Warm Up Gestures

I haven't gone back to my boards for a few days now and it feels daunting sometimes to get up in the morning before work and to jump straight into it, so here's a warm up exercise using posemaniacs.com for 30 second poses.

I should do this more to be honest, it's nice to try and translate those poses into quick gestures, I'm definitely not good at it (yet! ... :P)

The COATHANGERS FINISHED

So, here's as much as I could finish in 2 sittings. I redrew the pose for Julia from the coathangers in front. Jodie suggested I stick to a monochrome colorpalette like Robert Valley. Didn't pull it off that successfully :P Hopefully next time I start these things a bit earlier :P

Click on the image for bigger version.

COATHANGERS @ Night and Day Cage Manchester WIP

There's a drawing theme at work, so figured I would give it a go. This was my favorite gig in Manchester so far with the Coathangers.

Greyscale:

Lineart:

Rough Layout

TIDY:

Realised it was boring, so changed the poses:

Added in the BG elements and looked boring again :( Maybe the colors will tie it together but I doubt it :P

STORYBOARDS THUMBNAILS PT2

Another Batch..still first pass roughs but looking better somehow ...
PANELS READ FROM LEFT TO RIGHT

STORYBOARD THUMBNAILS PT1

Alright so here's the thing I'm boarding at the moment in first pass (thumbnails). So far I'm up to 94 frames and not really even half way in, but the action sequence is coming up soon, which really is the reason for the whole thing.

I started off using a textured Brusg pen but after a few panels my mac just started clogging up so I rendered them as Bitmaps and continued using the standard opaque vector pen. I think if I stick with it, I'll eventually draw cleaner from the word go using that vector pen.

THUMBNAILS READ FROM LEFT TO RIGHT. (In the export the framing got cropped)

Work Sketch

Drew colleague Saeed in between opening scenes :D

And a stupid inside joke nobody will get (super quick  doodles :P)

Work Sketch

Since it's hot today, here's a desk melting scenario

Work Doodles

Doodle

A thing about STYLE

So recently I tried my luck on a board test and I really struggled to find a way to draw the characters. While I am confident drawing in my own style, drawing cartoons is something I really have had to force on myself to try and fit better into this industry. For me cartoons and comics are completely different languages, both beautiful in their own right.

As the trainwreck which is my blog, you can see the path of ugly drawings left in it's trails. But I finally figured something out....

I was trying too hard to come up with cartoon characters...and heck, I am certainly not a character designer. So after filling pages with this new shorthand I was developing, I figured out that I had to strip it down one level. I had to draw a gesture of my cartoon drawings:

Once I got that I used good ol' Jodie as my model for some more doodles:

Went back to my storyboard thumbnails for some more exploration:

Give it another page and the drawings start getting looser:

It is of course all a work in progress, but at least I think I am on the right path. Funny enough when I looked back on my blog I realised I already figured that out previously...for some reason when drawing characters I was not familiar with, I forgot all about the gesture.

Heads Concept Turnaround

This is sort of a rough modelsheet for my upcoming boards:

More doodles

Continuing on with this board (thumbnailed out 7 pages, so that's getting quite out of hand). The reason I am drawing more cartoony stuff is to try and develop that part of my skill. I am much more comfortable drawing realistic stuff but for boards in tv animation, you really need to be adaptable. So hopefully these will at some stage turn to something better :P

Creature CLEAN

I haven't done any clean or coloured stuff for so long. Time to blow of the dust..yikes :(

CLEAN UP

Cleaned up a recent sketch

Creauture Sketches

Dave Doodles

Here's some sketches of a me character for this board.

Jodie & Monster Doodles

I boarded thumbnails for a quick storyboard I want to do, just trying to find a suitable style somewhere in between cartoony and cool that feels natural to me.

POST IT Doodles