happy halloween!

Here’s a creepy facial muscle study to celebrate:

graphite on 11″ x 14″ sketch pad

portraits

Starting in week 6 of my figure drawing class, we began to focus on portraits. Here are my three – they took me 1.5 to 2 hours each and were done with prismacolor pencil or graphite on an 11″ x 17″ sketchbook.

here’s the original photo for this one 

Vintage portrait from flickr

Clark Gable from this original photo

foreshortened figures

Here are a couple of drawings from week 5 of my figure drawing class – we were focusing on foreshortening (where parts of the body look smaller or larger depending on how far they are from the viewer). These took about 2 hours each to complete.

These are both charcoal, on 18″ x 24″ newsprint, from photos provided by the instructor

pose change animation

Here’s the animation assignment from last week – I’m catching up! We had to create 3 key poses, and animate in between them. Although I spent a long time on this assignment I don’t love the result – I didn’t put much into the character design and it shows.

When changing poses, it’s best to have an interesting action in between the two main poses – for example, if a character will be reaching out to point at something, you could bring the hand back first, in anticipation of the point forward. Otherwise you get a weird mechanical, morphing effect – which I happened to do on this assignment. Watch the movie a couple times – you’ll notice that as he’s sitting up he sort of morphs into the lean forward; I much prefer the settle back because I managed to get him to turn the opposite way a bit before settling back into the shocked expression.


Oh well. Better luck next time.

arm & leg muscle anatomy

Our figure drawing class has been focusing on muscle anatomy over the last couple weeks – here are the drawings I submitted for arm & leg schematics –

fishwife pencil test

Oh my, I am behind again on posting. This animation was for an assignment two weeks ago – we had to demonstrate a “stagger” animation, defined as kind of a shaking motion when someone is under stress (pulling/pushing/lifting something heavy), or if they’re shivering from cold or quivering from anger. The best way to animate this is to draw a series of frames with a nice, smooth arc of action, and then shuffle up the drawings.

I had fun designing this fishwife attempting to lift a huge fish. I filmed myself acting out the motion, pretending a pillow was the fish… I had originally planned for this to be about 15 seconds longer, but once I started plotting out the action on an exposure sheet (aka xsheet) I realized how ridiculous that was. It’s a big shift to start thinking in terms of seconds – as it is this film’s about 9 seconds long and it probably took me at around 8 hours to do from character design to final version.

You’ll notice that her features kind of disappear in the middle… the assignment was to get the overall motion down so I didn’t have time for the details.


Here are some of the initial character design sketches:

head turn animation!

Sorry for the delay! This week was a little crunched for time, so the blog posting got up late.

Last week’s Traditional Animation assignment was to animate two different kinds of head turns – a classical, fully-animated version and a “limited” or “stylized” animation, along the lines of UPA’s Gerald McBoingBoing 
I had a lot of fun on these – I designed a fishbunny (from an unwritten story I made up called “The Fishbunnies and the Water Tower”) for the classical head turn and here it is: 

Note how the ears drag behind and then fall forward as the head turns one way, then does the same on the way back.

Then for the limited animation, I made a monster (they’re so versatile):

This one took way less time – rather than moving in perspective like the fish bunny, the monster’s head just pops over from one side to the next. Most cartoons made for TV are limited/stylized animation, since the production time is way shorter.