Evening Sketching

I've just been itching to just sit home and sketch, so that's what I did this evening.

First a Flash based on a pose I drew yesterday:

Then a random character in a post apocalyptic world, selling chopped off arms to hungry bypassers.

Figures from imagination

There's a weekly sketchgroup with Android 18 as a theme, so I drew a couple of gestures (no reference) and fleshed them out a bit. It's a great exercise to practice your ability to draw figures from memory. I've come a long way since last year, but lots more ground to cover. The idea is to then pick one pose for a finished sketch.

So I picked a pose and drew a (very sketchy) android 18 on top..I might clean this up and put a background in...just to practice finishing up stuff.

STUDY: Persona 3 - Run Cycle Part 2

Ok, so just to clarify, I did not pick this run (or the previous) because they are amazing pieces of animation. I picked these because they work really well with very little effort put into them. Working in tv animation and eventually (hopefully) working on my own shorts, cutting corners is something I'm really into. :D

Here's the breakdown of that run animation (complete with lots of spelling mistakes..I should try and read stuff before I save a jpg).

I then did my own version (based on a character Kamendude > LINK drew for me. This literally took me 5 minutes to do.

And once again for those people interested, this is the magic sketch brush! I honestly can't stress enough how important a nice brush to sketch with is. Everybody has their own preferences, but sketching should never be a struggle (as it was in flash).

And below I also included a pretty cool running scene for that same movie (well, they call it movie, but it's clearly a tv budget production)

STUDY: Persona 3 - Run Cycle Part 1

I looked at some animation of the movie Persona 3: Spring of Birth.  This movie is an adaptation of the video game Persona 3, and apart from looking really pretty, I couldn't really recommend it ..things that work well in a videogame just make no sense in a film.

In preparation for a runcycle, I picked 2 cuts of a running scene:

(above) The close up on the foot works actually works surprisingly well considering that we're looking at 1 stride looped. The foot always lands in the same spot (I checked), this is animated on 1's.

(above) First of all I'd like to point out that I really love how this movie looks. The designs by Shigenori Soejima are just so nice and well respected in the transition to the film.  Anyway you can look at my breakdown for this run below, the animation was done on 2's. On a side note, the background pans while the character art is held for that extra frame..oddly enough it doesn't cause any strobing.

I also just sketched some characters in the film for fun:

Wonder Woman

I couldn't even name you 2 comicbooks with WonderWoman but I just love how this character looks which is why you'll see me draw her every so often. Anyway, this is a sketch from a few days ago that I decided to color.

Final Fantasy XII - Fran

The lack of drawing as of late has sparked the desire to draw more characters again..but instead of doing quick ones I want to try and do some more finished sketches..I even tried to include a background! :D

People wear clothes

All this life drawing makes you forget that people occasionally wear clothes, I drew these little sketches based on some doodles in my sketchbook from observing people on Grafton Street.

Poses from imagination

Some people call it doodling, I call it drawing with a purpose. Practicing drawing poses from imagination and then on a different layer draw in a character. If I remember I might actually try to do something like this in a life drawing class.

STUDY: Wander over Yonder

Hey, didn't I say that I'd focus on animation? I sure did! Though I have to say I miss drawing..and there's this fear that all of sudden I'll want to draw a simple sketch and realise I have forgotten how to hold a pencil! But my drawing skills are better than my animation skills, so I need to level the two out a bit before shifting focus again on drawing.

One of the eye openers last year for me was how much progress you can make by "studying" artists. You can watch cartoons 24 hours a day for 20 years and still be a shit animator, you need to take the time and analyse scenes frame by frame if you want to unlock the secrets!

And that's also the beauty of it, the best animation training is COMPLETELY FREE! As long as you can frame by frame through a video, you're all set up to study! Anyway, here are 2 little scenes from Wander over Yonder...sorry again to the animators for cutting and looping their animation, it's obviously not meant to be watched like this, but for study purposes we need to break this down easy :)

SHOT A
Also, the scenes I pick are super easy little scenes, but as with everything we need to understand the basics before we can tackle more fancy shnazz. I picked the scene below because the motion of the hands was just very pleasing, the main success of this because of:
1)Arcs : The hands follows a 8 loop, if I got this scene I'm pretty sure I would've just followed a circular motion, the animator here added interest by changing it up. Gotta remember that one!
2)The spacing: After the hands go into the anticipation for 2 drawings, it snaps to POSE B. And then basically settles by completing the arc. But it's really that snap that adds contrast and makes it pleasing.

SHOT B

Wander over Yonder is full of those snappy little animations from pose to pose, it doesn't pop or feel choppy, it's just super cool looking. I picked this scene because it's using a formula I've seen come up time and time again.

POSE A
Ease out of POSE A for 1 or 2 drawings
SMEAR favoring POSE B
Hit POSE B
Follow through with secondary action (usually the main body remains static)

Sounds easy? Well it's deceptively easy. The thing is that these guys are experts at using the 12 principles of animation. Squash and Stretch, Arcs, etc... They'll find interesting ways to cover the distance between POSE A and POSE B....

Anyways that's it for this weeks' little study. If anybody is doing something similar or knows of blogs that analyse animation, let me know!

CAT WALKCYCLE DONE

So I cleaned up the previously posted rough in 3 sittings, which kind of sucks because everytime I got back to it I forgot the rules I had set (width of paws, etc..). I also didn't do much of flipping back and forth so quite a lot of lines are siggly wiggly..but I just wanted to have this finished up so I could move on to something new.

This is the "finished" walk, ready now to move on to something new and apply what I learned!  On a sidenote I cleaned this up with the standard brush in ToonBoom, much easier to use than the pencil tool I used last time.

So first the clean lines:

And then my colors, I also applied some random color effects to make it look cooler than it is :) You can click on the images for a larger version...but don't because you will probably hurt your eyes! :D

EDIT: Looking back the worst part of this animation really is the tail and the staff. It's also the thing I added in last, but the movement is super distracting. It would've definitely been better to just leave it out...but anyway, on to new and better!