Today's Gestures

I won't post any more of these as I know that an entire blog filled with nothing bu gesture drawings is kind of boring. I still plan on doing these every day that I can, but I'll refrain from posting them from here on out. So here's today gesture drawings.

Gestures 11/20/12

Some gesture drawings

Here's a few gesture drawings I did from Friday and today. Cliff Roth on G+ made a post about a website, artists.pixelovely.com, that has a selection of models, clothed and nude, that flip by every 30 seconds. It's obviously not as good as working from a live model, but the website is still a very handy resource for getting your drawing arm into motion. I'm going to try to work this into my daily warm ups.

Tommy Run Test

Here's a second test done in Toon Boon Animate. I'm trying to get a better handle on the parenting system, which works well but it makes a million layers that is a personal pet peeve of mine. I'm also trying to get a better grasp on the Drawing Substitution system which can be a bit tough to wrap your head around. However, the main thrust of this test is to try to figure out the best way of creating character templates that can be shared between shot files. The BG was done roughly in Photoshop.

Toon Boom Animate Tests

So lately, I've been experimenting with Toon Boom Animate. I actually bought it several years ago while I was searching for some new software to do traditional animation. I never really had the chance to delve into it much. I'd fool around with it here and there, but nothing substantial came from it.

Lately, I've been getting tired of Flash's nonstop nonsense. I began to realize that Flash has largely remained unchanged in maybe six or seven years. I still use CS3 because frankly CS4 was such a steaming pile of trash. It is broken in many areas so I decided to not bother with any additional follow ups in the Creative Suite...though I have been thinking about upgrading to CS6 lately...

Anywho, Flash seems to have its better days behind it. Adobe really never did much with Flash when they bought it from Macromedia, and it seems web development is moving more and more to HTML5. Heck, even Adobe is pushing for AIR. It seems the future of Flash, and thus my livelihood, has its fate sealed. I can see a day in the not-so-distant future where Adobe will kill off Flash entirely. Thus, I decided to take another hard look at Animate again.

This test is me playing with the tool set in Animate. I'm working with what I know from Flash and After Effects, and trying to go from there. I was trying to test three things here. The first was to do a walk cycle using the parenting system. Its not the best walk cycle in the world and there are a few kinks in the kneee joints that I was having difficulty dealing with. The second was to traditionally animate "something". The third part, the Guy's reaction, was done in a similar manner to how I would approach a shot in Flash but still using the rigged puppet. I also wanted to see how Animate would handle a Photoshop BG so I did a quick splash card at his reaction. I did the edit in AE because I dont know how to do it in Animate yet :)

Not much...

I really struggled this morning trying to get something out of my stylus. I had several sketches started that I just lost my way with, and just trashed them. This little girl I cranked out was the only thing that didn't make me want to turn off my computer and go back to sleep. I'll try to dig a bit deeper later on today and hopefully something decent will come out of it.

Pilot (Three-fer!)

Two-fer!

Two in one day!

Untitled

Another study

Rough sketch

Found some new PS brushes online and wanted to give them a shot.

Robot-Boba-Fett-Guy

I've been watching "The People Vs George Lucas" on Netflix during my lunch breaks lately, and I guess Boba Fett is in my head. The helmet/head is clearly Boba Fett, but I made no attempt to duplicate the rest of him. I just liked the shape of his helmet and I made up the rest in my head.

Black marker.

I use the term "marker" here loosely. This was done in Sketchbook with the marker tool. Just some shapes and a dash of color to show tone.

Snowy?

By no means is it cold out, but for some reason the idea of a girl in a winter jacket and holding a snow shovel popped into my head this morning. Maybe I'm over the summer and am ready for some colder weather? I also wanted to make her "girly" so I went with a very saturated colors. I thought it would be funny if she just grabbed her Dad's winter hat and plopped it on her head so I made that brown and the least colorful thing on her. Maybe I should have pushed the size relationship of the hat to head then? Made it a bit more over sized and ill fitting?

Old Lady

Office drone guy

One more week.

...and we'll be moved into our new house. Can't wait!

No excuses

I wasn't going to update today, but in the time it took for me to complain about it, I could have just done it. So here's a quick one for today.

Gansta'

Sometimes, a great music track gets you through. I love me some Virt, so I had his DnB Chipmix from 2007 going while sketching away a this one. Love me some chiptunes!

Just a few

I realized that I haven't updated in a littler over a week, and that is not good. If anything, this blog is to be a reminder to myself to try to sketch at least once a day for a bit, and I'm already falling behind. Sometimes, that's just what happens. Life is a busy thing! Just now, I was on my way off to bed for tonight, and stopped by the studio to shut down my system. It was then I realized that I hadn't updated in seven days. So, despite being very tired, I decided to sketch randomly for 15 minutes, and this is what I came up with. Nothing fantastic, but I wanted to put pencil to paper...or stylus to Cintiq. You get the drift.

Reggie

I don't know about you, but I'm getting slightly pumped for this year's E3. My body. It's ready.

I'm sorry

Sometimes you screw up. Say you're sorry and mean it.

Tall duder

Kind of wish I added legs and feet. Maybe I'll revisit this guy later and flesh him out a bit more.

Weird Birds

Determined Space Kid

Little Einsteins Coloring Book Drawings.

I was digging through my old docs and came across a bunch of illustrations I did for a Little Einsteins coloring book. These were done around four years ago. I have no idea what ever happened to the coloring book itself. I don't think it ever came out. Here's a few I picked that I liked.

Hello

Doodled a bit while watching Aliens tonight. Then, i decided to hook up my scanner, and then realized I havent updated my blog in a little bit. Ink on paper:

Little Girl

Whoosh

Nothing fantastic today. Just a few doodles.

Only one today

Bloop

Little girl

New sketches

Did these on Friday, and posting them up today.

More sketches

The server's down...

Dirk The Daring

Love me some Dirk The Daring. I started pulling Singe out of my ass, so he looks like garbage hah. I don't know who that guy in the upper left corner is. I pulled him out of my ass, too.

Hi

Hello

Here's a new sheet of sketches done when I had a few minutes at work.

Some sketches

It's occurred to me that I haven't been sketching like used to in quite a while. I've been working a lot in After Effects at my day job, and thus I haven't been drawing much. I'm going to try and make an effort to fill an entire page in Sketchbook a day. Nothing special. Just doodles. Just something to get me drawing again. Here's the last three days worth:

GFG#5: "How To Hook Up The NES"

So after around seven months of production, Phil and I wrapped up production on GFGames#5: "How To Hook Up The NES". My brother-in-law, Joe, kicked into high gear and turned around a fantastic soundtrack. Clearly, this is inspired by the Goofy "How To" shorts from the 40s and 50s. I hope everyone gets a laugh out of it. Head on over to the Shamoozal and scope it out!

GFG#5 Update

I don't feel like re-typing stuff. Read more here. Me tired.

Short update

I was able to sink most of my weekend into the new short for the Shamoozal. I'll wager I spent around 75% of my time sitting here working on the short. I decided to revisit the shot I posted the rough posted below from. Hah. Does that sentence even make sense? It's been a long weekend, so I'll make this quick and just get to the image.

Animation rough from new short

It's been drawn to my attention that I havent updated this in some while. And you know what...it's totally true! I've been busy doing another short for the Shamoozal, and I feel like all my free time gets devoted to it. I don't know when it's going to be done at this point. I wanted to have it finished up last month, but you know how things go. The above image is an animation rough from a shot with Jacquo stuck in a very cramped space. Hopefully it'll be done soon! Wish me luck!

Suave Doodle Dude

There really isn't anything special about this guy. I actually kind of lost interest in him as I went along, but I wanted to post something up here today just to try and get myself in the habit of making semi-regular posts again.