Scant Collection

I haven't has as much time to draw lately as I wish I did, haha. Too much school, too much homework. I'm still writing though, so I'm keeping my creative brain busy.

Here's a drawing of Sherlock I made for Chelsea a few weeks ago while she was having a rough day. I gave him a little bit of a chin. He looks eighteen now.

Instead of sixteen.

Chelsea was happy.

That day, I'd decided I wanted to draw Sherry and Ninja, because I love them so much. So, in the afternoon class, I started to draw the couple of them.

It took me a while to find the time, but I eventually finished!

See? I'm not unfair to all of my characters. Just most of them.

So here, some Sherry and Ninja, havin' a moment.


For halloween this year, I dressed up as the doctor, from doctor who, and Leah was my companion.

We traveled all of space and time together and returned the same day we left! It is the advantage of having a TARDIS.

Later that night, I did up my makeup so I looked like a sugar skull for Day of the Dead.

It was a pretty kickin' halloween.

And a doodle of Alan and Rebel, just from my sketchbook.

I realized that even though Alan is Spanish, the goat I based his satyr appearance off of happens to be native to North America.

Oh well, it's a fantasy story.

And FINALLY working on getting some refined designs for the metal prosthetic one of my OC's has essentially drilled into her arm.

I gotta say, I'm having a ball coming up with all these designs and drawings.

Working out the mechanics is killing me though, haha! I'm sure there's a metal skeleton in there somewhere that holds it all together.

And hooray! All the work I have done lately.

I know, it isn't very much, I'm sad too.

Annie

6:37

Some Things Are Too Awesome

Yesterday in layout class, Komza had us drawing animals. Without references.

Let's just say it was depressing and frustrating. I walked home with Leah, and I asked her, "Leah, what am I doing here if I can't draw animals?" to which she answered, logically, "To learn to draw animals?"

Which is where this challenge came from! Leah told me I should give my characters mounts. Like Beaddan. And to draw animals that way. Which lead to her challenging me to draw Tinette on an alligator (I have been wrong about crocodiles and alligators my entire life) and me challenging her to draw Marc on a bear. I didn't draw mine last night, and neither did she, so we both drew them today at break. Thinking about it, there is no way Tinette would ride an alligator. Not because they're deadly, or frightening (Tinette? Fear? Never.) but because they're so low to the ground, and she wears one of two things; her incredibly long gypsy dress, or incredibly short, incredibly tight skirts. Panty shot? Shoot. That, and she has insanely long hair, and if she was riding a gator, it would more that likely drag on the ground unless appropriately clipped up.

Which in this picture, it is.

I also imagine that saddle to be insanely not comfortable; and I imagine straddling a gator to appropriately ride one, wouldn't be comfortable. And those knee braces. And leg braces. Ow.

8:01

Annie

The Final Product

I haven't been drawing much these past few days.

Actually, that's a lie, but everything I've been working on is a private project I don't want to show anybody at this point in time.

Maybe one day.

I'm making this post to post (to post to post to post) the contents of my portfolio for animation this year. One of my class mates was asking if she could see it, so she had something to compare to, but I'd given the hard copy of my portfolio to my mother, as she wanted to keep it.

In the following list of hyperlinks you will find scaled down images of everything I put in, with little comments from yours truly!

First up! The life drawing section.

Three accurate observations of the nude figure.

Set One
Set Two
Three
Four
Five

I clearly went above and beyond what they asked for-- but I'm also pretty certain it was a good idea to show I had strengths in different cuts of time.

Two accurate observations of an animal figure.

Set One
Set Two

Again I went above and over; I didn't have any strong observational animals that could fill an entire page, so I took the best from my trip to the royal winter fair and collaged them on two sheets of paper.

Two accurate observations of a hand, one anticipating an action, one carrying out the action.

Anticipating
Carrying Out

I re-did these a few dozen times and kept handing them off to my room mate to tell me if I snapped any fingers off. Which I did, and had to fix.

Character Design section!

Five Point Character Rotation (If you follow me, you've seen this already)
Expression Sheet, angry, neutral, happy, sad and shocked (Let it be known, I hate these)

Two action poses

Pose One
Pose Two

Story boarding! A four panel story board depicting a character finding a box, examining the box, trying to open the box, and reacting to the open box.

Adam the Child

My teacher suggested the age old joke of a boxing glove on a spring; I quite enjoyed drawing these.

Composition! Showing household objects resembling a sphere, cylinder, rectangle and cone in a space and then reacting to a particular event.

Before said event
After said event

I enjoyed drawing this, again getting a lot of suggestions of fun tidbits to hide in the second composition. It wasn't so bad once I let loose and just got creative with it.

Layout section! First a drawing of a character sitting or standing inside a space, then a drawing of that space from the characters point of view.

Character in space This, I reused from last year and just fine tuned a lot of the line work.
Characters POV THIS... I needed so much help on it wasn't even funny. Thank you to my room mate, who saved my life because I was drowning.

Five Personal Artworks

Really only has one box on the entire score sheet: "Creativity" But maybe that one mark could make or break it, I don't know.

Digital Painting 1
Digital Painting 2
Digital Painting 3
Water Colour Painting
Sketch Page 1
Sketch Page 2

I went ahead and included a bunch of sketches on one page and submitted it as a piece. They really like the red lines, a lot. They show a lot of thought and structure, so my teacher told me to make sure I included a lot of those, because the final, painted image? Doesn't impress as much as the work that went into it.

So, through the process of my portfolio I went to a main cluster of four people... My 2D design teacher, a third year animation teacher who agreed to meet with me, and my two room mates Sarah and Leah. I also got a lot of help from Chelsea, who kept me sane during the two weeks I was home alone working. I redid everything three or four times, but it got me a passing score.

Woo!

Annie

9:51

Frazzled!

I wanted to draw Ninja today. I wasn't sure how I wanted to draw Ninja. So I started drawing. this is what came out.

Ninja's very happy to hear the exciting news about animation.

I'm sort of failing at this "BE ENTHUSED!!" Drawing thing. In the last one, my back pain was ending my happy dance, and in this one I look horrified to be tackle glomped. Though I suppose in real life I would be.

This is far more fun to draw than something congratulatory! And it is congratulatory. Just in a very unorthodox manner.

I didn't realize that ALL of my room mates were headed home today. For whatever reason, I thought Leah and Andrea would be here until tomorrow, but alas, such is not so.

Everyone's gone home for the long weekend-- apparently some families actually do stuff on Easter, though in my family it never really got further than a chocolate bunny. I figured I'd stick around, do some painting, some house work, and relax.

Empty houses are creepy-- I keep thinking noises from my neighbor are in my house, haha! I'm so jumpy.

I rode the bus with Sarah down to the Via rail station, where we waited for the train, and my ipod's "solitaire" app became the coolest thing. I waved her off as the train pulled out of the station (I didn't see her, so I doubt she saw me) and then I waited a further forty minutes singing to myself for the bus to arrive.

I rode home, practically ran from my stop to the house, locked the doors and made sure the house was empty.

For the next three days, the girls get to be mine! Which is fantastic, except for the fact that Blimey is sick.. and I'm so terrified something is going to go wrong while Sarah isn't here. I couldn't do anything to help Archie, and I'm afraid the same thing is going to happen this weekend, due to the fact that my luck sort of really bites.

However; I'm being diligent (I thought that was spelt with two 'L's) with her medications, I know how to get to the veterinary clinic, and I know what to do in case of emergency.

That so doesn't help me calm down any. SO YES... Annie is the rat care taker this weekend! And I'm insanely paranoid about it!

Annie Hughes

11:43

I can't win.

SECOND character rotation attempt for my animation portfolio. I really can't win, I've started to realize this. I am much happier with this version than the first, because it has all the attitude that I originally wanted in my rotation (before I went with something simple and static) as well as? CURVES.

What is Tina without curves?

An angry skinny chick.

You can check out my much much larger rotation here.

I took DQ's advice to heart and I started from scratch all over again. During the entire process of this piece, all I had going through my head was *sproing* *sproing* *sproing* and the visualization of a giant spring working up and down throughout the entire body.
I discarded two other poses while I was working, because they weren't consistent enough to suit my purposes.

You can take a look at my older, unsuccessful rotation here. You'll notice lovely lovely Tinette has gained some weight, but in all the right ways. She's also gotten taller from my last rotation, which will make my friend Leah happy.

So the BIGGEST inconsistencies I see are during the switch from profile to 3/4 back view, Tinette's eyes drop, as does her nose. She's suddenly looking a bit further down than she was previously, only to be recovered in the next rotation. SO I NEED TO FIX THAT. Another inconsistency I noticed, and noticed while I was working, is that while in her front and 3/4 rotation, her second finger is along the hem of her pants. However, in the profile rotation... Her hand is further up on her hip than previous. The thing is, I'm not totally sure how to fix that, as the hem is consistent from one jump to the other, so is the hand. They just.. don't line up consistently, and I don't know what to do about it.

So that's another thing I need to work on!

I was also doing a lot of staring at the foot placement. As the rotation moves from pose to pose, the feet don't stay rooted in the same position, which would occur naturally, right?

I hope so. It looks natural, and it feels right, but at the same time I'm like.. IS that right? I hope so.

Tomorrow after school I'm going to return to DQs office and wait for him like I did last week. Hopefully he won't mind taking another look, as he invited me to ask him if I had any questions, and I'd like to show him I took his advice to heart and made (impressive) changes to (so far) the character portion of my portfolio. I still plan to take the rest of the advice he gave me to heart as well, and still have a lot of work to do in less than two weeks.

Oh Lord, please lend me strength. Or I will keel over and die.

*panic*

~Annie

11:26

Ah HA, some productivity!!!

Like I complained in my last update.. It's been a while since I produced something I was happy with. WELL, to people who actually bother to read my blog, I present: Ain and Kara, my unofficial couple characters.

Aaaaah, it's been way too long since I actually enjoyed painting something <3

I finally ordered a new tablet, the latest Wacom, Intuos4, and gave away my old Graphire4. My new tablet arrived from Mississauga on Thursday, and expecting its arrival, I wanted to draw something to celebrate.

At first, I was going to draw Suka. Then I didn't want to, and instead tried to draw Ainmire, because I love him to bits and miss him. So I started to draw Ain, and I decided the pose was boring, so I erased it and reworked it, and decided I liked it and then got a funny idea... but there wasn't enough room on my paper to fit the idea! So I had to flip the page over and draw it again. I came up with this, and I'm very happy with it, though, as Leah pointed out.. I did take Kara's right leg too far.

I had so much fun paaaaainting it!!! This tablet is so smooth and easy to work with, there are no glitchy spots, or dead areas, and everything works beautifully. I unpacked it like it was something religious, and carefully packed everything back in it's box so I'll still have everything in one place. I set it up, installed it, and instantly started to play.

You can almost over look my horrible line work! Don't worry, a new scanner is my next investment, though I still have no idea what I'm looking at.

Anyhow, Ain and Kara. I wanted to try some different methods of colouring, as I coloured and deleted my work twice on Thursday. Yesterday I went in with a brand new 600dpi scan, and decided to experiment. I had been browsing tutorials the entire day at work (yes, I'm massively productive in my job), and I'd collected lots of different ideas I wanted to test.

First thing I read was to draw and paint the background first.. The artist who's tutorial I was reading said that it helped him stay motivated about the artwork, as the character was the most fun part of a piece. So, I tried to focus on the background first, and it really did help! Granted I still have a mudpuddle carpet there, but the washing basin turned out better than I would have expected! Had I coloured Kara and Ain first, I would have rushed through the background as an afterthought, and this prevented me from doing so. The tutorial I was talking about is right here, if you wanted to take a gander.

More than once I've read, or watched, or been told, about starting with a completely neutral colour and colouring on top. Alright, I'm up to try that! So I coloured in my lineart with a warm gray, and kept all of my flats on one layer; something I'd never tried before. With my line art completely and precisely filled in with a warm neutral, I locked the transparency and coloured directly on top of that, then built layers on top to paint on my shading. Previously I'd colour everything on separate layers, and I'd get long lists of layers with everything broken up, like "Shirt", "pants", "hair", etc etc, but this way I wound up with maybe four or five layers of shading-- which I found a lot simpler and will probably keep to in the future.

I even coloured my lines, something I'm still getting used to. With my horrid scans, leaving them stark black is just too painful to look at, but I wasn't sure if I liked colouring every line in a slightly darker colour than the paint around it. I didn't get a feel for it, and maybe I just need some more practice. Instead I went back and used colour balance to pick a colour for my lines, which wound up being a reddish brown colour. I discovered after I flattened the image it slightly takes away from Ain's costume, but I will eventually get around to repairing that... This time I still have a PSD file to work from. Yes, I thought ahead for once in my life.

New finished product to upload to my DA! Took me two days and a day of farting around with my shiny new E-Tab the second. WEEEEE!!! I love Ain and Kara!!

It was nice, sitting there working away, reworking areas I wasn't happy with, or that looked wrong, going back, touching up, darkening a shade here, lightening a shade here-- I think I got a taste of what my art idols feel like when they're in the midst of painting something. I am a very happy artist right now.

And an experiment

I got this idea today after I bounced my head off some amount of duct work or not that I was supposed to be cleaning at work. I do this quite often in a day, and have multiple bruises I can not explain!

So anyhow, this is the idea I got, more or less, only I originally planned to have the background one colour. When I got home, I was very sad to find my plan wasn't.. working on the computer the way it had in my mind.

I gave up and passed it off as a failure, made a display Icon from it, and buried it away. I told my friend Leah about my experiment, and she asked to see the results. They weren't what I wanted, but I explained the idea I had in my mind and shared the final product, at which she had some suggestions for me to try.. and it fixed my fail! This is the final of a series of three or so test runs, most with varying lines left in, varying lines taken out, but this one here was the closest I had to my original vision. Thanks a bajillion to Leah, who saved it x3

Obviously this isn't DA worthy, i wanted to try making something very flat and simple. I wanted to try making something 'pretty' with a bit of a design flair added to it. My OC Suka (RP healed version), just... looking pretty. =3