I've worked once again with my friend Solrac/Yaplap for some merchandise. This time round I've supplied art for cardboard cutouts of characters from the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic in the art style variant used in Solrac ventures.
Below are the drawings, I used Adobe Flash entirely for these, and the particular art varient was inspired by the work of Andy Price, one of the artists for the official comic. (He also has the same name as my Dad, which is cool)
I provided a high quality .png of the art work and Solrac has begun the creation of the cutouts!
While on a train journey, I decided to give my imagination a stretch after being focused so much on VP. Below are a bunch of drawings I did on the ride, I was trying to get practice in a few different drawing styles and also use drawing and gesture to express characteristics.
Back in college I studied caricature as part of my art course, something I'd like to keep up with. Since I shaved my hair off recently I thought now would be a great time for a new cartoon version of myself.
For reference, here I am in all my "just woke up" glory.
I wanted to create something more cartoony than usual for this piece, working off basic shapes and bright colours. In the end I noticed a similarity to the work of Ged Haney, possibly from the colours and goofy face. Overall I'm very happy with how this picture turned out, using a strong colour scheme as well as capturing my likeliness in a comedic, self parodying way.
A still from Ged Haney's "Milk Milk Lemonade" showing the possible influences I took from him.
This was possibly my worst drawing lesson this year. For some reason I just couldn't get into the zone at all and I feel this shows through with my work, which is unfortunate because this was one of the most useful lessons we've had. The goal of this session was to capture a series of dynamic poses with a 30 second rough sketch, followed by a 5 minute drawing. These would be used as reference material for our battle mural.
For the first series of images I feel as if my rough sketches were bringing across more information than the final pictures. This may be because they were still in structure form. I was also finding it difficult to finish the figures in time, so I ended up rushing at points. I remember making better use of time in the rough drawing and falling short in the finals.
The second sheet of drawings after a break and some food. I felt like I was making more progress with these ones, but I'm still unhappy with the drawing quality, a lot of lines are in the wrong places, and the thickness difference can be distracting.
After we were done with the poses, we refreshed ourselves on an old lesson, drawing the head from different angles. These were again, 5 minute poses and I started to struggle for time more and more as the model turned to face me head on. One thing I've noticed since drawing the picture below is that I have a hard time getting lips correct, the second picture on the bottom row is probably my best so far for this, as well as my favourite drawing of the day. Once again, as with other life drawing sessions I feel I need to loosen up a little and quit obsessing over the small details to start with. For the second to last picture, I noticed I'd already drawn this pose, so I decided to try my hand at caricaturing Steve. I'm pretty happy with the sharp, structured result and found this to be a fun observed practice rather than drawing from a photo.
A painting I did a while ago in Photoshop to demonstrate my weakness when it comes to drawing lips.
All in all, I'm pretty unhappy with my performance in this session, whether it was because of sleep deprivation, or just not being in the creative zone on that day, I hope the next life drawing session brings more success, and more complete drawings.
This life drawing session showed the triumphant return of our life model from first year, Steve. Often remembered by the group for his action poses, this session covered just that.
For our final project in drawing this year, the group are going to be making a battle mural with a variety of poses taken from life drawing sessions. We'll be drawing 5 people each in dynamic fighting poses and adding armour and weapons to create a collaborative picture similar to the cityscape we made at the start of the year. For this first session, we practiced with short, dynamic poses. Each set of drawings included a 2 minute rough sketch, a 10 minute full body sketch, and a 10 minute close up sketch focusing on a certain detail, either hands, feet, or the head.
For the first set, Steve took a stabbing pose with a sword. Unfortunately I didn't have the best angle to make the pose look dynamic and due to this being the first picture, I didn't manage to capture as much of the figure as I'd hoped.
Possibly my favourite drawing from the day. I've been working with hands a lot in my current animation and thought I'd practice at drawing the clenched fist. As I was drawing, a lot of the focus was on the lighting, and also the pressure in his hand. I managed to capture the pressure of a clenched fist by making the lines around the middle of the picture noticeably heavier than the outside lines. I'm fairly happy with this hand structure and the loose shading style I used. A problem of mine is the speed I draw at, and I think a lot of this has to do with me making my lines neat in the same way I draw digitally. Once I adapted back to traditional drawing I found myself loosening up a bit more.
For the second set of images, Steve took an archer pose. This was the most interesting of the session for me as there was a lot of strength in the pose, which is something I'd like to work on more.
For the first pose, I didn't complete the body as I really wanted to focus on the strength in the upper body, I also noticed that his chest took on an more complicated shape as he locked his arm in place and tried to capture this in my picture. Due to Steve being thin, there was a lot more detail to draw in his ribs on this pose too as they showed through more and cast a shadow.
Unfortunately on the second pose, Steve had slacked his arrow arm a little, making the pose lose a lot of strength, the arrow was now being held as chest height, rather than eye level. Instead I chose to focus on the chest, neck and bow arm to bring the strength through. As with the first picture, focusing on the upper body meant I didn't have time to complete the legs. He took a wide stance to support himself.
I decided to focus on hands again the second time round. I had another strong clenched fist to draw, so I took the opportunity to draw it from the other side for reference. As with the torso, there was a lot of extra detail showing through with the strong pose. In the hands this included bones and veins that I tried to capture the shadows of. I also looked at the curves in his hand, such as the inverse curve at the top of the hand, leading up to his knuckle.
I thought I'd change the composition on this page and have two sets of drawings next to each other. The first (left) showed Steve taking on a pose holding a broadsword. Unlike the bow pose, this one was more close together, and his footing was less spread, to make the pose more defensive.
I wanted to focus on a foot this time round as they're not my strongest point, I started to look at the structure more in this picture and simplified it in my head to a circle ball joint and a trapezium. The main part I had trouble with was the middle of the foot, capturing the form of this section is something I need to practice when I next get the chance.
The final pose gave me a pretty poor selection of areas to focus on, so I thought I'd try my hand at hair, bringing out the different shades and textures.
I didn't find this particular pose interesting to draw, so I went for a lighter shading on the picture. I put most of my time into getting the chest and shoulders translated onto paper.
For the final pose of the day, I suggested a defensive shield. I got this pose from the back, which was perfect for this idea. I remember there being some interesting shadows across his back, but these didn't translate as well as I'd hoped on paper and ruin the shape of his back.
At the end of the session, we were told that we'd be continuing these poses next week. I'm going to try and make my poses look a lot more dynamic next time round and really capture the strength behind them as I started to in some of these drawings.
Wellp, my blog has been just a little behind lately... My big old problem of biting off more than I chew has come back and I've found myself having to do a hell of a lot of work each day to stay on track. Let's start with an update on Vampire Pixel, my university project...
In the final month of the animation, I still have several minutes of footage to complete, this totals up at about a scene a week, which means a lot of work each day. I'm determined to finish this ambitious project on time as I was intending to push and test myself to a higher work ethic. To add to the challenge, I have the rest of my University work including my essay and dissertation proposal, the essay being the main thing I see getting in the way of progress. We had a huge period in the first semester with little work, to have everything suddenly piled on us at the end is getting to a lot of people on the course.
I now have most of the voice acting in for the project and should be getting the title music at some point this week, once these are all in I should have all the files I need to complete the video, and animating the lip syncing sections will significantly speed up the process. Once I start completing scenes, I'm hoping to create a post for each one, showing the influences and more information about them.
Outside university, I've been working on a few commissioned pieces, the second Nick Basile Radio animation should be good to go now and more should be on the way over the holidays, where I'll have a lot more time to work on them. I've also been working a series of pictures for a friend to be sold at a convention, you can see the first one here. I wanted to make my own adaptation of the MLP art style for these pictures and I'm fairly happy with the results.
My personal work is currently all on hold as I barely have time for my current work, let alone more, but here's hoping the holidays are kind to me and let me make another Oddball episode!
Saturday, 6 April 2013
Still trucking on with VP, apologies for the lack of posts, life drawing and other stuff coming soon!
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