Mushu!

Our first assignment for 2D Character animation was a Mushu head turn! What fun!

This is my first time actually animating someone else's design from a model sheet, so I was a little nervous that I wouldn't get the design right. I drew him a lot in my sketchbook, and I think that definitely got me a little more prepared. There are still a few things bugging me, but I think I managed to draw him pretty convincingly.

I have two versions of my head turn.

The first is the version I turned in.

My Professor liked it, it seems. There are still a few things to fix, which I'll get onto soon.

My second version is an unfinished one. At one point, I had Mushu stop at a 3/4 pose, as if he's listening, before progressing to the final extreme.

Prof. Webber said it wasn't bad, but that to keep in aims with the assignment, I should focus more on the two extremes. Also, the middle pose breaks the pacing a bit. Nevertheless, I think I could still work with it so that it's paced better, but time will tell if it'll get finished.

I'll be posting again with more stuff soon!

Psych Character Designs be stylin'

Ehem...

This quarter, I'm taking a Character Design and Storyboarding class.
One of the first projects was to take an existing television show and convert the characters into caricatures. Now, allow me to say that my professor often refers to our caricatures as either "animatable" or "non-animatable".  At this point, he's completely ignoring basic shape breakdowns and turn-arounds (which, no doubt, will become needed for later projects).

In any case, this means the designs I have here are far from "animatable" yet. Nevertheless, he seemed to like them, and that's good. I'm pretty proud of them.

Here they are:

Gus

Shawn

Juliet

Lassiter

Lassiter was by far my favorite to draw. He's already so darned cartoony!

Tweet! Tweet! Twitter!

So my dad says I should look into this "twitter" thing that's been going around sometime, and I go like "what?" and he goes like "yah".

So I did. Now I have a twitter.

Here it is: http://twitter.com/#!/odditystew

FINALS! They are over!

They are so over it's amazing!
I got pretty good grades in my classes this quarter... and A in 2D Production, an A in Intro to Sequential, and (not 100% sure yet, but..) a B in Action Analysis!
BEHOLD! My two animation finals!

First, my Action Analysis final!

doggiedoggiedoggie!

There quite a few things I would love to change, one of which is the entire human. His movement is too controlled and too non-human. Very robot, and I am not happy with that ball throw. That being said, I'm very happy with the way the dog came out. Definitely a bunch better and smoother than I had him before. All those slow ins and slow outs are helping a ton.

And now, my fully colored, cleaned up, and finalized 2D Production final!

  

Roomie Rumbles!

I'm very happy with this... almost 100%!
A bit of the clean-up I wish I could redo... it was my first time on a Cintiq, and it's not the best linework sometimes, but time was short. I'm pleased with the colors. ToonBoom made them extremely easy to apply.
I like the sound: it really helps add a different dimension to the piece. All credit for that (minus the title card) goes to my friend Charlie Hafer, who was taking an Intro to Sound Design course at the time and needed an animation for his final.

My friend Josh also posted up his final on his blog, and it's awesome! Go check it out!
http://joshuapilch.blogspot.com/2011/03/its-here.html

All in all, good quarter. My Intro to Sequential final (along with some other sequential pieces) will be up soon, too. Stay tuned!

Updated Animations: Cleaned up wizards and walks on hot sand

This is a doggie

For my latest assignment, the quadruped walk,  I chose a schnauzer. This was one of my early tests:

As you can see, it looks more like a Giant Schnauzer or Great Dane than your Standard Schnauzer. The legs are too long, and the head is too held too high. Apart from that, the walk was too fast, and the body had pretty bad up and down movement to none at all.  Which is bad. I  tried to rectify these problems in my next tests. This is the one I turned in:

I think movement is much better here, despite the gratuitous head bobbing. My professor pointed out that the legs do not grow with the rest of the body and that adds problems to the walk. Also, he's still kinda fast, so it looks like he's walking on hot sand. However, it's much more of a schnauzer than last time. Which is good.

Also, for your viewing pleasure, here's my 2D Production work completely cleaned up:

Now we're working on adding color! Which I should add, feels like cheating on ToonBoom. It's WAY too easy. It's almost literally [select + Paintbucket].

I present to you... Osamu Tezuka's Star Wars?

Recently, for my sequential class, we all had to choose an artist and a movie. The point was to make you draw a scene in that movie using the artist's style.

Osamu Tezuka and Star Wars:

Tarkin has never looked so fly

Status Report: working hard

Howdy everyone!

Just here to show some of the awesome stuff I've been working on, recently.

Lately I've been rather busy. Due to schedules being mucked around, deadlines have gotten pushed forward, while some stay the same, making it less time to work on some. Less than I'd like. Currently, I have one quadruped walk I have to work on, along with a redo on the action line biped assignment I worked on last week, along with clean-up animation on all the animation for my 2D Animation final. This is all due this Tuesday.

That's three, Mr. Disgusting Orlando Drawing. Learn to count.

First off, let's see that Action Line assignment I'm redoing. I mean, it can't be that bad, can--?

AAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!

But yeah, I'm redoing it. There were many problems with it, the most notable of which is the crazy walk at the end.

CRAZY.

Meanwhile, for my 2D Production class, I've got all my animation pretty much done. Just a couple of holds I need to move. I'm entering clean-up, and it seems to be coming along. Furthermore, my friend Charlie is providing some music for the project, which is sure to be spiffy!

Can't wait to see it finished. It'll be my most finished animation ever.

Also, I'm doing a doggie for my quadruped animation assignment!