Getting closer with the alien...

As the title says; I did a really quick sketch today of my alien, and have taken quite a liking to the design of this one.

I want a cartoony looking alien, but not one so generic as in my previous sketch. Started out with a tiny thumbnail for a quick idea of build and pose, and then just sketched around it; a very quick and seemingly very effective way of quickly coming up with ideas.

Also thought id add a quick splash of colour... There hasn't been very much so far has there?
I'm sure that will change when I'm slightly closer to having finished designs.


Hope this alien is a little more to your liking Robear... Have you got any suggestions? 

Still suffering from this man-flu (cold), hope it goes before my holiday...

Matty out!

Guards! Guards!

Afternoon all!

A fairly productive day today, got a full beginning middle and end for my guardsman idea, so that's 2 of 3 3 minute ideas all done and dusted, apart from concepts, sketches, research and a presentation... Ok so I have a lot of work to do!


In other news I'm suffering from a pretty nasty cold at the moment, it's one of those colds that's bad enough to be a huge drain and an all-round inconvenience, but not bad enough for me to think that it's flu. All the flu symptoms are there... But I'm getting on with my day, so it must not be flu! The start of the uni year is fast approaching however, having some semblance of a deadline is a huge motivator and my work-rate has noticeably increased at last! (2 blogs in 2 days! I know right?!)

Anyway, the reason for this blog is to show the basic concept sketches I did today for my guards idea, so here they are:

 

 

I already love this new brush! The first image I was trying to get some ideas visualized, it probably makes a lot more sense to me... But hopefully I'll be able to sketch up a finished looking example frame to get an idea of what I actually intend it to look like. The second image is a character conceptual page, I really had no idea how I wanted the guard character to look, he needs to look slightly pathetic, but not totally unlovable.


I found that a great way to get some quick ideas for characters is to very very quickly draw silhouette character thumbnails, the actual silhouette of a character has a huge effect on the appearance, certainly the immediate impression the character gives, so it's a great great great starting point for character design. Plus, the character in this film is (at least at the moment) going to be shown entirely as a silhouette anyway!

I'm really not sure if I should publish my actual idea on the blog, so until I've discussed it in detail with Rob and Jud, I'll just stick to uploading the research and design side of things, not the story side (sorry).


Extra kudos to you if you got the Terry Pratchett reference in the title!

Matty out!

Quickfire Portraits

Hello all!

Kicked into action once again by Rob uploading and making me feel lazy!
I was going to do some speed life drawing like he did, but instead decided to go for speed portraits. So I quickly gathered up a bunch of character portraits (some you may recognize) and started sketching quickly from them.

This was just an exercise for me to get a little reminder of proportion of faces, my cartoony sketching has, I admit, warped my drawing habits. For example, I noticed that I was actually creating much smaller chins / jaws than what is correct proportion (particularly on women). 


Another quick helpful tidbit mostly aimed at Rob:
A way to save yourself some time when 'signing' in photoshop.
1. Open up the logo you sign with.
2. Using the magic wand (w) select the blank space around the image, also select the spaces inside letters are selected etc.
3. Go to Select > Select Inverse. Your logo should now be entirely selected.
4. Now go to Edit > Define Brush Preset, and select a name for your new brush.


Now your logo will forever live inside your brushes panel, so you can quickly select it, size it as you like and re-colour it with ease. It also doesn't add as much to your file size as importing the actual image.


Enjoy! 


Next time; sketches from my newest idea. All about guards!

Vancouver Film School (VFS)

While browsing the internets for animations, particularly on youtube I find myself coming across a lot of films from the Vancouver Film School (VFS). The quality of these videos really stand out to me, mostly 3D animation, they are all finished to a very high standard. 


I thought I would share with you some of my favourites that I've seen. 

This one is my favourite so far; 'Decency' by Dongkun Yoon, the simple character design and cartoony style allow for very exaggerated animation and expression, while keeping it still believable. I also thought that the voice acting was pretty decent (sound is so often overlooked in animation (one of my biggest problems at the moment) and it has a huge effect on the film). I didn't care for the cruelty in the film, I would have preferred the taller character to have stood up for the frog rather than giving into peer pressure, though I sense the point of the animation was to invoke sympathy for the frog.

This one called 'Border' by Bastian Van Rooden is another great one, the idea itself is simple and the way the film plays out is entertaining. Characterizing a standard object can be a tricky job and I think he did a great job. Extra kudos for the 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' reference at 2:22, I love finding little reference like that in movies and games!

'Space Pop' by Rafael Graça Teixeira is a simple but funny film. The strength of this film is in the animation, the various happenings in the film cause the character to make some very varied movements such as swimming and 'doggy paddling'. Though there isn't really much of a story there, I believe this would make a great film for a show reel as it showcases a lot of skills; lighting, expressions and varied animations, which I hope we'll be able to squeeze into our film next year. 

I'm fairly certain that this could be the film school which Robear mentioned to me last year, I'm extremely impressed by the quality of some of the films coming out of that school. Would definitely be a good investment of a year, if only I could afford the fees. More info on their site here. 

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!