The first 6!

Pages of my griffin comic, that is. That's a full half of 'em!
I think I'm going to try to do it the traditional way - ink and paper all the way - mostly due to the fact that my computer is acting old and sick. Or something like that. So these are just the pencils... and in real life they're red. :P

My first colored picture after my laptop's first Great Crash in April, and posted by request of some of my Avatarded friends.

Also, I kinda like how the water turned out. Colors look sorta wonky on this monitor (because Rippy's acting kinda dead again) though.

Also also, she actually looks kinda female. That's always an exciting accomplishment for me.

And thus began Spring

As the process of moving often churns old things to the surface, I ended up flipping through my sketchbook from last winter semester this morning. I've been pretty discouraged about my abilities and progress as of late, to the point where I don't really believe people anymore when they compliment me on something I've done.

But at the very least, I know I draw a lot less clumsily than I did a year ago. And that makes me feel pretty good. I'm still moving forward.

(Moving forward, heh heh. *shot*)

And I don't know how much of this I should show, but this is some concept work from the "other comic" I've been working on. The one where someone way cooler than me is doing the actual writing. Just as a "Rachel has in fact been working lately" proof.

A dusty old feline scholar. I love his face but his outfit looks way too Redwally for our purposes.

A little character lineup - the three main heroes from the beginning, and the villain. We were able to fit my otter dude into the script - he's second from the left. Go Dakkan!


I do need to light a fire under my griffin pages though. Just to put into whatever portfolio I decide to take to Comic-Con. They'll be awesome, once I get started actually drawing them.

VICTOLY

I may be headed for a B average for this semester *wince* but I was so happy to be done with finals that I did this when I came home.

Hooray Easytoon
Hooray animation
and hooray school ajourning for four months!

I'm sensing a theme here...

Jed made me want to draw dinosaurs. So I finished off this semester's sketchbook with them... woo Deinonychus!

These were done without reference. You can totally tell.

So I did some skeleton studies. Bless Flickr.

*thumbs nose at exams... then picks up a binder of notes with a sigh of resignation*

Look! It's me in elementary school!

see more crazy cat pics

Art will happen again soon. Blasted finals and my lack of motivation to study for them.

Life + gestures!

This guy was helping direct people at the conference center Sunday afternoon. All of their "guest service" staff had hats. Some looked like elderly gangsters, some looked almost Amish. Innnnteresting.

Does anyone else go into complete tunnel vision when you're walking places? People will say hi to me and expect me to notice them. It always looks like maybe I'm a LITTLE DEAF or blind. And sometimes I'll notice them a hundred meters off and try not to stare at them the whole time.
Maybe I need help.

And these are the more successful drawings from the gesture session last night.

Fresh Air! Thumbnails!

I'm in such a good mood today, even though I only slept 2.5 hours last night (and that because I didn't have the stamina for a proper all-nighter) and haven't eaten for a long time. Must be the sunshine and the fact that I learned I have a whole week to finish my English paper. Feels so good.

So what's in it for you are (hugely blown up) griffin comic thumbnails! Hooray!


This is for my restart - especially if we end up taking our stuff separately to Comic-Con, I'd rather my story start from the beginning than be a vignette from the middle of the story. What was I thinking?

Also, to put all the fire stuff in the beginning in context, this is the main character's first day as an apprentice, and his master spends the first page blacksmithing in high-contrast firelight. Then he goes flying and runs into a buddy in the air.

The Raph/Leo Effect

This is one of those spiels that gets bottled in my head and I have to either let it out somewhere or explode. And since I'm no good expressing myself verbally, I'll have to sully my blog with unprofessionalism. I'll just try to keep it concise. And yes Jake, this is totally your fault. :P

An interesting pattern I've found when I talk Ninja Turtles with people happens with those who've chosen Raphael as their favorite - almost invariably, they can't stand Leonardo. And usually for the same reasons their red-masked hero butts heads with him: they say he's bossy, pretentious, boring, self-righteous, teacher's pet... there's a list.

But for all the hostility, from fans and their Turtle alike, it's hilariously ironic that Leo and Raph are easily the most alike out of the brothers. In fact, their primary objective is even the same - protection. Cue my Leo defense.

Leonardo's number one priority is to protect his family - it's why he fell into the "leader" position to begin with. He has a natural air of command and a quick mind in battle as well as good judgment, and why would the position stuck unless Leo had earned his brothers' respect? Leo feels that the team's failures are his own, which leads him to try and run the team as well as he can without assuming he has more authority than Splinter. This puts a lot of pressure on him, and Leo has to act more mature than the average teenager to keep out the hordes of Foot ninja and maintain his family's safety. Splinter is proud of his student because Leonardo is the only Turtle that has embraced all aspects of his teachings (Donatello is distracted, Michelangelo is a bit of a slacker, and Raphael is primarily interested in the physical fitness/body-as-a-deadly-weapon side of things - screw the spiritual crap). However, Splinter is careful to keep Leo humble. This doesn't mean he's always successful - Leo isn't perfect and can tend to get a little proud, though Splinter, Raph, or a horde of ninjas will usually deflate that before long. He is also a perfectionist and Always Right, as well as at times being too focused on Staying On Guard to let loose, all of which are character flaws for sure... but I'd think he'd only be insufferable if he actually were perfect.

Raphael is all about protection as well, but his is a more emotionally-charged brand. While Leo is able to keep his brain functioning in "big picture" mode under stress, Raph goes to tunnel vision easily and impulsively throws himself into the fray. The quickest way to set him off is to threaten one of the other Turtles or even an innocent civilian - he's instantly on his way to beat the offender down, sai in hand. When he's working alone there's nothing wrong with this, otherwise Leo has to figuratively keep a tight hold on his leash so he doesn't jeopardize the battle plan just to defeat some peripherally important enemy. This annoys the heck out of Raph, first because he doesn't like being restricted, and second because he doesn't like being proved wrong, especially by his straight-laced brother. He is, however, a great beta to Leo's alpha - when not blinded by rage or some other strong emotion, Raph is a smart fighter and works well within the team in battle. In his 2003 cartoon incarnation, in fact, Raphael is always coming to his brothers' aid just as someone is about to nail them in the back, besides landing some good hits of his own. And whenever Leo is taken out of the picture through injury or capture, Raph is usually able to rise to leadership without too much trouble in an almost "scared straight" kind of way. But his most effective role is as Leo's right hand man, and he knows it. The only time this arrangement ever causes problems is when he gets prideful and refuses to put the family's welfare before his own.

So each has his strengths and flaws. Some people identify better with one than the other, and there's nothing wrong with that. But with the sheer pressure on Leonardo to be both a good brother and a good leader, I think it isn't fair to label him the way many do. He often gets stuck in business mode and has a hard time relaxing with the troops. It doesn't mean he thinks he's better than his brothers (I believe the remark he made to this effect in the 2007 movie was a product of frustration at Raphael's inability/unwillingness to understand where he was coming from, and it was an attempt to get some kind of reaction out of him in lieu of that desired understanding). It also doesn't mean Leo wants to make himself look better for Splinter. He respects Splinter as a sensei and father, and is very aware that he has much more to learn.

Anyways, the part that amuses me the most about friends of mine who hate Leonardo is... well, you could say I am Leonardo. Oldest child, perfectionist, expects a lot of self and beats self up for failure, bit of a goody two-shoes, maintains close friendship with parent, nitpicky and strongwilled... that's all me. Of course, perhaps the reason I'm palatable to these buddies of mine is there's also a healthy dash of Michelangelo in me, and we know from the comics at least that Raph and Mike get along pretty well.

But for those of you Leonardo haters who were first exposed to the turtles through the original cartoon or the 1990 movie, I can completely understand... those Leonardos are definitely boring, annoying, whiny and/or suckups, and his comebacks in the movie suck. The definitive Leo is better cobbled together from the 2003 'toon, 2007 movie, and the comics.

Anyways. If you ever had an irrational urge to talk Turtles with me, I could seriously go on for hours, especially if character analysis had anything to do with it. I already had so much crap I decided to edit out of this particular rant for all y'all's sanity, and look how long it got. 8|

More serious and valuable arty posts are indeed forthcoming - I went to general conference in person for the first time on Sunday, and drew some (possibly) post-worthy things along the way.

If I were clever this would be an elaborate April Fools' Day prank...

...but I'm not, so it isn't. At least, I'm not at 1:30 AM when I just spent several hours working on a research paper. So no wit for you.

Instead, have the page I drew when Dr. Catmull talked to us, when I had been awake for 30+ hours and was a certifiable zombie.


Also, a picture of a couple of my friends. It's the first time I've drawn them as people, because I've been too afraid to fail at the likeness. So I'm a ninny. What else is new?


And this kind of thing is always fun to draw on Sundays when I'm trying to stay awake during sacrament meeting.

Get well soon, little buddy

On Friday afternoon, Rippy 336 (my laptop) slipped into a coma for reasons unknown. There are signs of brain activity, but he can't get past spinning his disk drive on startup before settling into a gentle (but completely unresponsive) hum. I'm taking him in for professional help sometime today, with the hope that he'll get better in time for me to write a couple Very Important Papers for school.

::WARNING:: sketchdump approaching!

I realized that I have been excessively lazy with my sketchbooking for the past year or so... thus I am trying to fix it.

From our zoo trip. Armadillos are fun to draw - the three-banded ones are like the illegitimate children of a potato bug and an anteater.

Last week it was actually warm enough for me to sit outside and try to draw. Clearly it put me in a good enough mood to make commentary on everything.

A combining of my favorite two pages from last Wednesday's gesture session. I kept all the drawings on those two pages, so some of them are blah.

Here's an example of me tanking. One of the top guys at Sony came to talk, and I drew him... should have been easy enough, but for some reason I couldn't get him to look like himself. The one on the bottom left is the closest I got. >:P

Managed to get Carson OK, though. Sort of.

So my continuing goal to to draw more peoples' faces, and get them right more often.

Big Cat, Little Bird

It's a match made in the pre-existence.

I want blood like this.

This bizarre but kinda cool story popped into my head last week, and this picture was what came of it.

So there's some kinda monster/creature that is exploring a cave, and for whatever reason he loses his torch. It's pitch black and feeling around in the dark only gets him more and more lost. The thing is about his species - their blood is phosphorescent, bioluminescent, or whatever the heck I really mean. Basically, it glows like the goop in glowsticks.

The creature realizes that if he keeps blundering around in the dark, he's never going to get out and he'll die - starvation or falling into some terrible abyss, one of the two. So after some hesitation, he breaks off a stalactite and uses the jagged edge to open a gash. The problem is, there needs to be a decent amount of blood on the surface before he can really see anything in the glow. And as the blood congeals and dries, it dulls to black.

So what we have here is a race against time - he needs to be bleeding severely to see, and he needs to see to get out... but too much blood lost and he'll weaken and die anyway. The way it ended in my head, he collapses just as he sees light and is pondering the horrible irony when then light turns out to be the torch of a search party member. And when he's old, he shows his scars to kid-creatures as a lesson not to go cave exploring unprepared and alone.

Y'know, those Disney artists weren't kidding when they talked about the value of seeing things firsthand as opposed to drawing from photos or movies. Life drawing ftw.

Y'know, the prograhgm...

One day I will learn to caricature. And draw shoes. But this amused me anyway.

Gestures!

A couple of my better pages from last night's session, Photoshopped into vivid purple and orange because bright colors are fun.

LIONS FTW

I renew my undying love for PBS nature documentaries.

This one was interesting because I drew it straight on the computer in front of the TV instead of on paper, using that cool ArtRage2 program I found.

...next time I won't save straight to JPEG though, as I don't have control over the compression. It makes the white lines look icky.

Animation Workshop notes

I took some limited notes from Dylan Brown's presentation yesterday - basically when he said something that I felt "I gotta remember this," I wrote it down. Hopefully it'll have more value for more people than just me, which is why I post. Enjoy!
-----------------------------------
CHARACTER ANIMATION

- key thing to focus on = performance
- character's history/context comes from story
*animators perform it.
*ask "why?" not "how?" a character moves
- each character will have his own style of movement
*examples of Remy be consciously pushed toward rat and away from "little man in rat suit" - for example, he leans forward when he stands or walks and keeps his paws in front of him all the time.
*anatomy informs acting decisions
*action supports character design

- ball/walls metaphor
*you are the ball, moving foward between two walls
*the walls are the limits/ wrong decisions
*you go until you hit a wall (like the Remy-as-Pepe-lePew run) and this bouncing eventually guides you into a straight line that gets you to the end of the tunnel or whatever.
*the purpose of tests is to get things wrong, so you can better figure out what's right. They can help you make informed acting and motion choices in the final scene.

- copying reference is great... as a test. It helps you capture nuances that straight observation won't get you, which is its value. Then you go on to caricaturing it with the stuff that you learned.

- design and animation should keep the characters in the same world.

- the concept of a "gesture box" ...notice this! Examples given were:
*Americans have pretty large gesture boxes; their hands can go everywhere
*French have smaller ones - their hands are more contained but they are very energetic within that little box
*Japanese have an extremely small box up front
*etc.

PRESENTING
- What are a person's gestures telling you about him?
*if nothing, the acting is bad (milking the giant cow, etc.)
*pointing at self is especially bad
- take acting classes
- The character is defined by the way they do or don't move.
- acting = psychology
*characters connecting with each other instead of merely existing in the same space.
- boards =/= acting! The animator's job is to make those story moments sparkle with character
- Remember the idea that "he who moves the least has the most power"
- Spoken lines don't matter. Delivery does.
*try writing out the subtext to get it in your head before animating, as it's the most important part.
*example: Skinner being "nice" to Linguini, while his posture and acting still say he's a bad guy.

- Character Arcs
*over time have continuity
*example: "Colette teaches Linguini to cook" montage:
**status change...
**Colette goes from dominant to equal, hard to soft
**Linguini goes from submissive to equal, afraid to confident
*don't think of your scene on its own! It has to fit with the others.

- Other things to remember:
*counterbalancing: when your arm goes out, your hips go back, etc.
*study live action for "acting" rather than animation
**why do they choose to do what they do?
*Why is the shot there? What is its purpose in the film?
*watch people in real life and see what they do
*don't be afraid to do what will teach you
*traditional drawing/animation requires you to think more about what you're doing - that's its value even when you're going to do 3D

Things Dylan Likes to See
- your personality shining through (animate something with soul)
- sincerity of performance
- take risks now while we're still students

some environment paintings

I managed not to make it to our film class today, so these are probably irrelevant now. Hence, me posting 'em here rather than on the film blog.

Pity... I'm getting a little better at this, if slowly. The program I found and did these in is pretty cool too.