The game of stuff.

Let's see, what do I have for you today...

First off, a couple of really spiffy videos:

(Pretty incredible stop-motion piece. Ah, the secret life of books.)

(This just blew my mind. The paintings look so simple at first and then suddenly it's not even a painting anymore.)

Next, some scarecrow designs for another portfolio piece I'm working on. Like most times when I fiddle around with character designs, I ended up liking the first one the most (cute derpy one on the left). So stay tuned for more of that guy...

And last, I forgot to post this previously. Done the most recent "Year in Review" meme, and posting the previous years for comparison. Not seeing AS huge a change this year, which is kind of disappointing, but that just means I've got an even bigger and more exciting challenge ahead of me.

This little piggy went to life drawing class...

A couple assignments here done for Life Drawing. The first are some anatomical studies. We were supposed to choose a part of the body that we have difficulty with (oh such joke potential--but no time!). I chose the feet because, while they're my favourite thing to draw, they're easy to draw poorly. I figured practice could not hurt at all.

And the second assignment is a drawing done for the Royal Winter Fair, as has become the yearly custom! This year we were to focus on story-telling with our drawings. I chose to be cruel (also now tradition). But seriously, it's next to impossible to get close to the pigs with all the little poky children crowding around.

Oh hi!

I never really know what to post when a lot of time has passed since my last update, because of course I've been drawing every day since my last update and now there's just so very much to get caught up on.

Second year of animation came to an end, and I again worked full-time over the summer at Sheridan for facilities management, cleaning and painting and making the school all sparkly and majestic for the next year. This success is of course foiled within the first day, when students smear their conte-laden fingers across the wall, doodle genitalia over every available surface in the most permanent of inks, and cover everything else with masking tape and stickers.

But I digress. Here have some art!

A bunch of stuff from my sketchbook drawn over the summer.

And with the third year of animation comes the infamous.... GROUP FILM! I was lucky enough to end up with an incredible batch of talented individuals, and I think we've got a pretty spiffy story with a lot of potential for some exciting art, effects, and animation. In short, this year is all about improving my skills, expanding my portfolio, and pushing myself to try new things.

Here's a little of the art I've done so far, for our as yet untitled project.

And finally, some random art I've drawn recently of mine and my friends' original characters (Shaari from the first image belongs to Jessica Channer, and Tinette is of course property of no one, but is imagined with caution by Annie Hughes)...

School + The Awakened = ??? (Profit?)

And the race to catch up on missed posts continues.

Today, more "Floating Head Syndrome" sketches. This time of Asher and Montague. Both of them benefited from a nose job, and I would apparently make a rather shoddy plastic surgeon, because crooked hooks and gigantism abound.

I've heard a bit of feedback on both of these re-designs already, and I had to laugh at how many people thought I'd made Asher "ugly". It made me smile for the fact that Asher was *always* supposed to be a very ugly, ugly man. He's one of those so-ugly-he's-charming characters. So if anything, this update has taught me that I really have learned something about character variation. If the old Asher appeared "hot" to people, then I fell far short of my goal. So, as Asher is properly ugly now, I am quite pleased!

Received a mostly positive response for Monty, except maybe a little dislike for his new nose, but we can't all have beautiful, identical noses, people!


Aaaaaand in the world of school, I have... more Awakened stuff!

The assignment was a walk and run. We had to use contrasting characters, so I chose to animate Plague and Famine. I was juggling a fair number of projects alongside this one, so it's not as elaborate as I would have liked (particularly the interaction), but it did give me a chance to update their character designs a little.

(Apologies for the awful white BLOB in the corner. For whatever reason, whenever I put this clip online, the compression murders everything. If you squint, you might have some vague idea of what's happening.)

Definitely enjoying the chance to bring my established characters to life (though I can't do it for each assignment... as, well, the idea is to create new characters).

Royal Winter Fair

Once again attempting to catch up on posts here...

IT'S BEEN CRAZY! I'm still loving my second year of animation, but the past few weeks have definitely been exhausting. Many major projects, the holidays wanting attention, various nuisance illnesses... Barely a moment to breathe, let alone any time to myself.

But I'm managing to keep on top of things, so that's about the best I can hope for, and there are only two weeks left until Christmas break, which I think will be very much well-deserved by all.

BUT ENOUGH OF THAT! THIS POST IS ABOUT ROYAL WINTER ANIMALS! Except that none of them were wearing crowns at all, I noted a distinct lack of snowball fights and ice rinks, and I'm pretty sure the goats were just dogs with toilet paper rolls glued to their heads. HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS THE WAY THOSE GOATS CHASED FRISBEES.

In short, our class went to Exhibition Place for the Royal Winter Fair, and drew many a farm animal.




Moral of the story: Don't attend a livestock show if you hope to continue smelling of anything but poop.

Floating heads and boards.

I continue to get back into the Awakened groove with a multitude of little Chase and Sue heads. Chase seems to be pretty much settled in his new design, but I think Sue could still use some work. Asher and the other Hunters are probably up next.




Also got a couple school-related images. Well, technically EIGHT school-related images, but they... kind of go together... so it's like... two, really. *cough*

STORYBOOOOOOOOOAAAAARDS!

I'm really enjoying this class, because I adore sequential art and acting through characters, and Nancy Beiman has a wonderfully twisted sense of humour. Our first assignment was to come up with beat boards for two separate poems, after which we choose one to create a proper storyboard for.






I clearly enjoyed the second one more, so that's the one I'll be boarding out in full.

AND NOW I MUST RUN, for Chelsea is going to demonstrate to me how she achieves such amazing lineart on Photoshop.

Cheers!

Oh hey we're back!

Second year of animation has begun and I really didn't realize how freaking much I missed this place. I'm back with my little second family, meeting a lot of people I haven't met before thanks to the second year studio, and all of my teachers seem pretty damn rad.

Already swamped with homework, but as always it can hardly even be called that. Too much fun to be lumped into that dangerous category.

A few weeks ago was Fan Expo, and that was amazing as always. I met a whole slew of awesome people, did some commishes, sold some prints and buttons, and was thrilled beyond measure once again to be reminded that this world is literally teeming with wonderful geeky people whose passion and opinions and obsessive random knowledge of everything keeps life perpetually interesting.




Above is the print I sold at the con (also sold bookmarks of each sin).

For the past month I've also been working hard on The Awakened, which I have very big plans for. Aside from a refined script, the characters are undergoing re-designs. Today I was working out Tristan's design, and I threw in a random Asher for good measure.





Will be going through all of the characters as I finish re-scripting Chapter 1. I'll be roughing pages and overhauling the website after that. Haven't decided yet whether I'll be updating on a page-by-page schedule or if I'll put whole chapters up at once. Depends on how much interest is still out there, haha.

Until next time!

Amimawls

Today's post is brought to you by the letter G, the number 57-and-a-half, and multiple drawings of animals done for school projects (unusual sponsor, I realize, though I don't ask questions).

We begin with boring realistic animals, done for Life Drawing class. The entire first year went to the Toronto Zoo to draw depressed-looking animals freezing their asses off at the end of March (seriously, who thought cheetah + Southern Ontario winter = believable home away from home?). It was quite an enjoyable day despite the weather, and also despite the fact we only saw about an eighth of the whole park.

(Many excellent views of the frozen asses in question.)

These are a couple of my gesture pages. Mostly monkeys because the monkeys were inside and the inside was warm.


And some longer studies. The tigers were the only outdoor animals not looking completely miserable. In fact several of us were offered the rare opportunity to bond with our layout teacher through the magic of watching one of these tigers poop into an empty sloping pool. "It's like a game!"


And lastly I have a Swazzle reference sheet. This was done for our last Character Design assignment, so I decided it was about time I used a rat. And which rat better than my funny-looking goofy adorable Swazzle girl? The drawings are cute and all, but they don't do her justice...

(D'aaawww...)

Let's play catch-up!

Yup. Totally haven't posted anything in five months.

Finished my first year of animation and immediately went to work full-time at Sheridan, so there wasn't much of a break from massive distractions. STILL, I have plenty to show you. In fact, I may have too much, so I'm going to break this down into a few posts over the next several days.

I'll start with sketchbook stuff. I got a new sketchbook, and made a personal vow to myself that this sketchbook would be my new baby and feature nicer work than my usual scribbly conceptual stuff (up until now I've only really used a sketchbook to messily figure out compositions, which I then draw on different paper).

So far so good! My new sketchbook is now my most favourite-est thing in the world. Only downside is the coil prevents me from scanning anything, so I'm just taking photos...


Behold, my completely unnecessary title page! This thing took me close to two weeks to complete, as I was just adding to it on my breaks at work. It represents me and my love for crazy things, particularly demon fetus balloons and the taming of dinosaurs for personal transport.


And also, thar be dragons. I've been drawing a lot of dragons lately for a special reason that I will tell you about eventually. Aside from that reason, well, I just like dragons and missed drawing them.

Plenty more sketchbook stuff to photograph, but I'll leave it at that for now. Today is a day of mourning, as I finally made it to David Tennant's last episode in Doctor Who and am feeling lost and confused. Come to think of it, you should expect some Who fan art soon as well. It is my only way of coping.

Panthers and Alligators

Just a quick little update with a few things I've been working on, as I've been informed that I don't update my blog neeeeear enough. I guess I have no excuse, except for an impatience for scanning. It's 2010! My scanner should collect my art, scan it for me while I drink lemonade under the sun, and then write my blog posts for me. Psh... the future is a total letdown.

Anyway, I have utterly failed thus far in actually sharing any real animations from my animation course, so here's the latest. PINK PANTHER WALK. If I never see another Pink Panther cartoon it will be too soon. Unless it's the 90s version with Matt Frewer.



Our next animation assignment is the head rotation, and I've chosen Louis the Alligator from Disney's The Princess and the Frog (which is a freaking amazing movie, by the way, and you should spend lots of money on seeing it many times so that Disney takes the hint and keeps producing classically-animated films).

So I've been drawing many Louiseses... seses to get a feel for the character before I even attempt to rotate him. He's actually hilariously fun to draw, but since he's just a big blob for the most part, he's also kind of tricky. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting close.



I adore this gator.

It's that time again...

FINAL PROJECTS! And what a very large and terrifying amount of them! Let's see here... What do we have on the menu.

• Ball and tail animation (it's a ball... with a tail! Bouncing and acting and squashing and stretching and S and C curves oh my.)
• Artist presentation (from what I gather we pick an artist to profile and give a presentation on them--sounds too simple. I suspect a trick.)
• Final storyboard project (yet to be assigned, called "Bird in the Hand". Suspecting more tricks.)
• Repeating panoramic background (with two characters included I believe).
• Two 9x12 juxtaposition background gouache paintings.
• Second life drawing portfolio!
• Bone drawings (9 views of vertebrae, 3 views of scapula, 4 views of pelvis, 4 views of skull, two views of arm and hand, two views of leg and foot--most of these are done already).
• Leica reel! 20-40 storyboard panels music, sound effects, camera moves, etc.
• Research paper on animal welfare legislation in Canada.

BRING IT ON!!

I've got my tonals finished for the dual paintings. I decided to go with Safety and Danger. I was going to go with Dead and Alive (zombies) versus Not Dead OR Alive (robots), but I had a dream last night showing these alternate environments and decided they were more interesting. Plus the first idea was kind of a joke. Kind of.

I also finished my expression sheet, which will be handed in tomorrow. Character Design is definitely my favourite class, and this was my favourite project so far. We had to do an animal character, and it had to be a gender I hadn't drawn yet, so it could have been annoying (not a fan of anthro characters, and I always prefer to draw guys), but I made it FUN, by making the most hideous pig lady ever. Well okay, she could easily have been more hideous. She's mildly hideous. Still fun.



And finally, I figured I would post this here, as I had requests for a copy. I wrote this Sheridan Ghost Story for my English presentation with Chelsea on whether or not hauntings were real. Everybody who screamed on cue was hilarious and amazing and made the whole thing go over really well. It was delightful.

A Sheridan Ghost Story
By Sarah Anne Davis

This story was told to us by faculty members who have requested to remain anonymous, for this story is so horrible—so gruesome—that it may in fact scare away any future students wishing to attend this once thought to be happy, peaceful school.

But Sheridan College has a dark past. A bloody past. A dark and bloody past full of darkness. And blood.

It was a long time ago. Too long now for most to recall, except perhaps Mark Thurman. A sweet young girl with massive aspirations wanted only to attend Sheridan College’s world-renowned animation program. Little did she know… her aspirations would end in tears. Bloody… scream-filled tears…

She worked on her portfolio into each and every dark and stormy night. Rotations and storyboards. Expression sheets and layouts. White piles of copy paper ran red with the blood of her endless devotion…

And then, Portfolio Day.

Her rotations wouldn’t rotate! Inconsistent lines and weights!

Her characters were emotionless and dull! Not enough angles!

Her compositions were generic!

Life drawing lifeless!

What happened to the second action pose!? Pose… pose…

…
…
…

Transfer to Art Fundamentals.

(EVERYONE SCREAMS.)

Dreams crushed, the girl went insane. Picking up a deadly camera tripod, a murderous rampage ensued. She destroyed her competition, one by one, until she made it to the top of the waiting list. But it was too late.

In her madness and despair, the girl staggered to the nearest Trafalgar crosswalk and was killed by the unstoppable force of fifty old people in Buicks.

It is said that the girl’s tortured spirit plummeted to the farthest depths of hell, wherein she pleaded with the devil himself to spare her… to send her back to the school she so longed for.

A deal with the devil was made, and in the midst of cackling laughter her spirit was sent back. But her fate was sealed. Her punishment far more gruesome than her crime. Each day, every day, her spirit would cling to the halls… repeating Art Fundamentals for all eternity.

(EVERYBODY SCREAMS.)

To this day she can still be seen drifting through the A wing, withholding vending machine snacks, knocking over stools, and leaving unwanted invitations to pub nights in every locker. If you listen carefully, you can still hear her pencil tearing away at each new sheet of paper, so desperately trying to break free of her cruel purgatory, to one day see the light boxes at the end of the tunnel and pass into the next world…

Those damn, dirty swines.

Well the last few weeks sure have been an exciting ride. Albeit, exciting in the "Dear God help me I'm dying of swine flu" sort of way. First was reading week. Ahh, reading week. A time to relax, a time to head home and see family and ignore whatever homework you're supposed to be doing while you nap on the couch in your PJs, or something like that. Welp, I made the very silly mistake of walking in the freezing rain wearing only a sweater (okay, well, I probably had pants and shoes too) on the Friday my mother came to pick me up. I promptly got sick on the Saturday with a sore throat, which turned into a runny nose, which turned into a cough and runny nose, which turned into a sensation of breathing dust, which turned into a migraine, which turned into puking, which turned into a tiny single-celled organism, which turned into a fish with legs, which turned into a frog on the bump on the branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea--

It wasn't H1N1, just a cold brought about by depraved Canadian weather, and I was feeling slightly better when I came back to school, though I was clearly not better in the not-still-spreading-my-various-bacteriums-around sense, because Annie promptly caught it.

Sooooo another week passes. Annie's had the worst of it and is on the mend when we all go to the Royal Winter Fair to draw animals. It's a fun day, with the exception of the 95,000 children running everywhere, most of whom were screaming and crying and pushing and shoving and coughing and spitting and leaking far worse than most of the livestock. It was inevitable, and delightfully ironic, that one of the little buggers coughed all over me in the "swine area", just a few feet away from a sign about swine flu, in the province of Swine, in the township of Swineshire.

You can see where this is headed.

By the time I got on the train that night, I could feel it. Sore throat was back, as well as the cough. The next day the cough was worse, and I was aching allover, I was hot and cold and tired as hell. Then the stomach issues hit me very hard and very suddenly and the less said about that the better. On Sunday a thermometer was acquired, which showed I had a fever. Congestion followed, ear clogged up and was in serious pain. I had an exam on Tuesday, so I staggered off to school to get that over with. I barely made it through with all of my stupid embarrassing coughing fits, (and I'm pretty sure I wrote a one-page essay about logical fallacies being, er, uh, really false and illogical and full of... fallaciousness) after which I continued my stagger to the clinic.

I was forced to don the MASK OF SHAME, was proclaimed diseased with H1N1 (red stamp on the forehead), and banished from the school. The wide birth everyone accorded me on the way out was both hilarious and mightily humiliating.

So I have been sleeping all week, feeling very restless and wanting to return to school, but for this damn cough that would surely give my secret away.



Feeling slightly better now, though still hacking up sputum every colour of the rainbow (if that rainbow were green, yellow, and brown). I feel desperate to leave the house and get back to work! But I think there is a very important lesson to be learned in all of this...

KEEP YOUR KID AT HOME IF THEY'RE SICK HOLY MOTHER OF CHEESE. Who the crap takes their child out of school for an agricultural fair anyway? $20 admission and they're amused by llama hairdos and pooping sheep for all of half an hour (pooping sheep definitely moreso). Try as you might, your kid is going to realize quickly that this new cow looks exactly like the last cow, which looks suspiciously similar to the last fifty lethargic, motionless cows, and you're the one who's going to have to pry all of that caked-on leftover cow from his little shoe treads at the end of the day.

In short: Royal Winter Fair! Hooray! I had an awesome time and I highly recommend it! 8D

No complaints here.

OMFG ANIMATION FIRST YEAR WTFBBQ!!!1ONE

Yeah okay, so it's once again blatantly obvious that not only were the last two months of my summer fairly eventful, but I am back in school! AND I'M FREAKING LOVING IT. So far Sheridan's animation program is everything I hoped it would be. I'm learning lots already, the teachers are incredible, I've made friends, and am generally ecstatic with my classes and the amount of art I now end up producing on any given day.

That said, I can't post ALL of it. Not only would I be spending hours of my days scanning pages of copy paper, but a lot of the stuff that shows up in my sketchbook is probably only interesting/funny to those who were present when it was initially drawn. Not to say I won't share some seriously random drawings, however.

And hey! Speaking of random drawings! What a convenient opening...

Okay, so... Hm. Most of this is from the first two weeks of school. Zombies and monster thingies... Then we've got some Garretts drawn for Character Design (will be using him for my posing assignment), and... an arm, drawn by nobody!

Oh, and Blimey, who is better than everyone.

And now we journey even further into the realm of randomness... Apparently all the cool kids in our class are playing Pet Society these days, so the other day we were all drawing each others' Pet Society pets. And I guess they were supposed to be cute or something, but what's the fun in that? I drew my own pet, Doug, Chelsea's mentally special pet, Dillan, and Annie's pet, Shuffle, who hasn't been checked on in six months.

And a random boar for Annie...



What else do we have here... oh, yeah.



This is the character I used for my rotation assignment. Earl was just sort of randomly created in the caf one day, and he followed me to Character Design, infiltrating my project. For these pictures I was asked to mimic a pose the teacher had drawn, using Earl, and then show Earl running, walking, and jumping.

The next assignment is posing, for which I'm using Garrett! I spent last class playing with pose ideas... now it's just a matter of making them all larger and inking them. I do this sort of stuff for fun anyway, so this assignment is one I will enjoy muchly. Character Design is definitely my favourite class. I can't quite get over how unreal it is to be told by a teacher to do something I love to do, and something that would have gotten me in trouble if caught doing it in any other school.



Promised to post this one for Annie. Her characters, Ainmire and Kara! This is usually hanging on her bedroom wall but I had to steal it back in order to scan. :B

And lastly, some concept art for Animation. We have to animate a marine animal, and I'm either going to do an eel or a stingray. More likely the stingray, but I didn't have a ref. handy in class today, so I drew the eel instead.

And speaking of animation, I'll try and post a video of something I've done. Most likely my balloon or pendulum, buuuuut I think that's enough for this particular post...

Cheers!