Background WIP

Here's something I've been messing with in Painter lately. I'm half working on the painting itself & half just getting used to various brushes in Painter, so it contains a wide variety of mixed media right now, but that's fine with me. I like how it's taking shape so far, & I'm definitely getting more comfortable in Painter. I'm only using the "Essentials" version that came with my wacom right now, but I can see a future investment in Painter X for sure, I like it far better than PS for drawing/painting. I've used it for a few things before but mainly stuck with a small array of chalks & watercolors. I've been trying to expand my toolkit so to speak with this piece & I'm glad I'm doing it.

I used a lot of impasto oil brushes & palette knives for the ground, as well as some oil pastels on the trees (will probably use more of these to add definition to the ground). I also used some watercolors in various places as well, mostly with a very low alpha to help with the water.



Anyway, this piece will most likely find a home as a BG scene in the Falling Rock project I'm working on . Would love to hear what you think as always, especially if you see something that looks drastically wrong, as this is still a WIP, please let me know so I can fix it before I get too far off on the wrong track.

Other than that, what do you think of the overall look? Does the combination of media work for you? Just curious as I'll probably take a similar approach to the other BG's I have planned. This one & the others are all from photo references. I took a bunch of pics at my favorite trout stream & based this painting off one of them. Didnt trace, but tried to keep it pretty accurate. Anyway, hope people like it, I'm very curious about your opinions, so please feel free to leave feedback.

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Concept Art

Was continuing to mess around with Pencil today & ended up with a scene I may use as a BG for a project I'm getting started with. I'm going to animate the story of Falling Rock. Not sure how many people are familiar with it, but it's a story that I believe originated in the Boy Scouts. I thought for years that my father had made it up, but after some research I found other re-tellings of it around the net.

The versions I found vary greatly & were all interesting reads that just made me appreciate the oral tradition even more. Anyway, the common theme in all of them is that they take place in a mountainous area, and they involve an Indian by the name of Falling Rock. Sometimes he's a boy, sometimes a man, sometimes anywhere in between. In my version, he was always a boy, probably because my dad kept him around my own age to keep me interested. If you live or have traveled anywhere near a mountain region in the U.S., then you've probably seen a sign that says "Look Out For Falling Rock." The short, short version of the story is that the boy grows up the son of a Chief, and learns the ways of the tribe as he grows. Eager to impress his father & show his strength, he goes off to hunt on his own & never returns. The tribe searches endlessly for him & go so far as to have signs posted to keep people on the watch for him.

It's really a great story & one that I was old a hundred times in my youth. I think it will make a great animated piece, I only hope I can do it justice. Anyway, here's the sketch I scribbled out today, obviously needs refinement, but I like it as a start.

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Just Messing Around

Well I was playing with a new program I downloaded recently called Pencil. It's free, open source, and the code is available (in fact I think they are looking for programming help). The main thing that attracted me to Pencil is the fact you can draw & animate both bitmaps and vector shapes. I think this is one hell of a feature, especially for a free program.

I really haven't spent much time playing with it yet, but I can say I'm a big fan of the drawing tools, particularly on bitmap layers. The pencil tool itself serves different functions depending if you're drawing on a bitmap or vector layer. On bitmaps layers it behaves beautifully like a pencil, & is one of the most natural feeling drawing tools I've come across yet. On vector layers, the pencil serves much like the stroke tool in TBS, it draws invisible lines that make borders you can fill in with the paint bucket.

The coloring tools in pencil are limited but ok. The palette is very basic to start, but you can add custom colors and save palettes as well so it's no big deal. I didn't do much coloring in Pencil, but I did find a look I really like by sketching in Pencil on a bitmap layer, then exporting as a series of PNGs. I then imported these into TBS & added a drawing layer underneath where I added color. The animation is very simple, just 3 drawings, & the eye itself could be better for sure, but the overall look is very pleasing to me & I think I'll be attempting more stuff in this style.

I'd love to hear what people think, so feel free to leave crits & comments.

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Some Studies...

Didn't realize how badly I've been slacking on keeping content on here. Sorry about that..., been pretty busy at home & work lately & back in school as well, but I'll try to have fresh content more frequently.

Here are a couple of eye studies, a couple WIP character designs, and a poor attempt at a portrait. Pretty happy with most of it except the portrait. I'll give myself some slack as it's the first one I've tried in probably 10 years or more, but still, even my untrained eye can see it's waaaaaaay off from the reference pic. As a stand alone illustration though it's not that bad, almost looks more like a caricature than a portrait, which would be cool if I had been trying to draw a caricature lol. I'll include the ref pic so you can beat me up more easily. Please fire away with crits & comments, I need them!






Oh & here's a few more bits of classwork, some contour drawings & hatching:

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Updated Link for Cut Out Tutorial

Due to wildly popular demand by upwards of two people, here are new links to the cut out tutorials. Apparently some people have had trouble with the putfile links, so I uploaded the tut to my site. Here's the catch - the new links are going to be very temporary. I'll keep them up as long as I can, space permitting, but the files are quite huge & I can't keep them on my site forever. I will look into other video hosting sites though in the meantime & of course will do my best to keep them available. Hope they are helpfull, feel free to ask any questions. Also it's worth noting that these were done using TBS version 3.5. Everything still applies, but if you're using version 4.0 the interface may look different. Also apologies for the quality of the first one, I think you can still make everything out, but it's litterally the difference between a 20mb SWF file & a 345mb AVI. 345mb?!?!?! yeah.... anyway if the quality suffices I may be able to host them longer than I thought. Here ya go:
*edit* The first part is an swf, second one is wmv. They are both pretty big so they may take a little while to load, part 1 in particular, but they work I checked both.

Part 1

Part 2

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Challenge Results & Other "News"....

Well the results are in, and the winner is.... Fernando Porcel! (see last post). You can check out his entry along with the other winners Here There were a lot of good ones & all the winners deserve a congrats. Ferx scored himself a copy of digicel flipbook lite, so I'm sure he'll have some new stuff for us soon.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... I just got some good news today, I'm officially enrolled in school again, pursuing a B.A. in Digital Arts. I work at a university so the price is right, & while they don't have an animation major here per se, the Dart program does involve a few animation classes. Plus I'm going to learn loads of stuff I need to know whether they are artistic or technical skills. I'm really pumped about getting started, it was looking like I was too late for this semester, but they hooked me up :). I start Thursday with a drawing class that I'm very much looking forward to. Really psyched to get some formal education behind the past year's hobby.

So that's my big news, I can now at least guarantee a certain amount of work over the next few months & I'll be sure to post my progress through the drawing class. For now, here's a little drawing I did last night. Took roughly 45 min, but I had to get up a few times while working on it, so that's just a guess. Not thrilled with it, but it's O.K. I didn't get to finish the basket, & the bananas need a lot of love. In my defense though the general darkness around the left & bottom edges is a result of bad scanning, the BG is really a pretty even tone of grey. Crits & comments are most welcome.

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Mmmmm... Eye Candy

Here is a piece from a good friend of mine, Fernando "Ferx" Porcel. He entered this in a recent challenge at the CG Society, and I can only hope he won (if he didn't then something just isn't right in the world). I was so blown away by this that I felt the need to help spread it around so that other people can enjoy it as well.
He calls it "Lobsters For Dinner" and there is a short story that goes with the painting. You can read the narrative HERE. I believe he worked on this for about 2 months, and it shows. I'm not art critic, but this looks like a snapshot from a Disney movie or something of equal caliber. Enjoy it, I'll be sure to pass along any comments to Fernando.

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Walk Cycle Final

Finished the walk finally! Pretty happy with it, although there are still things I could improve on for sure. But this is what I handed in for the Winter Challenge atAnimationforum.net . I'll post an update with the results when they come in, but in the meantime let me hear what you think! Oh & do check out the other entries, there are some really good ones & the competition will be tough to judge I'm sure.

Here's a link to the fullscreen version
Cheers

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Getting there...

Yet another update on the walk cycle. I keep falling in & out of love with it now, I think I've just been staring at the same thing for too long. I was absolutely hating it last night, but then I got some really good feedback this morning, so maybe I was being a bit hard on myself. Regardless, it's still not where I want it to be, but it is getting closer. I should be able to get it done to my liking in the near future.

Here are 2 versions of the walk. First is 28 frames looping on 1's, then 56 frames looping on 2's. I also did a quick & dirty BG in TBS based on the sketch in my previous post. Ultimately I'd like to animate most of the BG elements to make the world seem "alive," but I'm not going to worry about that until the walk is where I want it. It's not a BG contest afterall...

I'm very curious to hear opinions on these, especially in terms of fast vs slow. Everytime I look at it again I like a different version, & I'm having trouble deciding. Is it too fast on 1's? Too slow on 2's? Aaaaaahhhhh!!! *pulls hair out* Well, whatever I go with I just hope I get it looking good by the end. I've already learned a lot through the 6 million mistakes I've corrected already & there are plenty more to go... So in the meantime, please give me your thoughts on the 2 versions.
On 1's

On 2's

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Outer-Space BG

Had to goto work today & sit around for 7 hours waiting for a truck... not going to get too into that but needless to say I had time to start a doodle & then some. I ended up with this at the end of the day & I'm pretty happy with it. I didn't get to finish it yet. It still needs a lot of definition in the foreground, but I'm pleased with the overall composition. As always please let me know what you think!

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