There's no explanation

A final assignment animation by Kendall, inspired by (=ripped off off) Chelsea.



Voice cast: Joe as Captain Aubrey (by way of JFK?), me as one-armed Blakeney.

I don't like myself and I can't blame you if you uninvite me home for christmas

My final animation assignment. We had to animate a character jogging into frame, saying a line, getting hit in the head from above, staggering, and falling. Like I said I chose to animate (and voice, just for the heck of it) Jay Sherman, and I like the character so much -- but especially in the face it doesn't look a lot like him.



I returned the assignment late and I still hadn't been able to clean it all up. Stupid me... I will get super frikking organised next year.

Lifedrawing leftovers

We had to hand in 10 life drawings to be graded at the end of this semester, and this is going to reveal something unpleasant about me: ten didn't seem like enough. Some of my favourites had to be left out of the final batch! Gesture drawings, for example, always look the most beautiful to me, but they don't show much of the stuff we've learned during this semester, etc, etc...
Therefore I will now sketchdump some drawings that I wanted to hand in, but couldn't! Conceited? So what.

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^ My capable colleagues modeling again! They're always among my fave drawings. :D

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I had an idea!

'Twas the night before design class where we were supposed to have a main character we would use in the semester's final design assignment... Preferably something that steered away from our usual fare. I was at my wits' end, so much so that I started doing random squiggles with a pencil and trying to see shapes in them. One of them looked like an old guy's face, and suddenly it seemed like the whole character had been waiting in my mind somehow for me to see that squiggle. There's your exciting artist's commentary!
(I'll fix some foreshortening things in the final clean-up.)





And now I'm really fond of him! He's not like the characters I'm used to drawing, and his face is more detailed too -- and both things add to the fascination that helps keep this assignment cooking amongst all the other end-of-semester stuff and Christmas break arrangements I've got on my plate.

Below is the face I first drew on top of the doodle. For the character design I sort of simplified it so I'd be able to keep it consistent.
Okay, so outwardly it's a liiiittle like someone I know, but maybe it should be taken as a compliment. Some of the best character designs are based on real people, they say ;)

Mr. Balowski at the door

Acting/lip synch assignment.
The character is "dog catcher" from the Ren and Stimpy ADVENTURE "Big House Blues".
My recorded voice manages to sound even more grating than Rik Mayall's, who originally screeched the line (which is from The Young Ones).



It's pretty instructional. Sorry, I meant to say cautionary. The volumes are all over the place; whenever any timing principles make an appearance it's almost completely accidental; the squash-and-stretch in the face is amazingly random; no character consistency; lacking antics etc. In a word, it's a mess, but hey, everybody's putting theirs up.
I'm not fishing for compliments over here -- this was just a genuinely bitter lesson for me as far as juggling school and work goes. And at least I like the hand rotation near the end.

Hotchie motchie!

Needed an established character for our final assignment before Christmas. Another difficult choice, but this time my pick is Jay Sherman from The Critic :D
I might be adding to this post to gather references.




Episode 2x01 ("Sherman, Woman and Child")


Part 1 of ep 1x09 ("L.A. Jay")


"Doctor Jay" (Features an elephant walk, among others)

Ma première maquette

Well, why not? Maquette's French. I can also say Super Sculpey in French: "Sculpey Super."
...That's probably not true.

I took my sunny time with our first sculpting assignment. I was going to post it when it was finished, ie. painted -- but considering my pace so far that might take weeks, and I can't possibly make my adoring fans (read: RELATIVES) wait that long.

I like sculpering. When you get to the carving and poking stage of it, it's exactly like knitting, by which I mean it's super relaxing and perfect for a little tinkering on the side while you're watching TV etc.
It was so soothing and addictive that I'm planning to start another maquette after this. And I have a ridiculously ambitious idea for it. I'm not really a figurine person, but there's one show I've always wanted that stuff of, and that is The Young Ones. Since, devastatingly, no official TYO figurines exist, why couldn't I at least try making some for my own amusement?

Meanwhile, here's... um, "space kid", only waiting to be baked and painted:











Turnaround:


One of the numerous things I learned was that carving/sculpting open mouths is actually A BREEZE! I was so intimidated by that before I started, but literally all it took was thinking through the parts of the mouth a little, before you grab the sculpting tool. "See Tim, that's the difference between you and I. Organisation. Careful thinking. Forward planning." (HELLO I just referenced Spaced in the same post I mentioned The Young Ones! On a roll today, boy!)

Walks (...or waddles)

We had to use an existing cartoon character as our guinea pig for animating a walk. So here goes Donald:



Perspective walk:



To me the walk cycle was by faaarrr the most difficult part of the exercise:

Hims

By the way, I just saw City of Ember, and I'd recommend it.
Note, I haven't read the book, so I don't know how it'll hold up for people who have. It did make me want to read the book though. Sad crummy little robots bumping into things...

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I haven't posted any male nudes yet. Shall fix.
Stuff from last week's class:

^I was amused by how those gestures look like they could be three different people sharing a scene.





^That lower pose was probably my favourite from the whole class, because it so reminded me of this children's song from back home, where "The captain looked over the horizon" ("Kapteeni katsoi horisonttihin").
The song neglects to mention whether the captain was looking over the horizon au naturel.



^Lower pose: new favourite!
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From last week's life drawing club on Wednesday:




^I liked the symmetry in the pose, even though the muscles turned out so exaggerated in my sketch (as seems to be my tendency right now).


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And fine, also some females from yesterday's class, because (again) I liked how these four sketches that just ended up on the same page could belong to the same ...tableau:

I just love saying it

"OHHH SHI-YAH! You make me feel like a schoolgirl again!"
That's the only part you really need to hear.

(You're bound to hear it from me at some point whether you watch the clip or not, so ...I guess that means you don't need to watch it. Talked myself into a crappy corner!)
Maya Rudolph is one of the lights of my life.
The clip is on YouTube too, but They're not letting people embed it! :C

Somebody very literal-minded (I love them) wrote a new version of a-ha's "Take On Me" that actually fits the music video:



"I'm gonna kick some a** with my own pipe wrench..."

Meanwhile, sunglasses continue to epitomise Cool, this time in the world of mathematics.

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Some people could be under the impression that I have something against Shia L. because I make fun of him at every opportunity IRL, but they'd be dead wrong. He's likeable, and yes he manages comedy, and something about him just invites ridicule (I mean, even when he's not getting arrested). Which are awesome traits in a celebrity. Imagine you cast him in a remake of Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- you can see he would obviously be Cameron instead of Ferris, right? And Cameron is ♥.

(Not that I want a remake.)

Stitch by stitch...

Hellloooo again... I don't think I'll be posting as much life drawing in the near future, just because I currently do so much of it that I'd be photographing and optimising and blogging until my fingers were mere nubs.
But here's some animation! It's not my first, but anyway... The first I've posted.



^The school assignment was to do a rough three-jump animation of Stitch from Disney's Lilo & Stitch. Above is the first step, where the character is just basic shapes. (Oh, and it's missing the ending...)



^I'm nowhere near the stage where I can tell how many inbetweens an animation is going to need just by flipping it, so after the first pencil check, I refined the timing and also added ears that drag.



^Then I darkened my blue-pencil roughs with a pencil to make them more visible.

So, this was rough animation. Neither character details (like facial features) nor inbetweens were necessary. I think I'll try adding those sometime later just out of curiosity -- although I have a feeling that if I try to add an actual face the character will end up looking less like Stitch instead of more.

Life drawing club on Wednesday

In case this hasn't come up yet: I enjoy life drawing very much.

There's a life drawing club for animators (though I guess anyone else who wants to can attend too) at my new school Capilano, sessions twice a week (plus obviously our weekly life drawing class). I will try to be there "AOAP" unless I have tough assignments I need to work on instead.

Well, at Wednesday morning's LDC there'd been some mix-up and the model didn't show. Sucks to be me, right? No, being me rocks, because the second-year animation students did the posing instead. I was too shy to pose for now, but kudos to those who stepped up.

It was fun to draw clothed people who were also staying still for once. drawing fabric contours is problematic for me, but I just considered this like a first step of that ladder. Plus, I was feeling GREAT. I don't know if it was because of my materials or what, but I haven't had a flow like that all summer. Because I had a good time, I really like my sketches from that day by association, and I'm now going to post most of them. Photographed instead of scanned, sorry about the picture quality.
The makeshift models needn't worry that anyone could recognise them looking at these faceless muppets; so, I hope they don't mind!