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Tagged: schoolism
Schoolism Light and colours week 01
For this first week, our teacher Nathan Fowkes asked us to do 12 under one hour studies of photographs, paintings or any reference that we found interesting.
I have been collecting color scripts and movies screenshots for quite a while so finding references wasn’t difficult. Painting was an other story… I have a whole set of clean-up brushes for character designs but when it comes to painting, I realised all my brushes were of no use and had to find some new ones more appropriate for that kind of exercise. I also had no clue how to go about painting in Photoshop but my knowledge in oil painting and lighting came pretty handy.
Here is what I submitted for this week. The first one took me a very long time to do and I didn’t have time to adjust the colours but luckily I became much faster after having done several and the last ones were more enjoyable. You should try, it is a fun exercise. For each study I tried to work on something different, SSS, backlighting, color scheme…
Credits: Aurélien Prédal (1/2/5), Joaquin Sorolla , Roger Deakins (3/4)), Robert Richardson (7/9/10/11)
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Schoolism – Designing with colours and light
Aurelien Predal Monstre à Paris
Light and colours
Schoolism – Designing with color and light
[update] Well the class sold out in probably less than two hours, this should give some ideas to other online schools like CGMA/CGMW (I can never remember the name, but I highly recommend the storyboard and character design class). CGMA has a 2 hours live class with the mentor every week, Schoolism doesn’t. Come on CGMA, there are plenty of great Feature Animation Vis Dev artist out there.
Check this out, Bobby Chiu’s Schoolism just announced a pretty awesome online class titled “Designing with Color and Light with Nathan Fowkes”.
I have been following Dreamworks visual dev artist Nathan Fowkes for a bit and I had to rush to book the course, granted I will have a slight issue compared to other students, I am slightly colour blind. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue, some people say Van Gogh was also colour blind and this is why the palette he used seems so vibrant to non-colour blind people.
Schoolism has also a bunch of other great classes from Zbrush to Storyboarding (with Kris Pearn) I would encourage you to check out
If you enroll to one of the courses and you want to support Animation with a Moustache, please give them the following promo code 75qs0
I should use this opportunity to thanks the two people who refereed me and I would like to hear which courses you took and how you found them.
I just found a 12 minutes introduction video to an other workshop he helds in L.A. that should give an idea to what to expect from his course.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32rLWfMzHTs[/youtube]
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Schoolism
Schoolism Gesture drawing week 03
Alright I cheated a bit this week. The poses were supposed to be 1 minutes which I respected BUT I spent some additional time cleaning up the poses and fixing proportions. Without a very good understanding of anatomy and proportions, it is really really hard to draw a pose in less than a minute, especially when you have to turn the model around so the silhouette reads clearer. It must be possible with experience but I am not quite there yet. Give me few more weeks 😉
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Schoolism Gesture Drawing Week 02
Schoolism Gesture Drawing Week 01
Schoolism Gesture drawing week 01
Sorry for those waiting to hear from “Pick my Brain” but I am pretty busy with other things at the moment.
One of those is the fact that I enrolled to the Alex Woo and Louis Gonzales Schoolism Gesture drawing class.
It is only the first week so I am not too sure how the class works yet or even who my classsmates are (except my buddy Maciek)
Our first week we were asked to focus on the line of action,. For the sketches I couldn’t find a spot with people showing interesting line of action so I did some regular sketches instead. Here are my assignments:
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Bobby Chiu new free painting tutorial
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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 😉
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Bobby Chiu interview
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