Narnia Characters

Here's my first stab at character design for my visual development class. We had a few stories to choose from, and I picked "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis. They look OK, but I feel like I stifled myself creatively since I know the Narnia books so well, I don't want to design outside of the story, whereas some of my classmates are getting more "out there" with their projects and seem to be having fun with it. Then again, it's so early in my program that there's nothing wrong with focusing on simple designs that are well-structured. Then, when I have my own crazy ideas later, I'll be better prepared to draw them (I hope)! So here we have designs for Jadis (The White Witch), then Peter, and Lucy!






Facial expressions too!

My Secret Life

This is primarily a venue for sharing my animation-related artwork, but here's something entirely different!

My roommate, Yifei, is a Photography major, and she uses me as her model sometimes because I will work for cheap (my fee = bowls of noodles and use of her laptop). The purpose of the shot was to recreate this photograph by Lillian Bassman, then we played around with other poses, and we thought that other one was quite nice, so I put it up too.

I could try to relate these to animation by drawing lines of action or outlining human facial proportions, but why ruin the fun of being glamorous for a day?

Figures and Faces

A quick note: I was hoping to update the blog every Sunday, but I had to go swing dancing this past weekend at Golden Gate Park, so things got delayed... it was a delightful afternoon in which I learned to dance the Charleston and then picnicked with my roommates, but now it's back to work!

The stuff I'm posting today is from my Figurative Concepts class. The concept of structure is so essential for everything else I'm doing here, and developing the skills to create the proper structure requires a lot of dedication and attention. I had a total art-geek moment doing perspective drawings yesterday. I realized the line of action, on which every figure's pose should be structured, it a lot like the perspective lines in environment drawing, where everything is constructed in relation to those pesky vanishing points... it's all connected!!! For me it was a big 'aha' moment, but I'll admit I am easily impressed by all the interconnections throughout art, life, and everything.

So above are some muscular anatomy charts I made, to help me focus on structure. And we're moving into head drawing next, so we had a homework assignment to draw faces from photographs with attention to cast shadows. I used photos of friends on facebook and then went through my own archives, so perhaps some folks will recognize people they know :)
Clicking on the images takes you to a larger view! That's it for today, but lots more is coming, like character designs from Visual Elements of Story, and a storyboard of my upcoming animation project from Principles and Pipelines! Check back soon!

Walk Cycle

I've graduated from a floppy little bag of flour to animating a human form! There are so many little nuances to a biped walk... and knowing what should happen with all those swinging limbs and bending joints didn't make it any easier to draw when I got down to it... but here it is:



I did try to loosen up on the quality of line, but I don't know why I did such a weird nuts and bolts joint thing on my figure, most people in my class did more rounded, squishy figures. I think I'm just a little obsessive-compulsive about keeping the structure intact as I animate. Maybe that's not a bad thing, but I'm still hoping I can achieve more fluid motions in the future.

Home Sweet Homer

My first homework assignment for Visual Elements of Story was to draw Homer Simpson in different poses. When I used to doodle little Homer heads in my high school notebooks, I never dreamed I'd be doing this for grad school! Of course, 10 one-hour Homer drawings, as fun as it was, got very tiring. That last pose is actually my self portrait as I finished the assignment :)