Check out this wall art

Here is something that I wanted to do fo the past two years at least, but have only slowly made progress on it. My dad carved this picture into a board using a CNC machine before he left his job as a woodworker. He gave it to me for my birthday a couple years ago and I always wanted to paint behind the carving. Two years went by, and I finally got around to painting it. Another 6 months go by, and I finally blacken all the edges, sand it down and through a light oil finish on it. I like how it turned out.

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.

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.

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.

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.