I saw a drawing from Jake Parker's Inktober digital edition book and loved it. So I thought I would recreate it. Check out his book here: http://agent44.com/blog2/?cat=12 Check out his other artwork too, great stuff. Inspiring artist!
ASketch is a procedural sketching app that generates some shading based on interaction between current and previous sketch lines. You can see such effect in this drawing and the previous one I posted. I am really liking this app for doing pencil like sketches.
I have started sketching again after a long time. And it feels really good. Thanks to my lovely and kind wife for a great gift(ipad) and inspiring me to post :)
Here are a couple of drawings that I did as part of my story-boarding class during Spring'07 at SCAD. We had to come up with a rough story concept and design an imaginary place for that idea. It is very difficult to design something without any reference at all. The best thing to do is to study references for all or some elements of the environment and add your creativity to it. References help making the environment more believable when all the elements are put together. Hence it is very important to study real life references, be it a drawing or an animation piece.
I became speechless after watching just the first few seconds of the film. And absolutely gorgeous drawings in every single frame. Watch it in HD!
Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.
I am back to animating and so far I am learning what my shortcomings are and what should I do to improve myself. It is a great feeling when you know what the problem is and what could be the solution.
The biggest problem in my animations is that they look very pose to pose. The solution to this is simple! Add overlapping and not have all body parts reach the key pose at the same time. I understand this and I have added overlapping in my new animation, but it still looks pose to pose to an extent. Here are some points from my learning so far,
- Body parts reach the pose at different times and some body parts overshoot a little bit in the follow through action
- There are few times when in real life we go pose to pose.
- So overlap is good, but not all the time. Depending upon the emotion or the action we have to do partial overlapping, only few body parts overlapping. (This comes from James Baxter's notes taken by Amrit here)
- Too much overlapping makes animation feel like rag doll. It depends a lot on style of animation of course e.g. slapstick comedy needs quite a big of overlapping. But in general for a little more realistic action we have to be careful in using overlapping.
- When adding overlapping you have to think what is leading the action. Or what makes action clear and stand out. In a simple example if character is punching somebody, you want to delay arm as much as possible and have arm hit the target in the last couple of frames with bigger spacing.
*-Always push the poses for overlapping and exaggeration to find the limit where you feel that it's not too much and too obvious. If we don't push the poses to extremes sometimes overlapping is too subtle to even notice and it can make animation pose to pose and stiff.
(I think this is where my main problem is.)
So in conclusion it is important to remember that we are creating feeling of natural motion and not actually showing overlapping itself.
I feel very excited to have my own website. I am still in the process of updating the pages with more detail and better layout. But mainly I have my demo reel up!
I want to say thank you to my lovely wife :)
http://maulik13.com
I am posting few links and notes (mainly for myself) as I begin animating again. Wohoo!
"Pretty movement vs good acting"
LINK
"Cut the fat from your shot, don't give too much to digest to your audience. Make action and acting clear to get the emotion and story point across."
(from author's comment at LINK)
I generally end up putting extra fat to the acting. While I am animating I suddenly think oh man this would look cool or this action would be very pretty because it has awesome use of overlap and arcs. But, as Brad Bird says, It's about acting man! Not the cool looking motion. (paraphrased)
There are times when I get a comment like your animation looks pose to pose or it is easy to spot that animation is just going from one key pose to another key pose. I understand what the comment means, but sometimes I don't know how to solve it.
While animating today I realized that if I break down animation into different body parts and loosen up the body (not too much or it will look funky) I can remove that pose to pose feel. So it's about adding proper overlapping action, arcs, follow through and secondary motion. But instead of doing it randomly or following just one rule, like hand always lags behind, find out what leads the action. Is it the torso that leads the action or force, or hands or pelvis or legs? Then it is good to draw thumbnails of how you reach your key pose with a particular body part leading the action. And always important, try to feel the action inside your body.
I just re-realized this so I thought I should write it down.
This is absolutely Amazing! Best puppet acting I have ever seen. Even though it's just a stick man with one leg and no face, you know what he is doing or feeling.
Just playing with built-in Mental Ray material for sub surface scattering (sss) effect. SSS looks cool.
Front and back vertical format.
The gear system represents the technical aspects of rigging. However, rigging also requires an eye for aesthetic or art so I have those gears made from faces (And they will actually work in practical if put together properly). So the gear system made from faces is my logo. And it will be driving an Inverse kinematics chain pulling head on the other side. IK is something I am very interested in for research hence IK highlighted in my name too. Also because it brings attention to name quickly.
Blue and brown are not my typical colors, so I feel good being adventurous this time. However this color scheme is widely used in graphics designs (esp blogs). And so it's not unique, but I like it. (please ignore the white border)
On 13th Dec. 2008 I got married to a beautiful and a sweet girl, Ami. And today is exactly one month of our married life. Even if we got married a month ago it feels like we have been married for longer than that. That is probably because we enjoyed every little things together. It's more than 2 years since I left for my studies and today as husband and wife we stand together stronger than ever; fighting time, fighting physical distance and uncertainty of economy. I can't tell how lucky I am to have got such an amazing girl as my wife. She has inspired me to become a stronger man and made me more determined to chase my dreams. I don't hesitate to say, Ami I will marry you in all my next lives as well.
Here are two drawings I did in a sequential art class (Sequential art is about comics) in Fall 2007. I learned a lot about perspective, drawings humans for comics and creating environments. It was really a cool experience. Drawings for comics is so much fun and demanding of course.
The first one, everything is from imagination.
The second, the location is from a place near river street in Savannah, but characters are drawn from imagination.
The great fun about these both two was the story. The primary goal of Comics is the story. And that's why I really love the sequential art, because you are telling a story through series of drawings. And yeah my professor had worked in DC comics and I think Marvel comics as well for a long time. He did spider man comics and many more. Check his blog here and scroll through to see his amazing artwork Tom Lyle
First work is done with Acrylic Gouache and this how it was done. First we had to find a piece of cloth with some pattern. Then trace the design on 11x11" square of bristol board. And take a small square of the same cloth glue it to the traced design where it belongs. And then expand the design by matching the cloth colors and painting the remaining design (If you see a little closely and you can see the glued square) . For painting remaining design, area remaining after gluing the square, was divided into different sections and each section was painted with different color processes. One was inverted colors of original colors, one was compliment of original colors, those are the two that i can remember :) And I think there were 4 or 5 sections total including the original colors.
The second work was for color theory class. We had to create a motif and from that create a pattern. Then took selected colors and paint the whole pattern. I used Acrylic paint on a canvas paper. Thanks to my professor who helped me see that we can create very different and creative designs using the same motif. This is I think the first time I have used such bold and bright colors. I wanted to get out of my confort zone of using mild colors. So this assignment was a great learning experience. (The photograph of this one looks a little dull compared to original work, sorry about that)
This is an excerpt from Mark Kennedy's post on his blog:
A very good lesson for parents. I have to keep this in mind because I will become a parent one day and I won't want my kids to go away from creativity and imagination."if I remember correctly, it said that most kids stop drawing around age seven because that's the age when teachers and parents start to tell kids "you're drawing that cat wrong, cats don't have seven legs" and so drawing stops being fun and starts being a chore, which makes kids give it up completely. And why not give it up? Schools and parents rarely seem to put much importance on art or learning to draw, those are always the first school programs cut when budgets shrink (it seems to me, anyway) and so very few people keep drawing throughout their lives."
Some of the frames from movie "The Hero". Really liked the cinematography in this movie.
If you haven't seen me then you will need the drawing on top right corner to identify me.
A storyboard frame for my idea about houses on tree trunk. I had a lot of ideas about this but could not flesh them out properly in time. For example I was thinking that the top is the main floor of the house so to go up and down there will be a mechanical system (based on weight shift) acting as a lift.
