Thursday Animation Highlights!

You guys, there is way too much cool stuff out there for me to limit this to just one highlight. I’ll try to be quick.

Paul Robertson’s doing it again at Adult Swim! His work is always a little cute, a wee bit oddball but always entertaining. He also lives over here on tumblr but he has an incredibly flashy background. Be ye warned. 

Over at Motiga they’re working on a game called Gigantic, which they describe as brawler/shooter/action RPG with influence from several genres. I can’t believe I haven’t heard more about it before, because I’m watching the alpha gameplay footage from last year and I’m TICKLED AS HELL.

Here’s a more cinematic trailer. 

Aiiiieeeee i love this art style! I love the 2D/3D look, I love these varied character bodies, giant monster battles, and everybody moves with some promising distinct personality. They’re currently open for testers if you’re as curious as I am! 

No free cookies awarded for guessing my favorite so far is Tyto. 

Lastly is a proof of concept trailer for a film called Kariba from artists based in South Africa. 

Kariba is about the real-world events around the Zambezi river dam and the local legend’s river spirit that threatens it. You can see concept art and read more about it over at Cartoon Brew.

I can't yell enough about how great it is to see diverse artistic voices from all over making cool stuff that represents their homes and cultures and sharing it with the world. More of this, please and thank you.

*dusts off blog*

May resolution! Get back into using this blog, and those 51 challenges aren't gonna do themselves!

Let's start off the month with sharing something a little crazy. This was done entirely with rubik’s cubes! I’ve never solved a rubik’s cube in my life (mind, I've never really tried) so this bit of stopmotion is quite amazing on several levels. I get a little distracted every time I watch it, because I'm trying to figure out how exactly one would have to manipulate a cube to get these results.


 

HOOOWWWWW?

51 Animation Challenges 3 - A Falling Brick

I've been running around so much lately that I totally forgot about these challenges! Back on the wagon! Here's the third challenge, a falling brick.

Spoiler: The brick falls at the end.

This is a neat little resource, real time life drawing sessions on youtube! A good mix of body types, too. Really great for quick practice, and definitely a different experience from other life drawing resources online that only use still photos.

NSFW for nudity, obviously.

Wow, do I ever need to dust off this old thing. Here we go!

Decided to hop into the 51 Animation Exercises from Animator Island! It starts off simple enough, with a couple of flavors of ball bounces.

Week 1: Looping ball bounce

Week 2: Bounce the ball across the screen

Next week, the FALLING BRICK.

I have never:

1. Painted a blue skintone.

2. PAINTED A BLUE SKINTONE.

3. Painted a white thing with another color.



So I borrowed Mass Effect's asari aliens to help me do both.

I like drawing faces a lot, which is why they usually have the most detail, etc. Must stop doing that!

Just a few today. Animation Mentor starts up soon and I'm so excited for it I think I might puke.


Some 2D WIP stuff!


Click for full view, as always.





National Gallery. My brother takes pictures and sometimes I paint from them.

... I wonder if you can actually paint inside the National Gallery?


A friend and I are batting around ideas for a TF2 map. I really love some of the inaccessible areas in TF2, which usually hold things like mysterious figures in front of fireplaces, remote control frogs, wooden cows, computers, seeeeecret briefcases and the like, so I wanted to think about that tiny corner of the world for a little bit.

Y-yes, that fireproof suit does belong to who you think it does.

Back on the blog boat.

I've started drawing random people downtown. It gives me an excuse to get out of the house and eat delicious downtown foods, but I'm the sort of person who gets nervous when other people notice I'm looking at them. Time to invest in MIRROR LENSES YEAHH

Wait wait, posting a painting before I go to bed.



(Yeah, I'm still awake. I can't sleep if I feel like I want to paint instead. This is detrimental to my sleep hygiene.)

I do not actually possess purple hair.

That's just me being nuts with the color.

I was feeling KIND OF BLUE.

This one is my new favorite. I decided to leave my other eye unfinished because it makes me look like a horror movie.

Things I've Noticed.

I got a forehead like a dinner table, looooool.

I told Tommy that I was going to do something a bit silly with today's portrait, but I was actually ONLY JOKING D: but then he took me seriously and said he'd do the same thing

SO THEN I HAD TO STEP UP TO THE PLATE

I kept moving my head. If I ever go back to Dr. Sketchy's, I am tipping the model so hard.

About a half hour, chillaxing before bed, listening to history podcasts while I work. Time for a new angle on this mirror, I think. Gotta stop giving people views all the way up my nose. Say hello, boogers!

Lololol.

New Year's res, remember this blog.

Trying to get better at painting, lately. I love doing 2D stylized art, but I've kind of ignored things like painting for awhile, so I'm trying to get back into it, especially because at work we've been having to do more realistic textures.

For starters, self portraits. I expect I will get very sick of looking at myself.

The first one, from yesterday:


The second one from today:


I'm trying to loosen up my brush strokes, because I have this tendency to smooth everything until it looks sort of cel shaded, while also being economical. Tomorrow I'm putting a time limit on these, because I sort of just painted until I had to take a potty break. I will also try to stop being slack jawed.


Oh my lord, Posemaniacs. I like to do at least ten minutes of 10-30 second drawings, just to loosen up a little before I start anything.



Ahaha... I love this character, I really do. I use her in a friend's tabletop game, as a female robot version of Sun Wukong. It's not really her fault, as she was commissioned by a rather silly man who wanted a little sex appeal for his martial arts school's advertisements on the telly, and instead got more than he bargained for with Hou-Zi, who is generally disrespectful, immature, exceedingly arrogant, selfish, and if she could, she'd fling her own poo. Used as brushpen practice.

Sharks and ladies

Oh man, recently I went with some friends to Dr. Sketchy's! Careful of that link, it's not... entirely safe for work. It's basically a place where artists can go and draw models that are far more interesting than the ones you typically get in school. It was actually the first time I've drawn a human from life in like... five years, so I was incredibly rusty, but I enjoyed myself.

These were my two favorites from the evening. I purposely went with a cartoonier style with these two pics, because the model was so cute and her outfits really seemed to lend themselves well to it.



... Yeah, I have nothing to say about that face to the left. I'm not sure what's going on there and I'm the one that drew it.



I do really want to go back to Dr. Sketchy's, but the problem is that it's always on a Monday night, when I typically want to get to bed early for the next day's work, and I live a good solid hour from Baltimore, driving.

Also, I am a tiny little suburbanite and Baltimore at night scares me a bit. Even when I went there with a group of friends, it was pretty scary. Then when we left Dr. Sketchy's, there was a POOL OF BLOOD on the sidewalk.

...

Seriously. A pool of blood. That area of Baltimore is supposed to be fairly safe, and a friend of mine who lives there said that sort of thing never happens. (I would sincerely hope not.) It makes me wish there was a similar sort of life drawing gathering in my area.

In less bloodied news, another friend of mine has been toiling away on a screenplay that he hopes to see animated on TV one day. It's an impressive bit of work, do go see it.

I'm really fond of the character named Naur, and did a fast concept for him:



On the right you can see what kinds of sharks and shapes I was generally thinking about, along with what I remembered of the character's reclusive personality and what would be appropriate for a simplified 2D character design that would not make the animator's wrists fall off in the deepest grips of carpal tunnel. I admit that it was my own wrists that I was thinking of, because some other friends of mine (I swear I am not trying to make myself sound popular) want to get started on animating it ourselves, even roughly. I partially want to do it to keep my hand in with 2D animation, since I've only done 3D lately, and partially because I really do hope he can pitch this to a network one day.

More art to come soon, I've been in a doodly mood lately.

Day ... what is it now, 5?

Whoops, forgetting to post things here! This one is actually two days old.



Hmm... think I'm less fond of this one than the others. It's a Peugeot 207, and I have no idea how they drive, but I want that car just because it's so gosh darn cute.

I'm working on some character designs for a Flash animation I want to do. Gotta remember to speedpaint -and- design!

I think snails are awesome.

You know what's hard to paint? ROCKS.

I should possibly work on rocks tomorrow. With the way I handled working on plants, don't be surprised if I end up posting a picture of a quarry.

Day 3

This was another two-dayer. That's me in a cafe in London, having my first English breakfast.

I know it's very unfinished, but man, my own face is freaking me out! In the actual photo I'm making this very intense stare and it's giving me the willies. I wouldn't be having this problem if I wasn't looking at the camera.

It's my "don't interrupt me for a photo when I'm eating" face.

Edit: Whoa, this looks completely different on a better monitor. For one, that bus is totally eye searing.

This thing again

OH I BET YOU THOUGHT I FORGOT. You thought so, didn't you? Oooooh, you can stuff it!



Actually I was working on this one for two nights. (I've never really used Painter before, and I was fighting it the whole way.) This is from a photo I took in Monet's Garden over in Giverny, since I was feeling guilty about painting other people's photos yesterday.

Remember how I complained about being horrible at plants? Well I'm still horrible! When I did the Kodkod, I said to myself "I'm gonna just paint a freaking tree tomorrow." And then I decided to paint Monet's Garden, which isn't so much a freaking tree as a wall of freaking trees.

It's a beautiful location though. http://giverny.org/gardens/