Life Drawing Class- Photoshop Enhancement

I joined the first year's life drawing class briefly last week, and did some rough sketches of the model. However the drawings were rushed and I also photographed the sketches poorly. So I took the images into Photoshop to enhance the brightness and contrast of the drawings and then decided to paint over the sketched in selected parts using the magic tool.

Character Design Lesson- Body Language and Emotional Expression

In Justin's lesson today we learnt about how body language is important to convey emotion in a character. We practised by drawing each other in different poses, and applying this to a character of our choice.

My chosen character was Amelie. I wanted to draw from a non-animated character, so I could imagine what they would be like in an animated feature.

Narrative- Character Clay Model

When sketching out the main character in our narrative project, I found it was tricky to accurately draw the head from different angles. So I decided to sculpt a small model out of clay to use as reference for drawing. I feel this will help when creating an expression sheet for this character, and even benefit us when we start to digitally model him. It's also good to have this model to pass around to everyone in the group who may need a reference point to draw or model from.

Character- Hive Heist Environmental Sketches

I've been focusing a lot on the characters and creatures in this game, and not enough on the environment. If I get the setting of the game established that may help me more to create a storyline. These are only the first sketches I've made, and I plan on making more that are referenced from nature. 

I decided to create a province with a few settlements in it. This is a rough sketch of the main settlement. On the tree is the hive castle and bellow are hundreds of mushroom houses. Once again these are really rough sketches and have a lot of work to be done to them.

Justin's Character Design Lesson

In Justin's last character lesson we were given a genre to create characters for. The genre I was given was 50s B-movie, and so I created Tula. She is from another planet far away, and reigns as queen there. In an attempt to rule more planets she comes to Earth in search of power. She arrives in America in the 1950s. She is then lead to believe that Marilyn Monroe is queen of the Earth, and so tries to imitate her image, however it doesn't quite work and a lot of her original alien image still shows.

Another idea I had was a werewolf of wall street. I made this purely for the pun.

Life Drawing

Thanks to the change in the timetable, I was able to join the first year's life drawing class. I haven't done life drawing for quite a few months and found it slightly tricky getting back into it. I found today that the fast sketches went well for me, but the longer poses were slightly out of proportion. Still it was good to do this again, and I hope to join onto more classes in future.

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Character Project- Wasp Nest Environment Thumbnails

I've been scribbling down a few ideas for the wasp nests. I've tried to make these sketches contrast with the style of the bee hive thumbnails.

Character- Hive Heist: Sketches and Thumbnails

There were a couple of things I wanted to change about the Queen Bee and the Wasp Queen characters. I wanted to experiment with a new look but was struggling with drawing out sketches in Photoshop, so I went back to using pencil on paper to do my sketches.

Queen Bee Sketch

Wasp Queen Sketch

I also started doing some thumbnails on some of the environments in the game. These thumbnails are of what the bee hives may look like. I tried to reference from real bee hives but also incorporate some medieval architecture into the sketches, such as castles and cathedrals.

Bee Hive Exterior

Bee Hive Interior

Some Traditional Animation

I've recently invested in an A3 light pad made by Huion, and I couldn't be more happier with it. I've been doing some very rough animated frames, using normal A4 cartridge paper and HB pencils. I don't have tripod for the camera as my dog chewed it up, so I had to prop the camera on a box and photograph the frames up against the wall. So they are very short and messy clips of animation. Still it's good practice.

Cathedral Sketches

In my little sketchbook I had done a lot of drawings of Canterbury cathedral. I decided to work on bigger paper so I can spend longer on the sketches, and include more detail. One thing I found difficult when working on a larger scale, was getting proportions and perspective right. I now can see that these drawings look a little distorted in places and I could tidy them up better.

More Sketchbook Work