More Animal Drawings

We had a few animals come in to life drawing class! These are pretty unfinished because they wouldn't sit still haha. There was one ferret, one small dog, and one big german shepard mix. It was a loud and crazy class. (:

December Life Drawing!!

Heres some more of my life drawing stuff! Woo!

November Life Drawing!

Here's my best work from November! Our instructor challenged us to draw our model as a basic cartoon dude for a few of our poses in class, to practice getting the personality of the pose down without getting bogged down with proper anatomy. It was interesting.

Photoshop BG

I didnt get a chance to create a video file of the animation I used this background for before my Christmas holidays! I'll have to get that up in the new year.

October Life Drawing

Life drawing stuff from October! We picked out our best stuff each month for our instructor. I remember October was a difficult month in life drawing, for some reason. Hopefully I have improved because of it haha. I put a bunch more after the readmore.

September Life Drawing

Some life drawing stuff I did for the month of September! Includes a few gestures as well.

Spring Life Drawing

Here are some life drawing sketches that I did while studying foreshortening last school year. Rick's challenges helped me quite a lot in getting the hang of perspective, in all my classes.

Border Crossing Animatic

Here are two animatics I did for my storyreel class! It was a good opportunity to develop a (tiny) storyline and a couple of characters. The assignment required us to have the character do a Pull and a Heavy Lift, so that we could later animate those parts. Outside of that we had lots of freedom!

Mid-Summer Animal Drawings

Time to catch up on some updates! We visited a farm full of miniature farm animals at the end of last school year, back in June. These are some of the field drawings I did on that trip!

Perspective Walk

In this animation we had to make a character walking towards the audience in perspective. Since I scanned this animation I have done more work on it but I haven't had access to the animation program to put together my new frames! I'll do an update on this one most likely in the next month. I think in our second year we will have the opportunity to work on our old animations to make them more presentable, so I hope to get to work more on this one. This is a monkey-human type character, who has landed on a rainforest planet and is heading out to explore.

Jump Animation

So this animation was a very quick study in weight shift and balance in a character that's jumping. I made a little mole character and got some keys and breakdowns done for this one, but didnt finish it in time for the end of winter term. It was actually a lot of fun, especially thinking about that stretchy worm in the ceiling.

Intro to Flash!

In the spring term we had our first introduction to Flash. I'll admit, I had a learning curve here. I think our second year will have more work in Flash, and more advanced stuff. My first video was a simple flame animation, to be put on an imported background. You'll probably recognise this one.

Our second project was to take an already made character (this belongs to Tara Audibert, voice by Curtis!) and learn how to manipulate a character from a library. Basically, we were making a puppet act.

Our last project was sort of a group project, in that we were to begin and end with the same frame to create a looping animation, and then we could link all our animations together. We never edited our animations together (ran out of time at the end of term!) but it still works as a looping animation. Although Flash is great for using and manipulating pre-made drawings, its also good for traditional frame-by-frame animation. Thats what we did for this one! Snoge is Tara Audibert's character and belongs to her. (:

Lipsync Animation

Our first animation of the spring term was a lipsync animation. Rick asked us to make a ghost character that would say a simple "Boo!". A couple of us went a bit overboard. Anyway, this is my crying ghost, Francisca, who hasnt been coping very well with being banished to the afterlife. This is another one I want to come back and finish, she is meant to have hair and a wilting flower.

Persimmi-Bun!

Persimmi-bun. C:

Cool Walk Cycle

Our next assignment was to do a walk cycle. Our instructor Rick really emphasized the importance of getting some personality into our walks (even though this was our first one). Walks are an important staple of animation so he said we would be doing many many walks in our careers. Anyway this guy has a pretty loose and groovy walk. B) I am still fairly proud of this one, but I would still like to go back and fix it up a bit.

Sidestep Animation

Alright folks, I had high hopes for this animation but I still haven't had a chance to go back to it. We were asked to design a character and have them take a side-step, to show weight shift and balance. I based my character on a Youtube skit about Cool Guy. It still needs work! If I update it I'll share with you guys and maybe edit this post with a link to the new version. (:

Sooo Cooooooooool!

Life Drawing: Drapery!

One of the last things we did in Life Drawing class before finishing our first year was to turn on some bright lights and do tonal studies. I think most of these turned out really nice! The first one was not so great, as you can see (the head is a bit messed up) but after that I got the hang of things.  This was a fun exercise that can help you with figuring out depth and thinking all the way around the forms of the people/things you are drawing.

As you can see, one of my alter ego names is Aisatsana Lizarb. That's when I'm not robbing banks as Reneé Chile. 

Kronk poses!

One of our challenges from Rick this year was to take a character and draw it 100 times! When nobody did this, he made it into an assignment. ;)

We got to choose an established character, practice drawing them a few times, and then he got our Life Drawing model to do a zillion poses for us to translate into our character! I chose Kronk, the henchman from the film The Emperors New Groove. He's a beefy flamboyant airhead character, but he turned out to be so much fun to draw. Almost all the poses worked for him haha. This was a fun assignment for sure! (Also it should be noted, these poses were drawn in about 30 seconds each. Thats why they just look like stickmen!)

Heres a Kronk character sheet, to give you an idea what he looks like.

Click for more:

River Monsters for the Game Design students

Just at the beginning of the Spring term, we got asked by the game design students to help out by drawing some monster concepts for their game. They were designing a top-down game where you'd have to traverse an old fashioned logging river, with all kinds of river-based enemies. The catch was that it was a collaboration with a local elementary school, so we drew their suggestions and the kids got to pick which monsters they liked best. Mine didn't make the cut, but here they are anyway. (:

It was supposed to be a 1920s sort of time period, so I drew a buff eagle with one of those old wrestling suits. 

This was a lumberjack walrus. There were a lot of lumberjack themed monsters suggested, so that might have worked against him in the long run. Or... the log run.... oh ho ho. 

A few Staging Layouts

In our short spring term we had a class about staging techniques. Basically we got the opportunity to bang out a bunch of new layouts. I learned a lot about using three point perspective and got way more confident in my backgrounds and understanding of perspective in general. I'm gonna include all the layouts in this post, since they're all related. But please don't forget that each of these took hours to do! Layout ain't easy!
We started by doing a town view:

This was basically our introduction to three point perspective. 

We were given a script that takes place in a western town, and then we had to do a two point perspective background and pose our characters in it!  This was a little bit like storyboarding, but these kinds of pose sheets are what an animator would be given before they begin animating a scene. That way they know how big to make the characters, and the range of movement they'll have on the page. 

And lastly we did a one point perspective drawing of the town, to provide another perspective shot for our location. 

 So that's it for my western town! This project really helped me wrap my mind around perspective, thank you Tara! I really had to rely on my instructors a lot this year when it came to layouts, as I find them difficult. With their help I pulled through though.

CafeSketches in the classroom

We set up a table in the life drawing room during the winter term (in the middle of all those crazy snowstorms) to take the pressure off for getting some candid people sketches down. It was fun! We took turns just drawing or relaxing. My drawings are a mix of my class and the 2nd year animation students. I think this is an area I need a lot more practice in!

Retroactive Updates!

Hi guys, gonna start filling you in on the artwork I made that I haven't posted yet! There's stuff going back to January, and if I haven't posted it either I didn't have time when I made it or I had planned to go back and revise it. Well tough, past-Ana, time is up and it's getting posted whether you like it or not.
I'm gonna start with my Background paintings! We did a colour book and two paintings in this class, which took place during the shorter spring semester. I already posted the first background, so this is the results of the second background we painted! We got to paint a background we had designed ourselves, and I chose my Jekyll and Hyde design, which you can see a couple of posts down. I remember having a hard time getting it to look the way I wanted (especially to look dark enough) but in the end I was happy enough with it. This was what I chose to show in the little art show that was held at a nearby gallery also. You can see a photo of me at the show after the Readmore. (:

Hunt for the Space Whale

Remember my hero and villain characters from back in October or something? I wrote a script for them, recorded some voices, and did a little animatic for animatic class earlier this term! I didn't post it at the time but you get to see it now!
This was my first time recording anyone for a script I wrote, and my first time editing anything really. Its a little embarrassing hearing my own voice up on a video but I'm really proud of this overall so I have decided to finally show it to you guys. Enjoy. (:

Layout Assignment

This is meant to be a background for a scene about Jekyll and Hyde, like a pharmacists basement lab. We had to design the room and the stuff in it, and then do what is called a tonal study where we figure out where the lights and shadows are coming from and going, which is a step that's very useful for when you go to colour the background.

Legs and Feet Studies

I'm kind of surprised I didn't post this already, I did these ages ago! Life drawing assignment showing the leg muscles, enjoy. (:

Background Painting- Industry Background

For our first background painting assignment we had to choose a background designed by someone in the industry. I picked one by Niklas Andersen, whose work you can see here: http://niklasandersen.blogspot.ca/
We did three different colour studies and picked one from them that worked well to do the larger painting.

I'm not super satisfied with the photo quality of this one, I may end up scanning it and re-posting it again haha.

Muscles of the Arm

Here's a few different views of arms and the muscles that make them. We did the drawings a little differently this time, so there's less colourful rainbows. Looks a bit more muscly though.

The Daisy 2000 Animatic

I wrote the script for this!!! We took an old Hans Christian Anderson story called The Daisy and re-wrote it to a new story. Colin Matthews provided most of the ideas, and I got to direct a team of classmates who really fleshed out the characters and the environment. We each took a section of the script and made storyboards to tell the story, and then edited them together to music and voice recordings and sound effects from the NBCC Miramichi archives.

Muscles of the Torso

A life drawing assignment from last month! I just finished a new one too, which will get posted later this week. (:

Walk Cycle Animation

Hey guys, here's a walk cycle animation that I worked on through the end of February!

There's another animation for me to post but I didn't get a chance to finish it properly. Perhaps sometime in the next few months.

Goat Metal

I got you this glam goat as penance for not updating recently. I hope you like it.

(It was actually for an assignment in a class I have called Clean-up. We used the method found in "The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics" and it was pretty neat!)