Speedpaint

My painting for the evening. An ink bottle on a dish cloth. I was really tired, so I wasn't feeling up to my usual ocd color checking, so the colors may be a bit off. I need to do this a lot more.

More painting

Decided to try another painting today. Not quite as successful as yesterday's, but I'm still getting the hang of this whole painting thing. I'm not quite sure how to accurately portray the translucency of this plastic.

StopMotion Exercises

I'm enjoying our stop-motion class this semester. I definitely wouldn't want to do it professionally, but I like the ability to do decent animation so much more immediately. It feels almost like sketching motion to me. I could see myself keeping a good puppet rig on hand just to try out motion ideas w/o having to sit down and draw or fiddle with software. With stop-mo, you don't have to worry about your volumes changing size, or if the rig will have all the controls you need for it. Or so it seems to me.

This first one was an exercise on having the puppet go from a crouch to a stand. all while keeping smooth overlapping action. I ran short on time at the end, so I wasn't able to have the puppet settle as completely as I wanted, but I think the end result still works. Each of these were done in under 2 hours.



This second one was an in-class action analysis assignment. We had to have the puppet smash a clay object w/ a bat. I hadn't animated clay before, and didn't quite nail it this time, so even though the object's smash is a bit slow, I would've had to go back and reshoot the entire thing just to fix those 2-4 frames. As added bit of fun for this assignment, as I was posing the puppet to bring the bat down, the spine wire snapped in half, prompting an emergency fix. Despite the apparent catastrophe, Chris was able to help me fix the puppet and continue shooting the assignment. See if you can spot the frame at which the wire was replaced.

Painting for fun

We started doing color in lifedrawing this week, so I decided to bring my lappy/tablet so I didn't have to buy more stuff and so I could start learning how to use them to draw live since I really don't like newsprint, conte, or nu/pastel. The drawings from the class itself were pretty meh, especially since I spent a good chunk of the class fiddling with software configuration, but T showed me a great, simple way to set up my Photoshop brush so I can get some good blending along with hard/soft edge control. I took a used Boost bottle off my desk tonight and tried painting it. This is all with the standard hard round brush.

Speedpaint

My speedpaint for the day is a bottle of Winsor Newton masking fluid that was on my desk.




















In other news, I've been working on my Walk and Run assignment all day. Lady Amplebottom runs like Olive Oyl.

And my dad broke his clavicle. Playing soccer. Surprise.

There's no sense crying over every mistake...

You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.

I've been loving Valve's mini-game Portal this last week or so. Everyone's been getting Orange Box, but I've only been able to get my hands on a copy of Portal. Not that I'm disappointed. It's a great little game. And the ending song is brilliant.

Anyways, I've got a few more things to throw up onto the internet now. I've decided to start doing grayscale speedpaints of whatever I find around me in hopes that my painting and tonal skills will improve. I might even move to color once I feel comfortable enough with my grays. I've got two so far, and I hope that I'll have more to come soonish.

Yesterday's was my heavy-duty Xacto pencil sharpener from the lab.
















Today's was a bottle of green Dr. P.H. Martin's India ink.




















And lastly is a pic that Robin found. It's me as a cat. Seriously.
















That's all I've got for now. I should have more speedpaints, a painting assignment, and maybe some character designs up in the next week or two.

Survival

Finally, reading week is here. The past week was rough on all of us, but we've survived, and now we get nine full days to recover and catch up on work.

I figure that since I've got this nice spot to throw my work onto, I might as well go ahead and do so. I don't have a lot to put up since I'm not big on doing "finished" work, but I have a character turnaround and a painting for your perusal.

Here's the turnaround I did for Pete Emslie's character design class, then used later for the "Weight Lift Toss" animation in Mark Mayerson's animation class.

We also had to do poses of the character grabbing, lifting, and tossing an object. The drawings could be viewed as keys for the animation, though I ended up doing completely new poses for mine.

The first painting assignment Mike Hitchcox gave us this year was to paint an outdoor layout, either one of the examples he gave us or one of our own. I opted for one of the provided layouts since I have none of my own to work from.

The first step we had to do was a set of rough tonal thumbnails. These were done on plain printer paper with graphite powder and a Tombow 2B pencil.

We chose the rough that worked best, then did a final tonal painting of it. This one is on Arches 140lb Cold Press paper using Winsor Newton Ivory Black Gouache.

We then took the tonal idea and used it to formulate some color roughs (which I have misplaced), and then produced a final color key painting. This is also on Arches 140lb Cold Press with Winsor Newton Gouache.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now.

In other news, I'm working on figuring out Adobe's new version of Contribute, and for whatever reason, I can't upload photos to Blogger directly thru the program, so I'm working on figuring out a solution. In the meantime, the pics may be nonexistant, or show scaling artifacts. Hopefully I'll get that cleared up soon enough.