I officially have no academic obligations for the rest of the summer. I've also tailor made a full Paragon save with cross game loyalty to everyone's favorite cerulean waifu in Mass Effect. With these (my two biggest time sinks) out of the way, I can finally finish one of my goddamn paintings/animations/bust of John Wayne. More time to post stuff too. At the moment though, there's a bit of a shortage of things to post, which is why I'm posting these awful iPhotographs, as filler to keep regularity.
I'm no photographer, but you could still kill someone with a blunt knife if you tried hard enough. That is to say, even though all I've got is the smudged lens of my iCamera, I've been lucky enough to sit through a number of breathtaking skylines, capturing them with all the finesse of a syphilitic Bonobo.
These are from Silent Hill appreciation weekend. I tried to come to terms with the psychological anguish of being an over-stressed art student, but I had a painting due.
They are of particularly awful quality, but if I could photoshop creepy stuff into them later on, it would be totally worth it.
And most of these are just from walking home. Despite its residents' daily attempts to fertilize the pavement with dog poop, Oakville still gets some great skies. It's got some damn liberal pet restrictions though. Seriously.
I don't think my career in photography is going to go very far. It hasn't even had its morning coffee and already it's succumbed to nihilistic depression. How could we possibly control lighting? Totally beyond our comprehension, best left to the gods.
I managed to drag my ass to three life drawing sessions all summer, but because TSA is deep in the heart of Mordor, I never make it for the short poses. I console myself by judiciously overshading whenever possible.
You know, I was able to watch TV again for the first time in MONTHS, and just my luck too. Apparently, today is the Dr.Who marathon that culminates in the series 6 premiere on Space. Stroke of luck? Uppercut of fortune? Sonic BOOM of serendipity?
It felt great to be able to draw stuff that will never see the ink of a teacher's pen., too. I decided to finally try to see what my last character design assignment would look like if I actually had the patience to paint it. It can light itself, what with the bonfire on its head and all. It was an interesting experiment. The malaise of summer break took it's toll at around the middle section of the painting, which precedes a rough mess of incomprehensible blobs. Turns out, yellow is a horrible color to use as an overlay mask, as a wise man once said "darkened yellow looks like a grey green mess". Good words wise man. Good words.
O yeah, and some quick fan art of the Grey from today's new DW episode. Are they the Silence? I could have paid more attention. Doesn't look like the alien at all, yes? That's because I have terrible memory.
I've got too many lemons, and I can't hold them all! In all seriousness though, that must have been the best 10 hours of my life ever spent in front of a screen. Did you know that even with meticulous attention to the tiniest of details, we still managed to miss the [spoiler]s on the [spoiler] displays?! Preposterous!
Anyway, this perfectly describes my sentiment towards a year of art education (Actual ART education, wouldjabelieveit?! And a year of it too!). I still regret that Oakville is not a Neo-Liberal enclave of rebellious artists from around the globe under the canopy of a futuristic metropolis, but you can't have everything. If it just had a canal of raw sewage running through it...
Top is one of the layouts from the Layout Portfolio. I recall saying something about going out with a bang and having an entirely painted portfolio. In retrospect, what I actually did was more of a fizzle, resembling a specter of the static buzz you get from touching unfriendly doorknobs. As such, only one of the layouts were actually worth anything. I adjusted some of colors and lighting as per advice, though it's still a bit monochromatic. The other ones are still very much works in progress that will eventually be fit for presentation, much in the same way that Episode 3 is a work in progress. Heh.
I've got a lot of backlogged work from this semester, but because I haven't had anything particularly important to muse myself with (Each post is like writing a diary entry in a notebook of madness), I haven't posted them. Above is the last character design assignment of the year. I'm still not really sure as to how one judges a character, so I won't try to get too deeply into it. It's supposed to be a phoenix, you see. I just picked the name of my favorite journalist to name the character. He was real close to being called Weegee.
This entire year, I've apparently made only male characters, so my summer resolution is to practice drawing hourglasses.
And here's something I've forgotten to post. The assignment was to draw some kind of anatomical reference with illustrations and captions. I'm not sure, I didn't read the assignment sheet. This is what I ended up with, though, and I gotta tell ya, it's not doing so much for my chances in the comic industry. There were 6 pages, but to be honest, the extra cheesy dialogue starts being plagued with typos in the 4th page, and the art spirals into oblivion on the fifth. I've saved any perusing eyes the torture.
It really is extra cheesy. Like a 6 topping pizza, except all the toppings are cheese. Or the moon.
Oh yeah, and I did animation too. It follows my philosophy of starting out lukewarm and then quickly contracting a fine layer of moss. The animation quality goes from sorta decent to not enough coffee after the repeat holds. The sack itself is supposed to be doing a Billie Jean hip thrust, but as a classmate cleverly pointed out, a gelatinous mass cannot hip thrust. Looks like I've got some real issues to iron out over the summer. Live and learn and trudge on through and so forth.
Regarding the entire year though, it's been an experience, to say the least. Cool People in Cool Situations: The Movie is what it was. Ratings weren't that great though, especially from the sleeping a consistent 8 hour per night camp.
I want to post something, regularity keeps a body sane. But these animal drawings man, these animal drawings... I'm going to sound real cynical if I keep typing, as I would continue to talk about how awful the rest of my drawings are, how bad my "gestures" look, failure, etc.
So I won't (I'm working on brevity, you see).
Thus, a haiku:
The zoo was filled up
With animals big and small
I can't draw them well
*Duh dun duh dun nah*
We all got the blues *Duh dun duh dun nah*
Animation blues
I just really need to do something unrelated to painting and animation right now. There's a human threshold for painting and animating and I am clearly approaching it. So instead of playing STALKER and wasting the rest of the night, I have decided to do a little bit of updating on this, my oh so neglected blog.
I've done a lot of stuff over the past few weeks, but very little that I would actually call presentable. In fact, some of the stuff I'm posting actually sucks, but I'm putting them up in the hopes that when I look back upon this moment years from now, I can remember how MUCH it sucks. Officially. For perspective purposes.
I've included the age sequence assignment from character design. Some bits look wonky, and the silhouette for the infant stage is awful. Could've had a better color scheme too, I guess, but that's attached to a cinder block in the water under the bridge now.
And, some layouts. Top is the texture assignment (I know there's no texture), and bottom is the big small assignment. I post these now, because as soon as I get a chance to do it, I'm going to repaint/rework them (but I'm not in a hurry, given that all the grades are already in and aren't liable to change). I'm not proud of the execution of either, but they pad up the post real well, don't they? Why, they must almost occupy nearly 1/4 of the screen! Blimey!
I just finished the roughest gorilla walk cycle ever conceived by mortals. I'd rather not talk about it. If any expert wants to conduct a study on PTSD and its relation to animation students, here's your chance.
And finally, my greatest failure this semester.
It's not that I couldn't make it look good, it's that I didn't have the grit to make it look good. They say grit could make or break a man. If you ain't got it, chances aren't too good of you seeing many more sunrises. My eyes strained under the eggshell white glow of the animation table. I found myself trapped, between a peg bar and a hard place. Not enough patience to fix the problems, not enough energy to correct the imperfections. It was just one last speed bump before the light at the end of the tunnel, some small, insignificant jostle that didn't have to be any more than that. It was practically begging to be driven over, without a care, like the carcass of some small animal whose only reason for being is to add gristle to the road. It was beckoning, almost enticingly so, to be glossed over, to be buried by the highway and lost from memory. I'd never heard of a schmuck that wanted to make life difficult for himself, not in this business. I wasn't about to be the first.
I'm certainly going to redo this, sometime over the summer, I expect.
And now, with an escalating sense of dread, I am compelled to return to painting.
A spectre is haunting my reading week- the spectre of animation.
Man, this semester has not been agreeable with my health at all. I have come to the conclusion that having paintings and animations due consecutively AND concurrently is the most sinister expression of physical and mental torment ever conceived. Right up there with pitchforks, boiling cauldrons, and appendectomies.
I have a lot of stuff accumulated from this semester that I'll get to posting eventually, this Pink Panther animation being one of them. It noticeably hiccups at two separate points, so I guess I'll need to fix that. The other stuff kind of looks like what haggis sounds like, but without the "savory, nutty flavour".
I still have an infuriatingly long way to go, and pertaining to the length of said journey, I so mad it's ridiculous.
Boy, I certainly do enjoy drawing characters that aren't my own. Like a careless scythe in someone else's wheat field I am! Surely nothing can be a more sublime expression of my counter culture, anti-establishment inner renegade!
Figure I'd make this week's quota with a few (okay two) sketches. I've been itching to do some proper fanart for a while. Top is SCP-682, from http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-682. Fascinating concept, I've been toying with the idea of what it looks like for a while now. As far as I can tell, it's just a big lizard that's really, really menacing. That's a lot of creative leeway, so it's always cool to try and redraw it every now and then. The bottom is ZAH EMPRAH, the leader and God of all mankind. If one puts out of mind the well established series of official paintings made of him, a lot of fun can be had trying to depict the well chiseled visage of the Greatest Human Being Evar.
Even amidst all the studying, and the arduous animating of certain fictitious felines, time refuses to accommodate our suffering. For no man does time relent its merciless flow, forever the icy deluge, uncaring for the desperate throes of mortal animation students. It is a cacophony of avian falsettos, piercing the crisp silence of winter, screaming contempt for the departure of a gently humming summer. Whistling and howling, time is the zephyr that propels itself on the currents of night, dancing at a frenzied vivace upon swollen clouds, cursing its company, a legion of white speckled against deep indigo.
What I'm saying is that my schedule this semester was cursed by the 9:00AM fairy. FML.
Apparently school starts on the 10th, rather than the 11th. That caught me off guard, I thought I would at least get another day to lounge around.
I wanted to add more detail to this, but I'm getting sort of frustrated with it. The colors really messed me up, as far as contrast goes, and I think I have like eight equally luminous bright spots. I don't think I can diagnose the composition, since the original sketch I made for this wasn't exactly planned well. The design for the train is practically a carbon copy of the Space Pirate Homeworld Train from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. I'd like to say that this was subconscious, and I only realized it afterwards, but to be honest, it's probably just because I'm not very original. The lighting is sort of awkward, too many bright spots in too many places, so it doesn't really have that sense of atmosphere. Perspective's probably off too. Dang.
I think overall, despite not being entirely satisfied with how things are going, it's a good exercise to post these. It provides a palpable source of motivation, an incentive for working more frequently.
The BW version reveals the really glaring faults with the lighting, and ergo, the entire composition.
Man, if Carl Sagan had only been broadcast on PBS in my time, the inspiration I feel from watching Cosmos might have been put to some kind of use. Oh well, more's the pity.
I've finally gotten some of the more standard art apps to work on my new AHZEUS laptop, so, after a long and arduous period of zero productivity (two entire Space marathons, along with a few days of the annual Holiday Twilight Zone stream), I can finally work again.
First thing I did to warm up was the OLD digital topic that I had meant to do before I was rendered computerless. It was something like "Ice Queen", or somewhere along those lines. Anyway, what I ended up with has absolutely nothing to do with the topic. The new screen is so bright and so vivid, I just had to try something real colorful, even if they don't really blend very well together. To get back into the knack of painting, I did the entire thing in grayscale before applying color. The focus is still on the face, the brightest and most contrastive part of the painting, but I think everything else is a bit muddied by the color. Some things are too defined, so I suppose I'll need to work on the cohesiveness of a piece in my future endeavors. The design is crap, no comments there. Honestly, after this long of doing nothing, I have actually forgotten the rules of composition, and will need further reference before I can correctly pinpoint what I did wrong.
More productivity ahead, I think. Got a whole host of topics that I've been neglecting to do. That's one out of four New Year's resolutions started. New semester looms in the distance, getting closer all the time.
