Indian Love

Come on everyone, can't you feel it? That special feeling right above your gut. You know what I'm talking about, that good old fashioned, --Indian Lovvveeee. Here is a sketch I made when I was home for the holidays. We were watching some sappy Christmas love story I think. Then I scanned it into the computer and painted it in ArtRage. Now I think that I have to go practice lettering and calligraphy.

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.