Animal Drawings, Caricatures and... uh.......... EPA?

The Chalk Talk was enlightening. There's certainly quite a bit to think about, but most of it is just wrestling with the immensity of Animation as a field. In addition to incorporating aspects of academic fine art, we're a combination Theatre/Film Making course. At some point, most of us will have to make some kind of duty call to focus a on particular facet of the program, or else risk being stretched too thin over the options. I guess it boils down to being either a story teller, an actor, or a draftsman, with each requiring a unique skill set. Last night's most daunting presentation was on the intricacies of story telling, with its structural complexity and its symbolic depth. Apparently, good storytellers operate in the abstract almost as much as in the concrete, which is manipulated to a T in order to serve narrative continuity. 

Daunting.

I've got a bunch of sketches for different parts of a futuristic supercity with an Egyptian twist. I'm using them to abuse the Blur filter. Maybe I'll learn something from them. 

This painting still has that really unsatisfactory, unfinished quality to it. Everything just isn't working together. This is something that I hope to iron out with more time and practice.

My last character assignment didn't blow over like I had planned. They're pretty far from stellar. Subterranean, even. I know I certainly didn't plan to work on them at 4 AM on the day they were due, for one. To compensate, here's a painting of one of them. 

Bob Jorn of the Oslo Jorns, PROUD VIKING WARRIOR. 

The best kinds of victories in life are assured victories. Congrats to everyone who drew a bear and a tangram.  At least on this occasion, we have all triumphed over life, beat it into unconsciousness, ruined its credit rating and sold its kidneys to organ snatchers in Acapulco. 

Would it still be called the Royal WINTER Fair, even though it's still autumn? Anyway, animal drawings from the Royal Autumn Fair. I enjoyed not having to draw as much this year, but depressingly, I don't see any notable improvement from last year. I'll need to work harder.

Sketches.

 I play a paragon Vanguard in Mass Effect. He looks like but is not explicitly a certain captain of a certain space faring vessel under a certain interplanetary federation. Commander Jean-Luc Shepard, colonist war hero. He's actually British.

Vandalism or Compensation

I am totally devoting every ounce of my being towards the realization of my 24 hour film. Totally. They'll need to assemble a legion, NAY, A MIGHTY HORDE of troubadours to chronicle the saga of my dedication to creating short films within dictated time frames. When the High Scions of short animated film making in the distant future speak of this era to their neophytes, they will recount the tales of my

I'm just shitting you.

What I have now is barely on par with a Naruto AMV. 

Crawling and stuff yo.

Of course, that's not to say I've been on this for 20 hours. This little thing called Rocrastination-Pay had a lot to do with it. I've been realistically working for about 30 minutes. Anyway, I'm just taking my 53rd consecutive break. 

Halloween fanart/dodging real work post. 

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?

But For Me, It Was Tuesday

So when I was about half way through this painting, it occurred to me that being depicted as a Merman With Wings (TM) was not exactly the kind of thing that floats people's boats. In fact, if I was to hazard a guess, I would say that witnessing one's image being distorted in such a manner would likely attribute to their boat being met with an earlier and possibly more devastating end. Functionally, this painting has more in common with your average high yield nautical explosive than any form of caricature. I got the idea from a conversion in our Tuesday Pound Resign Texture, and that's all I've got on the subject.

Yeah, and once again, all these sketches are from Thursday, which seems to be the only day that I can clock in consecutive hours of sketching time. I don't think I even touch my sketchbook on any other day. I meant to have two more paintings ready for this post, but with schoolwork being what it is, both of those paintings currently have about as much form and compositional clarity as a tiled roof covered in pigeon crap...or a Pollock painting (ZING!).

And then there's this. I messed up a lot of the timing towards the end, and went really lax with detailing the splashes. The entire cycle is, on twos, barely two seconds long, which means everything feels rushed. Some of the motion keys don't read at all, and the entire sequence leading from the splash to the repeat is just sloppy as all hell, with all kinds of weird distortions. I wish I had more time to work out the timing issues, but really, c'est la vie.

Urg the MAGNIFICENT

For he is the mightiest of the Orc-lords, unchallenged and supreme in his sovereignty. His followers cower beneath the weight of his majesty, and his enemies invariably become opulent feasts for scavengers. He is the conqueror of the men in the northern plains, the bane of the dwarfs under the western hills, and ravager of the elves in their southern forests. With a blood lust and brutality far surpassing even the vilest of his kin, there is no other whose name is whispered with as much fear, whose approach inspires such absolute dread. There is also no other who would put on lingerie war paint, but really, who's going to argue with him?

Anyway, writing meaningless crap like this is incredibly therapeutic for me. It takes my mind off of the heavier burdens in life, like animating waves, failing at storyboards, and other assorted first world problems. On an unrelated note, Urg is apparently one of the more popular monosyllables that people use to name their orcs. Bummer.

The sketches are basically all from Emslie's class about the contrapposto stance. Speaking of which, I also got this kickass caricature from the man himself. It's like he took a photograph of my soul with a col-erase pencil. Totally my new avatar.

"Chanson" is a genre of french music that seems to cover everything that has singing in the French language, but in modernity refers mostly to Sarkozy's-wife type songs (I actually don't know what the hell I'm talking about). There's a diverse range and a unique infusion of culture (like Bossa Nova), with a fine mix of velvety contraltos and satiny sopranos, all backed by Parisian accordions. It's about four clicks from the Cowboy Bebop Wikipedia article, and was a questionable way to spend the evening instead of animating.

Breaking EveN

I am hooked on a show about drugs, which I guess puts me only a hair's breadth away from watching a documentary about rehabs. 

I haven't done any homework these past few days, mostly cause the wave animation is just kicking my ass. I can't...wrap my mind around it? It's this conundrum that would eat up all my motivation the second I step into a room with anything even remotely resembling a light table. I suppose it'll work itself out eventually, but right now "eventually" has this "in the wee hours of the morning before the assignment is due" kinda ring to it.  

Here's that bear dragon. I'm still working on a way to fit Tim in here, but I'm pretty sure the perspective is off.

The mental patient is my character design for the Spangled Pandemonium, which is inspired (Wait, sorry, what's this "originality" thing you keep jiving on about? Is it some kind of pilates?)

by the Fred Bonaparte design from Psychonauts, in the sense that being bug eyed, lanky and straitjacketed usually invites discriminatory glances from the so called "sane". 

And layouts from the sketchbook. Sort of. Man I can't even pronounce perspective, cut me some slack.