Late Night Sketch

These are 2 sketches based on sketches from today's lunch drawings. Gotta say that I'm really enjoying this habit of drawing from imagination using an existing doodle from a real person as a base idea. It's like re-tracing that initial experience, but adding to it.

This first one for example was an old woman, but I turned it into a man with some manboobs.

Second one was a man gently reading a newspaper while eating his food. But clearly his hair suggested maniac to me:

Richard Williams: 6 frame run

Don't know how long I'll continue with my quest to post EVERYTHING!

I watched Ernest & Celestine this evening which was a really amazing little French film. All animated in flash, but made to look like a childrens' illustration book come to life. Really excellent all round!

I had some time to kill so I dived a bit into Richard Williams, read some notes about runs with the minimal amount of frames, so tried to do a quick little one to see what it looks like. The gif below is 6 drawings on 2's (so 3 drawings per stride). The problem is that doing a "quick" animation study is a bit of a contradiction. Animation is time consuming and precise, unlike my doodle :D

X-MEN CYCLOPS sketch + Step by Step

Ok,

so yesterday I drew a couple of stickfigures based on the action "drinking". I wanted to draw an X-men after seeing the new X-men film (which was f-ing awesome!!). So I picked the most "heroic" pose...is there such a thing as heroic drinking?


Anyway this is the results (no references used for the figure..which is why it semi sucks :P)

STEP BY STEP:

1) As you can see I picked the stickfigure pose and drew another stickfigure..a bit more proportional to a superhero
2) On a new layer I sketched out a more defined version with muscles etc...

3) On yet another later I started to define the character even further...here is where my lack of anatomy kicks me in the butt. Definitely going to grind on studies for the rest of year until I can draw the human figure confidently from any angle.

4) on yet ANOTHER layer, I finally felt comfortable enough to the final pencil version. I focussed on using line to sculpt the body in a 3 dimensional plane. I used the design by EDAYAN (who I mentioned before I one of my studies)

 5) Finally put on some quick colors using Edayan's style as a guide ( I didn't color pick though, I think it's important to try and pick the colors by eye).

6) The fun part, shading! I used only one brush for sketch, line and shading. For the shading I turn down the opacity to 22 - 60%. Look at him gulp on that can of coke...doesn't make any sense, but hey!

STUDY: Morning warm ups Shunya Yamashita

For my morning warm ups I drew some sketches of Shunya Yamashita's work (though I prefer the older traditional style and not the digital air brush). Really great posing and fun drawing style. I really notice for myself that its handy to draw a little stickfigure first, this helps to remind you of the BASIC idea of the pose and not get lost in copying detail (unless that's what you are investigating).

Also stumbled on this video of Stan Lee, which is both educational and funny, so check it out!

Additionally did some pose doodles related to "drinking"..drawing stickfigures be hard!

STUDY: Dragon Ball Z scene from episode 157

Ok,

 So I'm doing at least 1 study per week..this could be an analysis of an animation, study of a painting, illustration, photo..anything.

My main objective would be to study animated sequences, since I really want animation to be my number 1 skill. I guess I'm mostly interested in animation with semi - realistic characters and lots of action. (Legend of Korra, Black Dynamite and the like).


For this study I picked a sequence from Dragon Ball Z. If you know anything about DBZ, then you'll know that you shouldn;t study it for HIGH STANDARD animation. This is early, low budget tv animation afterall. BUT! ...if you're looking for tricks on how to get the most out of the least amount of drawings, I figured DBZ is the perfect place to start looking.

This little flash video below is a rough version of the scene I looked at. As soon as SC001 pops up in the left hand corner, you'll see the same number of drawings as there were in the actual version aired on tv. We're not talking 2's, 3's....this goes as low as 1 drawing every 7 frames!

So...most importantly...what have we learned?



1) The Power up FLASH!

One thing that was always so cool about the show, was the energy when they powered up. I might do my own version if I have the time. but this is how it happens on the show:

a. KEY drawing (no animation)

b. KEY drawing with no lineart, but just blacks held for 2 frames

c. Black screen held for 2 frames

d. Same Drawing as KEY 1, but energy animated on top on 4's

2: Character animation on 4's, special effects on 2's.

In the images below you can see KEY drawing #1 (start pose) and KEY drawing #2 (end pose). For the animation they broke it down using 3 inbetweens.

- First inbetween (a) right in the middle held for 4 frames
- Second inbetween (b) in the middle of that inbetween and KEY #2 held for 6 frames
- Then one more inbetween spaced very closely to KEY #2 held for a whopping 7 frames.

The reason this actually works on the show is because the aura (FX animation), animates at twice the speed, giving the impression that there is actually more movement than there really is. This actually happened in pretty much the entire sequence.

(KEY #1)

(KEY #2)

I'm sure nobody except for me really gets anything out of this, but writing things down is a way to internalise the information. Apparently the founders of Gainax, spent a lot of their days frame by framing animation, and look at what those guys achieved!

People Sketchin'

Went people sketching today, you can find the drawings on my other BLOG. I had a pretty bad headache, so between sketching and trying to formulate some sketches, I had a hard time focusing. Luckily you always get a second chance at your drawings, so when I felt better I re-drew some of the drawings in Photoshop and try to push the designs a bit:

STUDY: Rival Schools by Edayan

I want to do at least 1 study a week, no excuses :P

Let's kick off with some of my favorite artwork from the Capcom fighting game, Rival Schools (on the ps1). The original art work is by Edayan.

AIM:
The aim of my studies is NOT to replicate the image perfectly. I am not a copy machine. I only want to try and investigate how an image would be created and what tools I could use to create something similar in style.

Ok, here we go!

1) Sketched out the shapes, and I highlighted the negative spaces, because I am quite conscious about them while I am drawing. I actually drew the ball too small and as a result the figure is also a bit more squashed than the original :P

So I then sketched the linework, I am investigating where overlap is drawn to clarify muscles and folds in clothing.  In some way it kind of reminds me of Bridgman's drawings, it's quite sculpted.

Using the same brush I use to sketch, I just added a texture in the brush settings in Photoshop. And played around with the "flow" option to get that painted look:

And that's it. Of course it's quite sketchy, if this was my own drawing, I'd clean up the paint around the edges, and create some hard and soft edges, but for this quick study I was quite happy to leave it at this.

Randy Cunningham sketch

I'll get back on track with some more serious work again soon, it's nice to just doodle once and a while though. At least it's some form of keeping the daily grind going.


Randy Cunningham in a .. more...realistic? Style? He's pretty cool, I wouldn't mind throwing a little animation together with highschool Randy facing off against the venom...because..Randy = Peter Parker.

Here was another less successful experiment:

Street Fighter x Randy Cunningham Sketch

This is based on a drawing that Claire from work did of Randy & Howard as Street Fighter characters. I liked it so I sketched them in action:

Sailor Howard!

The theme for the workblog this month was Fairies.... I always wanted to drew Howard as a magical schoolgirl so this was the time to do it! :D

Original before text and color touch up:

I'm not really good at drawing toony or cute stuff, so this was kind of hard.
The inspiration image was from Sailor moon:

Randy Cunningham Sketchdump

All the sketches below were done for my new secret Randy Cunningham fanart tumblr.

Street Fighter x Randy

Ninja Doodles using posemaniacs on 90 second random poses:

Ninja doodles without reference:

Ninja doodle colored!

ART TRADE with Stefanie Reville + WIP

Here is my part of an art trade with Stefanie Reville, who's beautiful Yuna piece you can admire just below. Please check out her blog for more awesome artwork LINK

Artwork by Stefanie Reville (  LINK )

And as always for those who are interested I have some work in progress breakdowns:

1) Thumbnail: As you can see I immediately worked out the greyscale, I wanted the composition to revolve around the wizard character in the middle.

2) ROUGH: More fleshed out Thumbnail, I added paws to the dragon to frame the composition better, but since I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this drawing I decided to leave it out (call it being lazy).

3) Line Art : Speaks for itself, no idea why I dropped blacks on the wizard since I decided from the start I would paint this.

4) Since most of the image would be the dragon, I decided on the color for it first and then painted in the sky.

Skip ahead a bit and you can see I was just using a darker version of the green to block in the shadow.

At this stage I still didn't paint any highlights (apart from the red eye), I just changed some of the colors on the wizard and painted in more refined shadows.

When I was happy with the overal image I then started painting in the highlights (lighter parts).

I passed it on to my buddy Eddie jensen to have a look at quick fixes, he pointed out the double hat looked kind of strange, and a lack of something on the left to guide the eye around the painting. I remedied both in the final version and also tweaked the final colors a bit.