Ever since I saw Up last summer I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a nifty badge out of a bottle cap. After a few false starts here’s what I came up with. I found a local supplier who sells bottle cap blanks, and then découpaged the designs on the top.
I’m made up some holiday cards to send out to friends this year. These are my patented limited-edition collectors’ vintage one-of-a-kind letter-press hand-made eco-friendly fully-sustainable partially-synthetic future-proof vertically-integrated non-denominational woodpulp-containing buzzword-compatible messages of holiday joy (rocket ship included).
After 4 months of work, somewhere around 1,000 drawings, and lots and lots of pig tails and squid legs, my Animation project is finally finished (yippie!). Enjoy:
Well animation class is over, and the big premier show went very well indeed. Now that the whole process is over (and I have some time to do something other than animating) I thought it might be fun to post some of the artifacts I created along the way.
You may remember I posted my animatic back in late September. Based on the timings I worked out in the animatic, the next step was to animate a rough pencil test of all the action in the story.
The video on the top is the original animatic, which I’ve included to help you see what’s going on in the pencil test because without faces or backgrounds or, well anything but Ada really, is a little out of context. You can see that the simplified rough Ada is lacking a few bits and pieces, but all the basic movement is there.
I’ve never been a big fan of digital painting, mostly because I’m not very good at it. I could give you a litany of it’s short comings but I’ll admit it, it’s just frustrating.
I know, I know, boo hoo you cry, and your right. Well it’s time to do something about it. And not just because I’m being forced to by a class assignment either (though that always helps).
We’re starting a unit on speed painting here in concept art, and after watching a thoroughly engrossing instructional video (complete with highly entertaining French accent, “reactors” were prominently featured), we all selected paintings to reproduce sanz-paint.
Guess what, it was loads of fun! So much so that I did three.
This first piece is a reproduction of an illustration by Gianni De Conno for the book When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. De Conno is one of my favorite illustrators because of the way he works with color. My reproduction is on the left, and the original is on the right. I made it smaller so, well . . . honestly, to cover up some of the inconstancies. Don’t give me that look. It’s my blog.
The second reporduction is from a sketchy sort of study painting by Gustave Caillebotte, one of the French Impressionists. The original is called Man and Woman under an Umbrella. Again, mine on the left, original on the right.
Now I said before that I did three speed paintings for class. Being the scoff-law that I am I decided to paint the last one by hand, a gouache reproduction of John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X. Unfortunately I neglected to scan it before turning it in, so you’ll have to wait to see it.
Obviously it was superb, fantastic, shiny, I may have heard the word “genius” at some point, who can remember. If you could see it I’m sure you would agree. Oh, but now of course you’ll build it up to something beyond magnificent in your head. You’re doing it right now, I can tell. *sigh* Now when I finally post it there’s no way it can ever live up to your expectations.
Just remember when you finally see it, it IS magnificent, it only LOOKS bad because YOU built it up so much.
In any case, I had a lot more fun at this that I though I would, so I’m thinking of doing a few more of these over the winter break. Hopefully it will be a good way to get some practice with color theory.