After purchasing my Wacom Bamboo tablet, I've really enjoyed playing around with it, and developing my overall drawing skills in photoshop and Flash. Its a great piece of kit, and a must for any animator! For the our drawing module, we have to create some backgrounds which would work as animation background layers.
Here is just one that I was playing around with, which was inspired by the concept artist Noah Bradley. For this drawing I really wanted to just focus on getting lighting correct. Noah Bradley is incredible at hitting the correct lighting in the overall image, and that is what i aimed to accomplish. Unfortunately I was unable to finish this Image as I started it, and forgot about it, and when I returned to finish it I had lost the initial connection with the drawing, so decided to leave it.
Adaptation of comics, books, games and artwork has been a popular source of inspiration for me and many animators alike, so when we were asked to create a very quick and simply 'test shot' in Toonboom animation software, I was quite pleased.
For this I decided to use a game that I had been playing recently, Borderlands 2. Borderlands has a very unike art style for an open xbox game. It uses cell shading, it quite a graphic and comic way, and I had always really liked the way it looked. I decided to select a Ice scene from Borderlands 2, add a hut and some smoke and see what I could do. This is an image from the game that I had used.
This is the photoshop image that I created, using Borderlands art style as a rough guideline. I attempted to make everything stand out with block graphic outlines, and using the same colour palate.
And here is the final test shot. Although its short, I am reasonably pleased with this, and definitely feel more confident about using Toonboom, which is certainly a good thing! I managed to include the clouds moving, the smoke rising and the camera move. I may have animated the clouds and smoke moving a little to hastily, however I think I can get away with it for a test shot!
In general I much prefer drawing women, I find it a lot easier to draw curves than blocks, and it feels much more naturual to draw the female figure. However when it comes to animating I have found that my rule does not apply. Im not sure yet why this is so, I just seem to find animating Male character much, much easier. Maybe its because, being a male myself, I know the ins and outs of a Male's walk much better than females. Nevertheless, I have finally produced a female walk which I am at least slightly pleased with.
I started off this walk cycle with a very basic female form. To make this walk seem 'female' I knew I had to accentuate certain aspects, such as the bust and behind. I wanted to make the hips sway and the hair to flop carelessly about. After all its a 'flirty' walk! This was my first attempt at blocking out the key poses of the female walk. I included my basic reference character that I started off with.
From that I learned that the basic movement of the bust and hair was correct, and I thought it worked well, in a very comical way. I did not, however, like how the legs moved, or the arms really. The dress actually made the process harder for me to aniamte the legs (even though I thought I could used it to hide them)
Next I cleared up the basic walk cycle. This time I focused on the legs a little more, make them a little clearer within the walk.
After this stage, and quite alot of time attempting to clean it up, I decided to bite the bullet and
and start again using a different angle, and different character. Here Ill show you how i focused on the legs first to make sure they were feminine enough
Quick Flash sea test for the group animation. Think we decided on this as a rough way of our sea moving, however there needs some changes, and for it to be alittle less detailed and more loose.
This shot works well for a shore shot, with the sea lapping up at the sand.
When we first started out planning what characters would look like for the group sea project, our characters were pretty bland, obvious character types. I've personally found it very interesting how our design of the characters has progressed into our final design. We knew wanted to add humour to our film, and we also learnt that contrast helps add to humour, and seeing as we had two main characters in the short film, we decided to make them opposites of each other: a fat, round child, and a strong, square man.
Here I'm going to show a basic character sheet for our final 'fat kid'. It might not be the final design in terms of detail, but we are decided on the silhouette and general size of the character.
