The Line Look

Hello and greetings again! Thought I'd better get some blogging done as Robear is starting to make me look rather lazy.


Last year for my final project I chose to use a very simple looking 2D style in Flash, after seeing this animation I just had to give it a go! Despite it's simple style it's actually still very difficult to do, as you essentially need to draw each frame. The strength of this series is in the animation; the movement, and expressions are very well observed, and the simple style really helps to emphasize that.


Without further adieu, here are some of my favourite Simon's Cat animations which inspired me last year:

Cat Man Do:

TV Dinner:

This one is my favourite, i just love how well observed the cat's cheeky behaviour is! 

Hot Spot:

You can see with this one, that the actual drawing becomes a lot neater. The creator actually made the first Simon's Cats to learn to use Flash, 'Hot Spot' came a little later, when obviously he was getting better with the program.

Blog note: It's slightly annoying that you have to edit the html code to get the youtube videos to be larger than those silly tiny boxes. If you're wondering how to do it, it's quite simple: 

1. First, link your video as usual.
2. Go to the "Edit HTML" tab.
3. Find the chunk of text that represents said video (look for lines starting with <object class
4. Now find the section below it starting <embed width="320" height="266"
5. Now just change those numbers to how large you want the video, I use width="480" height="360", which is the size I would have expected them to link as... Alas, they don't.

See you the next time I see you!

The Alien Sketch

Another mini-project for today!

Today my goal was initially to do some simple concept sketches for one of the ideas I'm working on for next year (I'm super excited about this one!), not sure if I can give away the story just yet but it involves a boy and some aliens... Put very simply!

This started out as just a rough sketch, but as with so many of my rough sketches I got a little carried away and went on to shade it. I did add colour, but I actually liked the black and white version a lot better, with just the green hue of the light over the whole thing.

 This was, like I said, originally a very quick and rough sketch, and I personally prefer the look and feel of the rough lines, unless I'm required to fully 'clean up' a drawing with neat linework, I rarely do... It's a time consuming job, and the drawings tend to lose their character.

Anyway, hope you like! I'm SOOOOO excited about this project! I can't wait to get started next year!

Photoshop Practice

Hello all! (Rob... and the other 3 or so random views)

It's been a while since I spent any time at all on photoshop, so decided it was time to set myself some summer homework. Today my project was to just loosen up my drawing, something I've been trying to do in my sketches for a while (which I must begin to upload soon). 

I decided I'd attempt a skyline landscape (landscapes are a huge weak-point of my drawing since I mostly draw characters, animals aswell... But that's for another day) without allowing myself the use of the eraser tool or undo at all, and not really thinking too much about what I was doing, and this is what I ended up with after around 7 minutes:

• I started off with a simple gradient background.
• Set a new layer to multiply and painted in the building at random, using a hard square black brush, occasionally using the shift key to get some straight edges.
• Changed the opacity to around 80% to get some colour from the background.
• Created another layer (normal) and using the same brush, only white; I began by colouring in lit surfaces, again not thinking, just going with whatever happened.
• Made yet another layer (normal) and using a hard round brush picked reddish/orange colours (for no other reason than I felt like it) painted on large dots and streaks of colour, holding shift between strokes, which gives the shapes the 'tails'.
• Next just to finish up created a full black/white gradient across the screen on a new layer, and set the layer to screen to enhance the lighting above the base background layer.
• Then another layer, using the pen tool created an offset rectangle and filled it with white, lowered the opacity, and then copied it to the side. I was trying to give the effect of looking through a window, not sure if it worked but for 7 minutes work I can't complain.
• Then poked on the Ratworks watermark in the bottom corner and saved as .jpg.
• That's it!

 I'll set myself more sketching / practice mini projects through-out the summer (a few per week I imagine). 


I'm currently looking for a free recording tool so I can record the whole drawing process as I go, but being on a mac my choices are limited, especially cheap / free choices.

See you the next time I see you!

The New New Header!

Hello again! Attempting to write this blog straight into the blogger 'composer' instead of C&Ping from word, hoping to not encounter various issues I had on my other blogs...

Yet another attempt at the design of the header! It may seem like an insignificant thing, but rob and I will have to stare at it for the best part of a year, so it has to be good!

As we discussed, I've tried the resized paper texture header, I like the scale and position of the logo above the writing now! And also vectored the cheese background to make it look more cartoony, which I think works well!


Here they are!

 

What you reckon now Robear?

Interesting note... The built in blogger uses a ridiculously small or ridiculously large arial font... I'll be C&Ping from word from now on!

The All-Important Header... Now With Added Logo!

Well, after the enthusiastic response I got from Rob for the logo’s we had a brief discussion and decided that the grey logo suited the colour theme that we want to go for. So with a finished logo in mind, the next task, is to include it in our blog headers, and change the logo itself into a .png format with alpha channels, so we can quickly use it to watermark any work or images we use.

So, here is the logo in .png with alpha channels (Rob you should be able to download it straight from here, if not I’ll email it to you).

The first thought was to simply add the full logo in the bottom right (pretty much how I intent to use it as a watermark).

But, honestly it feels like a totally unpolished header, so I went back to the logo file and removed the text from it, just for use in the header, and came up with these:

Which I actually quite liked, the first one in particular, though I feel the sizing and positioning should have been somewhere in between the two... Then I had another little thought, so I took some liberties with the whole design and came up with these bad boys:

Wocha reckon then Robear?

Logos Galore!

Thought it was about time that I got these sketches uploaded for everyone (probably just Rob) to see. First are a few of the simple concept sketches I did, while I was brainstorming on my sketchbook in bed.

Note to self: when scanning in an image, be sure to ink the lines first, pencil really does not scan well at all.

I think a logo should be quite simple and preferably instantly recognizable; be it through colours, or shapes. Being in the creative field that we are at the moment I think it’s fairly important to not just have a simple circular emblem with initials in it like so many companies use, but it’s also important for it to be relevant. So I started to sketch simple shapes, keeping the shape of our official mascot rodent in mind. I quite liked the first idea (top left) but decided to keep going, I’m sure there’s some kind of law against settling for your first idea!

 

These are further sketches I did in photoshop, still keeping to the rat theme, but slightly less simple. Most of them didn’t feel like they had much potential for being a logo, but I did like the rat sat at the computer, which I almost did settle on. Then I did the bottom sketch just randomly, which I really love, and am hoping Rob likes too! It’s a simple silhouette, it includes our name, it sticks to a simple square form, and… It’s fun! LIKE IT ROB! =P

Here is the logo, in the silhouette form, completely undecided on a colour (any thoughts Rob?).

 

  

Hopefully, we should be decided on a logo soon! Let me know what you think!

Malice in Wonderland (1982) by Vince Collins

While watching the new (Tim Burton’s) Alice in Wonderland today, I realized just how bizarre some of the concepts in the film are. Whether Alice is dreaming about her time in Wonderland (which kind of shows that she is probably fairly messed up in the head), or if she literally goes there by falling through the rabbit hole there are some bizarre things happening there. Personally I’m assuming she dreams about the place, and that idea is pretty strongly pushed by the happenings in the new and older films.

It occurred to me that it could be a good, and fun idea to push the bizarre storyline further, in animated form; make the whole tone of the film much more dark, because there’s certainly room for it, even if you copy the storyline directly.

Following this thought, I immediately thought of the title: Malice in Wonderland. Genius! I thought, and immediately googled the title to see if it had already been done, which, of course it had, and several times too. I must have been living under a rock for the last 23 years I swear!

One animated version stood out to me particularly, made by Vince Collins in 1982 (5 years before I was even born, that is how behind I am with this idea), here it is on youtube, but be warned it is a pretty sketchy film and contains a lot of sexual imagery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnhYK0oi0wU

It certainly pushes the dark tone I was talking about, but only extremely loosely follows the story line of the original Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The focus of the animation seems to be more on the imagery than the story; after all, compressing the entire story into 3:52 minutes is bound to skip various (most) parts of the story. Much of the imagery in the film is very sexual, combined with the dark tone of the film gives me a very uneasy feeling while watching it, I can only imagine what Vince Collins was feeling at the time of making.

My teachers know full well how much I hate the contemporary animation that was abundant in the 80’s, though I can see the value in creating an animation based solely on imagery, which is obviously created to cause an emotional response in some way. Personally, I prefer to use animation as a platform to tell a story, or at the very least to invoke happiness, rather than nausia.