Animation tests- fox facial expressions

So finally I have had enough time to sit down and dedicate a couple of days to creating some facial expressions for my character of the Fox. I have been working on them for a while now, but it has become very apparent that I need to actually do some animation tests as that is the only way really to see if the expressions I've created have been successful. Here are three tests that i rendered out to test the artwork (created in Photoshop). The animation tests were done in AfterEffects, due to the fact that I'm using bitmap not vector images, and Flash (last time i checked) has never been able to handle it without crashing. I think the last test is most successful, as it conveys emotion quite well, it could be better and I will continue the experimentation process until I'm absolutely happy with the result, but for now here are the first tests , (it's been so exciting seeing months of work on the character now starting to come alive, my favorite part!) 

Looking at form through tone- life drawing

Today's life drawing session was interesting, as I completely immersed myself in looking at tonal values in the surroundings of the figure, almost forgetting that I'm looking at human form and considering the scene as a whole, trying to avoid the "tunnel vision" that I normally get when drawing a figure. This exercise has been about relating everything in the drawing to the surrounding area, working the whole drawing rather than focusing on details and I think it really shows through in my drawing this week. Firstly this is the first drawing that has been worked all over the paper, rather than leaving some bits unfinished, (like feet in most of my previous work), secondly because the figure is rather large and I was focusing on the tones, I have completely neglected to look at proportions, instead focusing my energy on getting an overall feeling of the scene. I am please with the result, despite the fact that it's not normally what I would consider a good depiction of the actual model. But it's okay because what I did instead was to gain a new perspective and try a different approach.

Tonal Study- Life Drawing

Today we did a two hour tonal study drawing, which i enjoyed so much i can't even describe it. 

The key to our drawing task was to cover the whole page in graphite hatching, to create a general mid-tone  then use a rubber to rub out the lightest areas of the scene, followed by more graphite hatching to darken the shadows. We were suppose to look for differences in tone and work the whole drawing at the same time, contours weren't allowed, so I didn't even do a faint pencil outline, before starting to draw. I enjoy painting, and this exercise felt a lot like oil painting to me, because nothing was fixed, you could change and shift your marks over and over again, by rubbing out or darkening certain areas. The challenge was to work gradually, and resist the temptation to get sucked in working on certain details, because every single tonal value in the drawing had to relate to the whole composition, and not just to the adjacent area. Here is my drawing from this exercise. 

 

ChickenFox- Animatic v4

Here's the almost almost final animatic for ChickenFox:

ChickenFox- Animatic v3

So it is about time I post an update on the ChickenFox progress, over the last week, here is an improved version of the animatic. I will post later the changes I've made and the changes that still need to be made, as discussed with my lecturer- Derek Hayes, I have changed a few scenes, few cuts and a few camera angles. But as I said I will talk about all the changes when I post the final version. For now here is the work in progress: 

Life drawing- looking at form

Today's life drawing, was focused on different representations of form, and we were given several exercises, such as representing the figure as basic geometric shapes and using parallel hatching, as a way of depicting form. I didn't want to do the box exercise, as I didn't feel it was challenging enough for me, it seems quite boring, but I did try the hatching technique and actually quite enjoyed it. Here are 3 drawing's from today's session, the first two took 40 minutes each, and the last one was 25-30 minutes, because the model was late, we got less time to draw this week. 

I think the most successful one is the hatching drawing, as it really gives a sense of mass and volume, which was the aim. It is good to get out of your comfort zone, when it comes to drawing, because that way we force our eyes to see differently, we start drawing what's actually in front of us instead of drawing what our brain thinks something should look like.

More poses, drawing.

Today I had my, animation life drawing class, where we get to draw a variety of VERY quick poses. The objective behind that technique, is to learn to capture and represent movement, through very quick poses. Such poses, although sometimes very frustrating do focus your mind on capturing the line of action and the weight of the figure, which is very important in order to represent dynamic movement. 

I find that in longer poses, I spend more time on details and less on the overall "feeling" of the pose.

Below are examples of some drawings from today, and because the poses are extremely quick, I always have more drawings from my Wednesday sessions. I didn't annotate on each one how long the poses were, but generally the really simple line contour poses are 15-30 seconds, and slightly more detailed ones are 10-15 minutes and finally the one in colour takes a lot longer and this one in particular was 40 minutes I believe. So without further a do, here they are:

Experimental life-drawing

This is going to be my experimental life drawing post from Today. Ashley, my teacher, wanted us to focus on form, rather than shape. The difference he explained, is that normally we draw Shape rather than Form, an most common linear outline drawing of a figure expresses its shape, but looking at prints of sculptures for example the form of the figure is much more evident. After showing us a few examples, of how different artists portrayed form through drawing, he set us an exercise: to draw the figure using an imaginary string that wraps 360 degrees around the shape. It was very hard to imagine, and even harder to express, and despite my reluctance i gave it my best try. Here's my first attempt:

Which wasn't the right technique at all, as I had to express the form with one continuous line/coil. So I tried again, focusing on the lower torso and legs:

This was much closer, to what was asked of us, and although I didn't quite see it in class, looking at it now I realise how much closer to a three dimensional form that drawing is. I tried the same technique on the hand, and then using fewer "coils" to remove unnecessary information:

The next exercise was to try and draw the pose, using as few geometric shapes as possible, to simplify  and represent the pose, as a cardboard prototype:

And the last drawing, is just a sketch i did of the model's profile, after i finished the polygon pose.

Life- Drawing, a skeleton

I have just come from another life drawing session, which was quite different to all the rest, as we didn't actually have a model. As a solution, our teacher found a skeleton in the cupboard :D and posed it ,as best as he could on the stage. The exercise was very difficult, as i found drawing skeletons to be much more meticulous that drawing flesh. It was much easier to measure however as all the joints and bones were visible. We did an exercise in accelerated drawing, so our first pose was 40 minutes, second was 30, and etc. until the last pose which was only 5 minutes long. The less time we had, the less i concentrated on drawing the skeleton structure and more on the actually pose and shape of the body. These poses are quite different, in an unrealistic way. Most real human poses have a sense of weight, which shows through the figure, whereas the skeleton is supported by its stand, and therefore hangs weightlessly or rather limp, when stood upright. Here are my drawings from this week, in the order that i drew them in :

Life Drawing- male figure

I've just come back from Life Drawing, and thought I'd post an update with today's drawings. 

We started off by doing warm up sketches - five 30 second and five 60 second poses. These are designed to get you too assess the line of action withing a pose- the weight of the figure. These are usually dynamic poses and look very rough, I hated them at first, but kind of got used to them over the course of my study, I see now why they are so useful. 

We then did another exercise, which i have grown to appreciate over time- contour drawing, and as you can see I am not any better at it than i use to be , except I draw with a different attitude now, instead of frustration and giving up, I try and try and try to get my hand-eye coordination to be better. 

And last but not least, we did two 30 minute poses, which has to be my favorite  exercise, as my 'perfectionist self' suffers a lot less, as a result. The first one, i was quite dissapointed with at first, as I thought the pose, from my point of view was quite dull and undynamic,  however one of my life drawing teachers taught me to always persevere and make the drawing better, rather than give up and start a new one, so I did, and in the end , it had some nice quality to it. The last drawing, is my favorite as it had the most interesting lighting out of all poses. The main overhead light was turned off, and my favourite type of drawing on black paper seemed just ideal. I really enjoyed it, however i noticed that, once again i concentrated on the torso, which i find the most interesting and neglected the feet :). 

Characters turning

Here is a little test i did, with my character turnarounds, to test whether or not my animation technique is a viable option for bringing them to life. I think this is good start and my next step is to work on creating facial expressions and character rigs. More on that later, but for now here is my test : 

Animatic -version two

I've been working on finishing the animatic, whilst at the same time making changes to the plot.After feedback from Louis Cook and Helen Brunsdon and Derek Hayes, i realised i needed a better ending, that makes more sense. I have thought of the changes a while ago, but have been keeping it all in my head, as I've been writing my dissertation. Now it's finally in a version which i can show everyone, and hear some feedback. Hooray! 

Measured Life-drawing

I was in a very interesting life drawing session yesterday. 

We started by doing a 40 minute measured drawing, first our tutor explained to us how to measure. It is key that your easel is not obstructing your view, and that you stand at arm's length from it, so that when you take a measurement of you figure, you can move your arm and jot down on your paper, without changing your point of view or bending your arm. I was drawing in my sketchbook, so i ripped out a page and stuck it to a board on an easel. 

The standard way of measuring is to pick a unit of measurement on the figure, such as a head for example, and to use it to measure the rest of your model, height, width, arm's length etc. But something i learned yesterday is- how to measure angles, but not only angles of individual body parts, but rather the angles of their relationship to each other. For example, to measure what the human eye understands as "points-of-symmetry" on the body, such as shoulders, hips knees etc. Normally poses are asymmetrical, but our tendency is to draw what we know as symmetrical points on the body, as such. Therefore a drawing starts to look inaccurate, so measuring the angle relationship of such points helps us depict the pose more accurately.  Which becomes even more useful when foreshortening occurs, where a measured drawing is key to accuracy, because our brains have a natural tendency for compensation of foreshortening, in order to recognize what we are actually seeing. Instead of drawing a foreshortened leg, we draw what we think a leg should look like, and a measured drawing forces our eyes to draw what we see not what we THINK we see. 

Below is an example of the two drawings i did, in yesterday's session, the first in pencil and second in acrylic on canvas. I've also included an explanation drawing of all the measurements i took. 

Life-Drawing, longer poses

I went to my first extra life drawing session on monday, and as i said we had some longer poses, which meant i started experimenting with using colour and paint, i ran out of time and didn't finish the whole figure but i enjoyed it so much. I really look forward to more sessions like that, but in future i will be a lot faster, as i got carried away here. Before we got to the long pose, we had to do my most hated technique EVER - BLIND contour drawing, and you can see why i hate it so much, i am absolutely rubbish at it. Although i understand the point of it, and as much as i despised not being in control of what i draw, i think i actually got a little bit better after about ten minutes... Or i might be imagining things.

I'm also including some older life drawings that i hadn't posted before, because they were in a different sketchbook.

Facial Expressions

I have been looking into facial expressions, trying to find some useful resources that i could use as inspiration, but in the end it seems like a waste of time, when i could just use my own face as reference and create some exaggerated emotions that i could then transfer onto my characters. Warning: these are not attractive, but they are never the less educational, as i needed to see the relationship of facial features to each other, and how they move as i formed different expressions, i traced over the images as i didn't wan't a lot of distracting details , i needed to see just the main features and facial shape in order to understand how to map them onto my own characters. Here is a summary of different expressions i managed to come up with, some of them are pretty similar, a lot of them are quite horrid but here they are in the name of studying :)  : 

Character Turnarounds

I have completed my character turnarounds, as I am now getting ready to animate, so i need full turnarounds to create and rig the puppets for each character. Here they are :

Life-Drawing

My intent this year, has been to go to every single life drawing class that i could, and i have been doing pretty well, i have only missed a couple, and only in weeks of extreme deadline stress :). What's more I've even started going to EXTRA life-drawing classes, which are awesome, because we get to do longer poses, and I've started to paint .I'm starting to feel more confident with drawing, and lately have been attempting to draw in the style of one line, rather than the messy style i preferred before. I think the more often i go, the better it's going to reflect in my other work, like animation for example.

Here are a few examples of smaller drawings that i could fit through a scanner :