a "layout" for Caple's class. I say "that" because, as Scott says, it's really more of a smattering of tones than a layout. Also, apparently my laptop screen displays blacks as a sort of light gray. On normal computers, this "layout" is basically a black box.

This is actually our first for reals storyboard. The draftsmanship leaves a lot to be desired, but I personally like the story. It gets mixed reception though, unsurprisingly, since it requires a few pieces of culturally specific background information, as opposed to just being funny by its own right. This is something I need to work harder on in the future, assuming I still have one after this weekend's animation assignment.

 And Thursday sketches. They are all from some kind of Thursday, because our supplementary elective course is just such ripe ground for fostering creativity. I like to attribute this phenomenon to the soft hum of mildly partisan rhetoric, which is probably what Homer's muse sounded like.

Finally, a painting. An actual, honest to goodness no jokes pigment on pulped tree bark painting. I realized that as far as my current abilities are concerned, I'll never have a real gouache painting that I can be proud of. In light of this revelation, I think it's better to sort of come to terms with what I CAN accomplish now, and set some kind of starting point that I can look back on as I try to improve. I like the lighting in the tonal better, but it has a few major tangents that I didn't notice until the very end. The painting itself has inferior lighting and sense of space, and the character size relationships are distorted. 

It's more like 49 hours now. Sleep is only a prelude to more animating, and in some insane way, I feel like putting off sleep will help put more conscious time between me and the animation. EXTREME procrastination, or slow descent into animation induced madness?