This year, we have a new tutor so classes are slightly different. So far we've had a lot of focus on group activities and not just on the drawing, but expanding our imaginations too. While at a glance this may seem somewhat juvenile, it's extremely important to animators as creativity and freedom can be key in certain lines of work. I'm currently in the process of planning a new show (which I'll mention later in this post) so at this point, these lessons have been extremely useful to me. So without further ado, I'll sum up the first three drawing lessons:
Lesson one: Creative Inkling
My main flaw when working on paper is that I have an obsession with tidiness, my lineart has to be perfect. Not in this lesson.As an introduction activity and to get back into the flow, we worked on paper with ink and sticks. This encouraged neatness and focused on the mark making rather than what we were actually drawing. I'll upload a scan of my first piece later on, but from what I remember, I was sticking to basic shapes and things I knew, which defeated the object of the lesson. I think a part of me was still conforming to tidy work rather than creativity, This showed through even more in our pairs activity when we took it in turns to add to the picture we worked on, the picture below will explain for itself just how that went:
To sum up the lesson, I need to learn to loosen up a bit more and let my mind take over, rather than stick to boundaries.
Lesson two: Living in chaos
Our first task was to name things that you'd find in a conventional city, post boxes, police stations, schools, etc. Once that was done, we were to draw one down, then pass our picture to the next person to add to.
We didn't end up with a "conventional" city at all.
By time we'd done a full rotation, our cities ended up having the creative juices of the whole class splattered all over them. Flaming pandas, Twix eating aliens and Safety Gnomes (had to!) were just a small selection from the madness we had collectively created.
Our next part of the lesson was spent joining these pictures together. Due to the fact we had no idea this would happen at the start of the lesson, the perspective on all our pictures was radically different, so we had to really think how to put everything together seamlessly. After some extensions to the skyline, road layouts even worse than those in Leeds and a touch more fire, we had a consistent city.
The final part of the lesson was the most risky. After having bad experiences with art teachers "adding" to work in school, I was somewhat worried when our next order was to cake the whole picture with a layer of charcoal shavings.
I was mistaken.
After doing this, we were handed an eraser each to add lighting to the image. To put it in an amusing way, the flying spaghetti monster hovering above the city now had a majestic glow that engulfed a third of the whole city. The result was *wipes tear from eye* beautiful.
I will soon be uploading a picture of all the backgrounds joined together, but for now, here's a placeholder segment:
Lesson 3: Corn Boy VS The Panda Empire
Returning to the glory of our city (now named Poland) our task for lesson 3 was to create a citizen worthy of a presence in our conglomerate brainchild.
Enter Corn Boy
I went to expand my retro art style with corn boy, making his body up of very basic shapes, I also thought about how he'd move, which I imagined to be very loosely and exaggerated, so I added a swinging corn from his hat to add secondary motion. To amuse ourselves while drawing, a few of us shared our characters' back stories with each other. Corn Boy lives in the Corn Shop in Poland, where he sells Twix bars. Jack (CurlyPanda) created a Panda for his character, and decided that his Panda hates corn.
Our back stories meshed, and when the second part of the lesson started, it showed.
For part 2, we had to draw the city from our character's point of view, our versions of the city both had propaganda posters against the opposing faction. The goal of getting our imaginations running has certainly pulled off so far, and I've started to break away from the problems I had with the first lesson.
OUTSIDE CLASS
As mentioned earlier, I'm starting to think up ideas for a new show to carry on after Oddball ends. So far I've been working on the characters and art style. To help buff my skills, I've started a 100 pose challenge with the new trio to try out the dynamic new art style. Below are some pictures from the challenge so far:
As it may show, I'm trying to take a more retro direction to my art style, sticking to strong, basic shapes. It goes a lot without saying, but my influences are old Cartoon Network shows I watched as a kid, mainly the Powerpuff Girls.
I learned recently that I'm missing out with my current art style for Oddball. I don't have much focus on lines and curves, which can make animation emphasis a lot stronger, so my aim for this style is to have something a lot stronger, and more dynamic. From my pose tests, I'm already getting a feel for that. Below is an image that shows the development from the original concept idea:
After making this, two friends pointed me towards a cartoon, Panty & Stocking with Garter Belt, which I've watched a short clip of before, but nothing more. I decided to watch every episode for inspiration as it has a very similar art and animation style to what I want to accomplish with this new show, below is an example:
I'm not planning to start proper development on this show until 2013, I'm just getting practice with the art style for now as I have Oddball to keep me busy.
Aside from that, I've been trying to emulate other art styles too, for example Adventure Time:
I've found that copying other art styles is a great way for me to learn, so practice like this is likely to happen again.
I think that sums up this dragged out entry anyway!
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