Animation with a moustache

The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!

Category: Drawings

Snowman walk 11

Animation / Drawings / Painting / Portfolio

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Snowman walk

Few people wanted to see this guy animated so here it is. Believe it or not this was animated in Maya. I placed the walk cycle on a nurbs plane and animated the UV 🙂 I have been told I could have just used Photoshop. I will give it a try next time or maybe use Plastic Animation Paper since it is free.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33138769[/vimeo]

and while I am at it, here is a little teaser I made with my new camera using some footage I shot during my last Animation Collaborative character design class with Albert Lozano and Chris Sasaki.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33213216[/vimeo]

Related posts:
Scarecrow model packet

Scarecrow model packet 5

Character design / Drawings / Education / Painting / Portfolio

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Scarecrow model packet

Today we had one more amazing Animation Collaborative Character Design class.

This time, Albert and Chris brought Jason Deamer to give us a talk on Model Packeting. According to Al and Chris, Jason is the best artist for that kind of work at Pixar. Jason shared with us some of his Model sheets from Finding Nemo and we also saw some more from Up and the character Muntz in particular.

Here was the assignment I turned.

This is a rough “model packet” for one of the characters from my take on the “Wizard of Oz”. A “Wizard of Oz” that would take place in Siberia.

A model packet is a document that gets handed to the 3d modelers so they can take a design and turn it into a full 3d model. It can range from 5 to 18 pages depending on the complexity of the character or how much direction the modelers need.

There is nothing too complicated for that one but that was still pretty challenging. It is still very rough for the time being, I will post a cleaned up version very soon. Right now the arms and nose are not detailed enough for the modelers to do their job. The eyes also need to be worked out as they wouldn’t communicate eye direction. I will probably go for cartoony eyes like the last drawing.

I hope you like it!

Related posts:
Snowman walk

Bobby Chiu new free painting tutorial 2

Character design / Drawings / Education / Painting

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Bobby Chiu new free painting tutorial

Bobby Chiu is a very good artist, a very good businessman and still a very generous guy.

I hadn’t followed him for a year or two and while looking for Photoshop painting tutorials for a friend I found that “new” video he posted well … last year.

Unlike his old painting videos, in that 190 minutes long tutorial (9 parts video) he explains his whole painting process from the original scanned sketch to fully rendered. This is probably similar to the paid videos you can get when attending his online art school Schoolism.com.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dib6oA3in0[/youtube]

Since this is a free video, I am also posting my notes, feel free to add comments to these.

Water creature fishing

1. Bring the scanned sketch onto a layer in multiply mode, Bobby work at 33% of the final res
2. Open a second window not the navigator in a corner at about 12% to get an overview
3. Create a backgrond layer in dark grey
4. Add a new layer inbetween sketch and background and work on the tonal values of the character, we establish the base tone.
5. We create a new layer for the cast shadows
6. We create a new layer for the Colors in Color mode

Part 4 Lets bring the lights in:
1. We have been roughing out until now but it is time to zoom in, to add more detail in normal mode
2. Upmost layer in Normal mode we add the light so the sketch disappears

Part 7 Adding a secondary rim light

Part 8 Make an overal Levels change to make the painting much lighter. I would actually do the exact opposite so the dark area would have more details rather than creating flat dark areas… strange workflow

Ah and while I was getting ready to post this….. I just received a notification that Bobby Chiu posted an other AWESOME video interview with Pixar story artist Alex Woo. Alex was Tom Gately’s substitute teacher at AnimC last week and the class had a really fun time with him. Alex is a gesture drawing teacher in San Francisco and his class is usually sold out month in advance, he also holds a very popular class at Bobby Chiu’s Schoolism

As a side note, using the 75qs0 promo code when registering on the Schoolism website, you should get a nice discount and it will also help to fund my Philz coffee addiction 😉

Related posts:
Dice Tsutsumi interview
Bobby Chiu interview

Moonshine 2

Drawings

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Moonshine

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/29200097[/vimeo]

DreamWorks first personal art publication, Moonshine, was conceived as an opportunity to highlight the breath of artistic development talent at Dreamworks.

This short documentary gives you a sneak peek into the personal works from the artists.

via Paperwalker

While we are at it, here are some of my latest sketches and a picture of my AnimC classmates hard at work on the Berkeley campus.



Sketching with Jason Seiler 0

Animation / Character design / Drawings / Painting

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Sketching with Jason Seiler

The jury is still out there on the importance of being good at drawing for CG animation but to me, being able to quickly convey my ideas through rough sketches or a series of thumbnails is one more tool to a CG animator toolset therefore acquiring drawing skills should be one of our goals. It is also a great party trick! 😉

I lived in West Africa for a while and there were many circumstances where I couldn’t pull out my camera but no one minded when I fired up my pens and pencils. My skills weren’t that amazing at that time but once I have a bit more experience with watercolours or maybe gouache, I am hoping to travel again for a month and fill up an entire sketchbook.

This brings me to great video I just found on Schoolism.com:
“Sketching with Jason Seiler”.

There are thousands of free sketching videos on Youtube but they are always too short or not exactly what I am looking for so $25 for looking over Jason’s shoulder and listening to his process is a bargain. It is also a great introduction to the great training Schoolism is offering.

The video is a bit less that 2 hours long and you see him sketching in the street and at his desk, demonstrating the importance of breaking down the subject into simpler forms and shapes, thumbnailling, crosshatching, digitally painting on a TabletPC, ballpoint sketching and applying watercolours.

On a minor note, each artist has their own style and I prefer cleaner lines to the more fiddly Jason uses when sketching, in the watercolours section he didn’t really explain his thought process and how he selected his colours however, I would still highly recommend watching those videos if you are trying to develop your sketching abilities.

You will probably need to register to access the website but don’t worry it is really quick.

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My drawing category

Edinburgh Fringe festival 0

Drawings / Portfolio

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Edinburgh Fringe festival

For my coworker and environment artist extraordinaire John’s birthday, we went to the Edinburgh Fringe festival this week end. The town is soo pretty that I will have to come back and do more architectural drawing.

Back from California 0

Drawings / Portfolio

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Back from California

With my hero Mike

I just came back from California and I am completely jet-lagged 😉

This is the second time I visit San Francisco and Los Angeles but having been invited to visit some of my favourite animation studios made the trip much more special.

I had decided to focus mainly on my sketching skills this time and try to apply what I learnt during the past seven month. My knowledge in anatomy and proportion combined to 7  month of intense life drawing practice helped me to make the most of those very long journey on bus and subway. The Santa Monica/Downtown LA journey was probably the most fruitful since people tend to quickly fall asleep and not pay attention to that one guy with dark glasses and hat screwed on his head, frenetically moving a pen on a tiny notepad, in a corner, at the back of the bus 😉

If I lived in LA, I think I would take the bus everyday, the passenger always presented amazing features to capture and every ethnicity and age range was on display.

Here are some drawings and pictures from my trip. I had brought some watercolours but eventually decided against using them. I didn’t want to ruin the sketches with poorly chosen colours. I need more experience with those however….. the reason why some of the sketches don’t have any shading,  is because  I still intend to colour them at some stage 🙂 I just found a great video tutorial with Jason Seiler that could prove useful. Jason Seiler/Schoolism

Forgive the poor line work, I was using a cheap Bic cristal and those don’t allow much thick and thinness. I had in mind to buy Glen Villpu’s favourite Namiki Falcon fountain pen but at $180 a pop at Flax, I eventually decided against it. It is only $120 online. Still very expensive for a fountain pen but the nib is really really flexible.

Here we go, that’s it. Enjoy

[ps] if you don’t know Matt Jones, check out his work, he has some really nice sketches on his blog
http://mattjonezanimation.blogspot.com/

Related post:
Sketchcrawl material

Life drawing obscurantism 2

Drawings / Portfolio

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Life drawing obscurantism

Some time ago, my friend Annes sent me a link to a different Life Drawing class that I would possibly enjoy more than the one I am currently attending and everything finally made sense.

In life drawing, there seem to be a predominant “school of thought” that believes in learning by pure academic observation. That “London Atelier of Representational Art” (LARA) in Clapham Junction, even goes to the extreme of forcing you to draw using a “Sight-size method”. As they describe it, here is how it works:

“the artist first sets a vantage point where the subject and the drawing surface appear to be the same size. Then, using a variety of measuring tools – which can include strings, sticks, mirrors, levels, and plumb-bobs – the artist draws the subject so that, when viewed from the set vantage point, the drawing and the subject have exactly the same dimensions.”

I think “academic observation” is very valuable when drawing from the model but as Glenn Villpu implies it in his theory and instructional material. This is just, one tool!

How long is it going to take you to finally be able to work as an animator, illustrator, storyboard artist and draw from imagination then? Years and years and years and years!

Why not instead, add more tools to your toolset. Why no try to understand the underlying structure of the figure? What about learning proportions and the different parts of the skeleton but also the few muscles that shape the surface of the skin? How to represent the figure in simple geometric shapes?

What about learning … the Structure!

The big problem with the “Academic observation” approach is that you only discover the elements of the structure through experiencing them, this can take a very long time. It is what I would call “brute force life drawing” teaching. But there is a smarter way!

K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer published a great paper a while ago, about “the Role of deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”. The paper is a bit dry so you would be forgiven to skip to something a bit more approachable and that great article from CNN called “The secret of greatness”.

What those articles try to demonstrate is the importance of having a plan when learning and focus your practice on specific areas. This is what they call “Deliberate practice“. “Brute force” learning is great but it is definitely not the deliberate practice sort of approach.

Where can we learn about structure? well Glenn Villpu is the obvious start, then all the AWESOME blogs, Dreamworks storyboard artist and life drawing teacher, Rad Sechrist, is part of!

Rad How To
Analytical figure drawing
Advance figure drawing
The Art Center

Reading those blogs and learning what is on display should help you improve tenfolds!

I would also recommend Andrew Loomis pdfs as a start actually and this great 1890 book by french Dr Paul Richer
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k205846w.planchecontact.r=richer.f145.langEN where he shows the relationship of the head height to the rest of the body.

To finish this post, here are my two last drawings from my thursday class:
Contains nudity
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Life drawing, second term just started 1

Drawings / Portfolio

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Life drawing, second term just started

This term I have gone a bit mad and enrolled for 3 classes a week for a total of 7h. I can already see a lot of progress compared to last term. Better composition, better line work, better shading, better proportions, speed. Good thing I didn’t walk out or gave up like other students.

Here is a 2 hours pose. My Thursday tutor keeps telling me that I would be a great forger. That’s not a good thing for him. As artists, we shouldn’t try to copy the model like a camera would.

I don’t care much for the moment, being a camera is still a good thing for me until I have mastered anatomy and proportions.

This term is very exciting, I am sharing two classes with a lot of very talented concept artists and artists from the Video game industry. That is a lot of competition but at least that pushes us to get better.