Morph Project!!

Here is my "morph" piece from animation one. One of my little characters turns himself into a crow, a wolf, and then back again. It was fun. Drawing canine anatomy in motion was hard.

Project Hiroshi - Fourth Panel/Complete set

Thesis:

My goal for this class is to complete a short animation by the end of the semester, with that in mind I chose to a four-panel mural including the four characters I've created for the animation against a constant, or shared background. Essentially, I am using the Hiroshi Project as a visual development or pre-production method for the animation to come.

For the first three panels I drew my characters and their individual backgrounds with Micron pen on a full page of my sketch book. 

For the final; however, the line work for it actually came from a thumbnail pencil sketch (1 inch x 4 inches) which gave it a more "sketchy", less "clean" look that I kind of liked. I then painted in some lights and darks in Photoshop. Finally, I painted and re-painted and re-painted it until it came out as it was displayed above. Finally, I brought in the characters themselves (some with slight adjustments) and meshed them with the lighting in the scene.  I decided to push the chroma more in the final piece.  

The final mural (aka. "CHROMA BLAST"):

Ta. Da.

The final panel:

I have mixed feelings about the end result. On the one hand, the time spent working on the characters and finding a color scheme/painting the background in Photoshop have been undeniably valuable; on the other hand, I had hoped to feel better about the end result than I do. I like it, but it is not the final look I want for the animation. I started out with a look in mind, a sort of "Le Illusioniste" meets "Le Royame" and I don't feel that I've quite married the two to my satisfaction. 

Here are a couple of process shots:

Unfortunately, I have not answered all the visual questions to my own satisfaction ... yet. But I do feel the process has been beneficial. The end result of the Hiroshi Project is that I have collected a great deal of building blocks for the final look of the piece if not the exact aesthetic. 

Rascally Kid!

This is a project from my animation one class. Unfortunately, the YouTube upload cuts off the last half sec. or so...

 

Ballet Met Sketches

I just posted these on my cafe sketch blog too, but they were too fun to pass up on posting them here too. We went and sketched during a Ballet Met dance class yesterday and it was kick ass. I think I did something like 29 or 30 sketches in about 90 minutes. It was exhausting. Very worth it though. 

Week 03 Project Hiroshi

Epic fail? Maybe...

I liked the foreground enough with the squirrel and the log but when I played with adding the background trees things took a turn for the worse. I drew a small scene with trees, put it in the scene and then painted it and duplicated it a couple times for a "thicker" woodland look. I think it is too dark, too devoid of color and lacking the character the rest of the background has. I think it will be back to the "drawing board". (Get it?)

New/old guy: Village Elder

This character design sheet is for my class, but I hope to develop this guy for my senior project next year. It's early in his development so he will likely change quite a bit.

The Feared King of Games

This character sheet is for a project in my character design class. We swapped sketches/descriptions with others in class and had to create a character off of that info. Here's what I came up with:

 

Week 02 Project Hiroshi

This second panel features the other half of the pair of hunters from my idea for a short animation. The background in this panel would continue off from the background of the first piece. I kept the construction paper overlay as feedback on it was pretty much all positive. Would love any thoughts on how hunter 2 goes with/visually counters the first hunter.

People-in-motion

This is my most recent homework from my Cafe Sketch class, had to draw people (as best we could) in the middle of making some sort of movement.

Bouncing Ball!!!!!

This is my bouncing ball from animation 1!

Week 01 Project Hiroshi

This piece is the first of four that will feature each character from what I hope will be my first animated short. I played with style for a few days before settling on this mix of line work and digital color...I'm pretty happy with the results. I intend to add more to the background in the actual piece to create more of a sense of being in the woods. The leaves took a LONG time, the whole image probably took about 8 - 9 hours from start to finish.

 

I also played with a construction paper overlay (in keeping a little more with the Hiroshi-ness of the project), so here is what that looks like. I also dulled the chroma of the leaves and the guys boots a little.

I'd love to know which one people like more.

Cubisized Masterpieces

I also put this on my Cafe Sketch class blog. Our first homework assignment was to take three master works and re-draw them with simplified figures. I chose pieces by Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Gericault.

The Rembrandt.

The Caravaggio

The Gericault.

Meet Crowseph!

This little guy is for our first project in Character Design:

His description:

Crowseph lives in the field next to the Korean Seventh Day Adventist Church and makes his 

nest out of fortune slips from cookies from a nearby Chinese food restaurant. He also collects 

other "lost" things.

Week 00 Project Hiroshi

With a goal of completing a short animation piece by the end of the semester I plan on using my Hiroshi-inspired project as a basis for my final character designs.

My piece actually includes four characters (kismet...) so I am hoping to feature one in each of the four panels. The idea, as it currently stands, would be to marry the pieces through setting, style, texture and color scheme. (For example, I hope to give the final piece a sort of 'paper cut out' look but with a cartoon-ish and chromatic vibrance.)

I intend to have a running "set" as a continuous background while each of the characters will be featured in a way that possibly (hopefully...) previews their role in the short piece.

And a late addition... incomprehensible notes about what Im doing from my sketchbook:

Further amendments/super additions:

I didn't really write much above about the origin of the short or the actual plot. The piece will consist of a pair of inexperienced hunters sitting beneath some sort of rocky overhang (it was originally going to be raining) in a state of utter misery while waiting for their first chance to shoot an epic buck. The two ultimately take a series of wild pot shots at an unfortunate squirrel, annihilate a large section of forest (a la the original Predator) only to find that they've mistaken their target and missed just about everything they were aiming at anyway. The piece ends with a pan above their heads (to the top of the overhang) where a trophy buck has been watching their missteps the whole way. 

The piece is based off a story my dad told me about himself and his best friend the first time they went hunting some 30 or more years ago. I have taken a GREAT deal of liberties with the original tale. 

Here are some concept sketches for the characters, I like where I've taken the "fat guy", but still have some work to do on ol' slim:

This last one is a sketch of how I envision the first project for this class, the landscape broken down into four panels each featuring a character: