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 : 

Animatic layouts

Here are the layouts i had designed for my animatic, they got me thinking about continuity a LOT, and i think maybe with a couple of exceptions the continuity in the animatic works pretty well, people seemed to understand what was happening, even those who had no prior knowledge of my project. These layouts are in no way indicative of the style of my backgrounds, i wanted to make these as clear as possible without using colour or full animation. I will be restyling these layouts in line with my previous work. And here they are:

Crafts

In my spare time i have been inspired by my work, and started creating some craft projects. I made a jewelery box and a photo frame  It is the first time I've ever made anything like this and I've had so much fun and it really inspired me to used mixed media in my work, i like making things with my hands, and this has made me realize that i would enjoy making props for stop-motion sets. Here are some pictures of the stuff i made, the photograph is an actual vintage photograph of my great grandmother.