Failed Commercial Work

School is over for the term and due to me moving to another state and waiting to gain residency, it is going to be  little bit before I go back. Which is fine by me!

About a month (or 2 or 3 months?) ago I met with a lady who needed an illustrator to design some pictures for her children book. I met with her and she showed me one picture that she had for the project. She didn't give me much direction to go with my art, so I made some line drawings. Then I took one of them and painted it in a bunch of different ways. After I sent them back to her, she never responded. After waiting a couple of days, I tried some more, but no response. Then about 2 weeks after I first emailed them back to her, my friend who new the lady, told me she didn't like them.

So here they are for you!

It would have been fun to do my first commission, but I wasn't too worried about not getting it. I feel that she might have not been ready to move forward with the project yet, so she just backed out. Or maybe she just really didn't like my art.

Spilling the Beans

Well, these last couple of weeks I have been working in complete secrecy, in the dark, damp underground cartooning lair that I call home. Slaving away day after day on a new animated short that I want to make. Right now I have it storyboarded, and timed out on barsheets (explanation to come in another post).

Lets start off from the beginning though. Where it all started. I wanted to start with an incredibly simple premise.
     - Two guys have trouble getting into a club, and then once they are inside, they find a girl and have trouble inside the club.-

Stay tuned for more titillating images to come.

Failed Concept and Doodles

First up is my concept that I scrapped that was going to be for my buddies magazine. I just didn't think it read well at first glance, and you shouldn't have to figure out what is going on in a cartoon. It should be easily recognizable and understandable. That being said, what do you think it is?

 The rest are doodles from watching tv with my buddies. Some are my of my friends, others are what was on the TV and the rest are from my imagination. The shaded drawing at the bottom was done earlier yesterday.

Landscape Painting

Not that I think this is particularly good, but it was my first try at a landscape. This is something that I will definitely have to work on.

Prob took me about 2 hours from start to finish, from a picture. Man, doing these makes me admire people who can whip out awesome speed drawings in like a half hour. This one isn't even polished and it took me a long time.

Business Card

It's official, I am now for hire. Now that I have my newly designed business cards, I am ready to do business. I didn't think that I would need a business card so soon, but my boss has been talking me up to an acquaintance of hers that deals with publishing. She asked for my card, so I made one up. I didn't want to pay for 250 business cards, that were double-sided and full color, because the cheapest place in town was $40, and vistaprint would still be about $17-20. I decided to do it the old fashioned way, and print it out on nice cardstock at FedEx Printing just a couple blocks away. The end result looks awesome, but it took a little bit of trial and error though.

Here are a couple of unused designs that I came up with, but decided not to use.

 Pencil sketched in ArtRage with rotated and transformed stencils for the blocks of color, I really like the feel of this one with the construction lines beneath.

 The finished product in a couple different examples. Done in Inkscape (which is an awesome free program. Very powerful) I decided it was too heavy though and scrapped it.

Pretty much the final design. After my first printing though, I decided to enlarge my phone number and email to make it more legible.

After the first printing I learned a couple of things that I hadn't thought of. First, printers can't print white, so anything white will show up as the color of the paper being used. That is what I did for my final card. I picked a paper that was tan like my design and printed on that. Second, I saved my images as 8.5 x 11, but I forgot that printers needed around a 1/8-1/4 margins around the absolute edges. So, my first print was automatically scaled down a little bit to fit into the printable area. For my next printing I exported my image at like 10.6 x 8.2 so that it didn't get scaled down.

 Here is the full-sized sheet that went to the printer.

Then I also realized I needed a backside, which wasn't too much trouble to do. Here is my first design.

Here is the full-sized sheet that was used. There was a lot of variation in this design but unfortunately, I didn't save jpgs of all of the variations.

Finally, here is some photos of my card in all of its glory. I then got out my ruler and my exacto knife and sliced them into perfect rectangles.

Overall, it cost less than $2, which is right up my alley. $0.53 per side plus $0.12 per piece of cardstock.

Well Here's Another One

Man these are fun, value studies in ArtRage. This one was done with the oil brush, preset "thin and dry". I'm feeling more confident in my tones and values already. I'm also less afraid to rework areas if they need it because I know what I need to do to easily lay the right values down. Maybe next time, I'll spend a little bit more time on the rough sketch so that it comes out a little bit better proportioned.

Value Studies

Whenever I try and do digital paintings, I always read people telling me to start in grey-scale. Most of the time they skip from their rough pencil drawing to their full tonal and value image, ready to be colored. Well, that was the step I always failed at, getting my value down. So, In failing again, I decided to paint from a picture instead of from my head. It is a lot easier for me to paint traditionally rather than digitally, so I am going to do some still life paintings to get better digitally (not that I am a very good painter traditionally on canvas either though).

First up is an egg, and it probably took me about an hour. Done in ArtRage, with the felt pen set to the preset "hard tip".

With border and initial sketch

Without

ArtRage Demo

I've been writing up a story so that I can animate a new short, so that has been occupying my spare time. This time though, I'm going to do it right and take my time. Drawing is coming to me a lot easier than it ever has before and after taking those special effects animation lessons for Adam Philips my animation and timing is much better. Now, I need to focus on everything else, mostly story, music and sounds and backgrounds (my weakest points).

I'm planning on composing my own music, and just making it a very simple jazz tune, but one that correlates perfectly with my story. Then once I have the basic timing and structure down, hopefully one of my buddies can elaborate on the tune. This post by Stephen Worth at animation resources has been my biggest inspiration for composting my own music. I played piano as a kid so reading and writing music is coming back pretty quickly. To write the music I am using a tiny keyboard, but it works well enough. I've been doing gag sessions by myself, which doesn't work very good, but as long as I take some time away from the drawing board, once i get back to it, ideas flow out for a while. It's pretty hard to change an idea about how the scene will go that you are already envisioning, but for some things I'm glad I was able to brainstorm some better ideas.

I have also been wondering about what program to paint my backgrounds in, seeing as how I'm not the best painter. I just downloaded the demo for ArtRage Studio Pro, and this program is sweet. The learning curve is small, and it mostly just mimics traditional drawing and painting mediums. And it only costs 59$ right now!

Here's my second painting I did with the program.

Not the style that I plan on doing the backgrounds, but I gotta play around with it more.

Right now I am scanning the rough story sketches and the my gag/idea secessions, so I will be posting those shortly. Next up will be storyboarding, then composing the music. Also, I have no time goal for this project, meaning who knows when it will be done. I should be able to work on it though, because I am only taking 6 credits starting on 9/24.

Photoshop Images

I just finished with my summer classes. YAHOO! I took a Photoshop class which really helped shed a lot of light on the program, for I only knew how to use it a vary basic way. And most of the time when I needed to use it, I just fumbled my way through it. I thought I should post some of my images that I had to do for the projects throughout the term.

 Project 3

  For this project we were supposed to create an illustration using brushes and layer stacking.

Project 4

For this project we had to colorize a black and white photo, I chose this black and white promotional photo of Bob Clampett and his creations. The objects were actually pasted onto the photo, so I had to blend in all of the ridges left between the paper and the photo.

(Here's the original)

Project 5

These projects were all about filters

 Here is a picture of my old dog, with a beam of light behind his head that looked just like he was smoking a cigarette. So I emphasized that, and made the room smoky.

I had to create a texture using only filters. This was done off of an online tutorial as seen here.

Project 6

 This was my first try at making a composite. The crow was added, and so was the flower in his mouth. Both images were off of Deviant Art, the crow can be seen here and the field of poppies can be seen here.

Final

For our final we finally learned about layer masks, which seems like a really powerful tool. Then we had to create a collage with some sort of type in it using all of the tools that we have learned over the course of the term. I think this one turned out really cool.

I liked the class, I learned a lot and had fun doing it.

Peter Behrens 1907 Manifesto for AEG

Here is a picture of the 1907 Manifesto by Peter Behrens. It is from the book "Industriekultur: Peter Behrens & The AEG 1907-1914" by Tilmann Buddensieg (1984).

Mr Bug Goes To Town

I finally have some time to myself so that I can draw. School is done and my summer classes don't start for another week and a half, so I decided to draw something.

Micheal Sporn (who I linked to before on this blog) has just posted some excellent model sheets from the Fleischer Studios second and final feature film animation, Mr. Bug Goes To Town. Inspired by these model sheets I doodled for a while until I came up with this piece. Scanned and then inked and painted in TVPaint. So far I have only used TVPaint to draw and ink in, but have not really done much animation in it yet.

Casper Part 2

Here's part 2 on our epic journey for revenge, starring that loveable Casper.

GGG-GHOST!

Haven't posted anything up in a while.  I was busy doing the special effects animation course, but now I started a full-time job  (*knock-knock* housekeeeeping. whatever it is still a job) and I am about to start full-time classes online in less than a week for my web design certificate.  So all of my fun animating and drawing will come to another stand-still.  Who knows though we will see.

Anyways here is a fun little comic that I am putting together, and it has to do with everyone's favorite ghost, Casper.

1st part

My First Demo Reel

I finally put together a demo reel.  This is a compilation of the last couple years of work.  My first one was done back at the beginning of 2009.  That is when i bought my first wacom bamboo tablet and started getting into art and animation.  I was also living out of my van, snowboarding everyday in the Colorado mountains, and animating every night at the public library.  Seems like such a long time ago.

After that I came back to Montana, and did a couple more little animations here and there.  Then for my 20th birthday in 2009, my girlfriend bought me an Intuos 3 9x12 tablet, which helped my digital art out a lot.  I realized though that my lack of solid drawing abilities made the animation much harder.  So from then until now I've been learning how to draw, and that's why I started this blog.  I started it to post my lessons from the $100,000 drawing course from the famous John K.

After a long stint away from animating, I've been able to get back into it recently and it feels good.  My drawing abilities have gotten better, but those still have a long way to go.  My animating abilities have also gotten way better, which I think can be seen from the intro to my demo reel that I just animated a couple days ago.

I made this demo reel because I saw a job posting for a animating job on craigslist, but I realized I didn't have anything but a couple of posted videos to show off my animation.  So I started making this reel, and then I saw that the job had been taken down already, but I figured it would be good to have this made.  I might not be the best reel, but my animation can only get better from now on.

Enjoy


Demo Reel 2012 from Tyler Williams on Vimeo.

New Daily

I got a new daily up for all of you guys.  I have had a lot more time to draw and animate lately and boy does it feel good.  It's posted on my vimeo channel.


Daily 2 - Sneak from Tyler Williams on Vimeo.


It happened because I was having trouble drawing arms on my cartoons, and I was always guessing when the bicep would push in or when it would push out, so I drew some roughs after figuring it out, and then I wanted to make a sneaking walk cycle.

 

sorry if it's a little hard to see

Pogo Tribute

For all of you faithful followers,(probably not many) you may have noticed that I haven't posted anything in the last couple of months. Well, there is a simple explanation for that, I haven't been drawing at all. I was working a construction job out of town and only had one day off, so I spent that time my women and my friends. Now that work is done for the winter I can finally start to draw again. I've also been teaching myself how to watercolor, or paint anything for that matter.

My first thing to post is a large scene of Albert the alligator from Pogo, which is just a fun tribute to Walt Kelly in his swamp style that I tried to emulate. I also made a little comic strip for Pogo that I will post here shortly.  This is in honor of the first in a series of twelve Pogo volumes that has been long awaited.  Now that I have more time I can finally sink my teeth the book.