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.

* * *

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!

Reepicheep at sea

For the record I really like the movie take on Reepicheep. Coulda done without the addition of the supposedly funny one-liners in battle, but hey. He wasn't overly cute, and ahhh the animation. And although Eddie Izzard is not "Officially The Only Person Imaginable For This Part" he is great. Izzard does this sweet soft little thing with his voice in the role, where it sounds almost out-of-breath...? I could buy that it was coming from a small animal (without it having to be all high and squeaky. It would have been awful if they'd given Reepicheep an "Alvin and the Chipmunks" -voice!). Pleasant surprise.
But, even so, I tried not to let movie-Reep influence this drawing too much, because obviously I've had a "reader's image" of him since before the movie and I still haven't really succeeded in putting it to paper. ...Yeeah, um, this isn't it yet, either :B I just wanted to have a fun wax crayon time.