Watercolors Are Hard.

I recently did a two weekend watercolor workshop through the USCAD program at the U of S and I thought that I would post some of what I did.  I discovered that watercolor painting is not an easy thing to master.  Mixing vibrant colors was especially difficult for me.  It was also difficult having two other classes and working part time while it was going on...I am very tired now.

For the first weekend we did a lot of color mixing exercises and learned to find the lightest lights and the darkest darks first when painting.

We did some drapery studies.

And a whole lot of still lives.

We also did a winter landscape from a photograph.

For the second week we were encouraged to take what we had learned from the first week and try out different styles of watercolor painting.    We worked from photographs again and did some portraiture.

I tried out pointillism.

We also did an exercise where we had to paint the picture upside down in splotches of color.

We did a timed still life.

On the last day we had a model.  We did some warm up gestures and some quick paintings with a limited color palette.

This warm up painting ended up looking like an amazon woman...

And this one ended up looking like a fancy cave woman...

My longer pose turned out a little better, but it could still use a lot of work.

Then I did a quick tree study.

And another still life.  My teacher told me to try a more vibrant color palette.  That didn't work out so well, hahaha.

We also got to do a non-winter landscape, and I chose to do one of Loch Shiel in Scotland.  I went on a Harry Potter fan trip a couple of years ago and this was one of the coolest places that we visited.  It is also where they filmed a bunch of parts of the Harry Potter movies!  If you look really closely you might even see Harry riding Buckbeak over the water in the distance... 

I also tried playing around with some watercolor pencils that I had bought.  It wasn't turning out so great until I added some ink for the outline and gave him some fruity friends.  None of them are happy to see that pear though...

Animation Mentor Class 2-week 2-4

Ok, so blogger finally decided that it wanted to let me upload video files again, so I can finally post what I`ve been doing for the past few weeks.  For week 2 we had to take our video reference and thumbnail poses and translate them into Maya to begin actually blocking out our assignment.  For the basic blocking we just had to get the basic timing, key poses and breakdowns in there.  Here`s what my first pass at it looks like. 

In week 3 we had to take our blocking pass and start a `blocking plus`pass.  We had to incorporate our mentors notes and start to move it out of stepped mode and into splined.  In Pete`s feedback he said that the wind up for the kick needed to have more of a bounce to it and more of a squash and stretch into the jump and kick.  I re-blocked it out incorporating those notes.

 

I started moving into the dreaded spline mode and this is how it turned out.

The timing turned out being really even and the kick was way too slow... I had a LOT of trouble trying to get Maya to do what I wanted this week and it was really frustrating.

In week 4 we had to take our mentors notes and start to refine our animation.  My biggest problem was timing, so I worked on it a lot.  Pete also suggested a slightly different approach to the fake out and wind up to the kick, so I took a shot at that.  I was still having trouble with Maya and it turned out looking a little choppy.  The speed of the kick worked out better though.

   

When I get time I might revisit it and try to make it smoother, but for now I`m just going to move on to my next assignment.  The drunken stumble! 

So I haven't posted a lot up here for a while, mostly because I have had a CRAZY busy couple of months, but I have a ton of stuff to post up here over the next while.  The first thing that I wanted to post about is that I started Class 2 (Psychology of Body Mechanics) at Animation Mentor!!!  My new mentor for this term is Pete Paquette, who like my last mentor works at Blusky Studios.  Some of the Q&A's that we've had with Pete so far have been the most entertaining that I've had since joining AM.  He doesn't sugarcoat things and he swears like a sailor, and I kind of love it.  He has also been doing walkthroughs in Maya during the Q&A's which have been really helpful.

For our first assignment we were given a pick list to choose from including things like walking down stairs, a sidestep, river dance, back flip, and other stuff like that.  I chose to do a roundhouse kick, because I was hoping that it wouldn't be too terribly difficult so that I could focus on making the weight of my character believable.  It turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had originally thought it would be...  For the first part of the assignment we either had to create our own video reference or go and find some on the internet.  Seeing as how the assignment was not to create an animation of someone failing a roundhouse or falling over I knew that filming my own reference would probably not be the most helpful route.  Luckily I found a couple of great roundhouse reference videos on youtube and this one especially was great in describing what was going on during the kick and showing it in slow motion as well.  I don't think that I have ever watched so many people being kicked in the head...There were many videos of people being on the wrong side of a roundhouse, and not just adults, little kids too....

The next step was to take the video reference and make thumbnails of the major poses to plan out our animation.

Sketch Blog-Imaginary

"Unicorns are not imaginary.  They just made up that rumor after people found out that they tasted like bacon."

So I left this week's sketch blog until the VERY last minute because I had a crazy busy week full of homework and a watercolor workshop and I did it while very over-tired and sleep deprived.....Can you tell?  I was pretty excited to draw a unicorn, although a unicorn standing on it's hind legs in a supermarket looks a little strange.  I did the background really quickly because I was tired and didn't really want to work on it any more.  I do like that the unicorn shops at a store that stocks liquid food, moonshine AND value pack tacos though.

So my sister got me to do some paintings of our dogs a little while ago (in exchange for a Princess and the Frog movie poster from Disney Movie Rewards....) and I'm finally getting around to posting pictures of them.  We have 3 dogs, all chihuahua's named Abby, Sophie and Amigo and they are all ridiculous.  My sister is a huge Ron Burns fan, so she asked me if I could do them in a similar style while still incorporating my own.  I tried my best!

I first did little thumbnail paintings to try and figure out what kinds of colors I would use and where the general placement of the dogs would be.

This first thumbnail painting turned out looking more like an angry Ewok type creature than a chihuahua.  It also let me see that just painting the dogs head with no body is kind of creepy...it looks like Sophie had a run in with a guillotine or the Cheshire cat.

The next thumbnail I did was of Abby, our long haired chihuahua.  I like how the eyes and the colors turned out.

The last thumbnail that I did was of Amigo.  He has an abnormally large head.

After the thumbnails I had a better idea of how I wanted the paintings to look, so I did the actual paintings on slightly larger canvases.

And here are some actual pictures of my dogs for comparison.

Amigo

Sophie

All 3 dogs

And then I found a ridiculous sultry picture of Amigo...

The End.

50th post! And Class 1 Progress Reel

So I just realized that my last post was the 50th one on this blog!  Happy 50 posts, blog!  For the occasion I got you a progress reel...More specifically my progress reel from Class 1:Basic Foundations at Animation Mentor!  The class was awesome!  My Mentor Scott Lemmer was super wonderful and always pushed me to do better while still being incredibly supportive at the same time.  My classmates were also super supportive and I thank them for all of their helpful feedback and comments!  I start Class 2 on Monday, and I'm super excited for it!  I'm really  looking forward to the break week that we get in between Class 2 and 3.  Animation is hard work!  Anyways, here's my Class 1 progress reel!

Animation Mentor Class 1-week 10 and 11

So after the Vanilla walk we got a chance to put a little bit of character into Ballie with a personality walk.  We were allowed to choose from pretty much any type of personality walk, happy, sad, old, young, etc.  I chose to to a sneaky walk.  This is my planning for my contact poses/breakdowns and extreme up and down positions.  

This walk turned out to be a little tricky because there is so much back and forth to it.  I had a lot of help from Richard Williams Animators Survival Kit though!

And this is how my initial blocking pass turned out.

We also had to do a Stu pose conveying exhaustion.

Here's how my final pose turned out.

I got some good feedback from my mentor as well as some awesome words of encouragement from Dreamworks animator and former AM student Ron Pucherelli!

In week 11 we had to take our blocking and throw it into spline, as well as putting into a 3/4 

view.  It was the first time we were asked to actually animate our assignments in a 3D view

 instead of just a side view which was a little scary...

  

Once I put my blocking into spline a lot of craziness happened as well and I spent a lot of time fixing and tweaking it.  I even pulled my first AM all-nighter and stayed up until 6am working on it.  Even with all of that time spent on it I still forgot to look at it in a front view to make sure that the weight was shifting properly from leg to leg with each step...I guess I'll have to do that in my revisions.  Anyway, this is how it turned out.

Because I was up so late working on it and because my brain goes a little crazy with no sleep I decided to make a background for Ballie to sneak past.  And because I fail at modeling I drew a picture of it.  And with that I give you 'Sleepy Bears'

I managed to get the BG into Maya, but I forgot how to playblast the file with textures and such, so I had to leave it without the bears.  This is what it would have looked like though.

Our final Stu pose of the term had to convey balance.  Here are my early sketches.

I decided to go with one inspired by the Karate Kid.

And once again my tired brain decided to give my assignments a background...

And that was my last assignment of Class 1! I had a great term a learned a ton!  Even having taken traditional animation classes before it was really good to refresh the basics/foundations of animation and I'm super excited to start Class 2!  Psychology of Body Mechanics here I come!