In today’s morning class, we had an activity where we had to interview a partner about their family and draw a picture and ink it. I’d scan it, but I don’t have it with me, because my partner liked it and wanted to keep it. After that, we got to work on our comics. I finished inking two pages in class, and finished the rest at home. I still have to erase some of the pencil marks and make a title page, but I’ll have time to do that tomorrow in class. My sharpie started losing its… uhh… inkiness after a few pages, so the outlines for the later pages seem a bit lighter.
In the afternoon class, I got about half of the “Matrix-dodge” animation done, and since tomorrow’s the last day we get to work on these in class, I did the rest of it at home. I also kinda started coloring, but most of that will probably be done tomorrow. The plan here is to have the bullet hit a tree branch, causing the cat and mouse to fall. Unnamed Character will jump to save the animals, but they end up falling on top of her and running off into the distance.
We also had a guest speaker: Max Porter from an animation company called Tiny Inventions. He showed us some of his animations and talked about his career and some projects of his. He is attempting to create a childrens’ TV show, and showed us an example of one of the possible episodes. The cool thing is, if it does eventually appear on TV, I can be like “Oh, I knew about that show before it even came out” and stuff. Yeah, it was pretty cool.
We got to work more on our comics today in the morning class. Specifically, we had to finish transfering (and by “transfer” I mean “redraw”) our comics from our sketchbooks onto bristol paper, which is much higher-quality paper. The comic pages above are scans from my sketchbook, so they’re a lot messier than they actually are on the bristol paper. I’d scan what I have on the better paper, but they’re pretty much just the same thing, and I’d rather just wait until we’re done inking and scan them all at once.
We also worked with oil pastels on bristol paper, and she taught us a technique where we had to go over most of the paper with one color, and then draw stuff in pencil over it. The oil pastel on the paper kinda reduced the friction, so it felt odd when drawing on it in pencil because my lines would go further than expected. Then we had to use a darker version of the color (I forgot the technical term, but it’s like… if you start with yellow, you use orange) to do shading and stuff, and a lighter color for highlights. Then we used some bold color for clothing (in my case, blue), and then we made cross-hatching patterns with the pointy end of a thumbtack. I think it ended up looking pretty nice.
And here’s the progress I made today on the animation. I basically finished the cat and mouse running, the turning around, and the sunglasses guy holding up his gun. The last thing is supposed to be him shooting his gun, but I didn’t really get to finish with that, so it just looks like he’s moving it up.
We finished watching the rest of Persepolis in the morning class today. It was good. Then we spent the rest of class time working on our comics. The first image up there is the third page, and it was actually something I did yesterday (because it was our weekend homework to do a third page). I drew another two pages in class, and I really like the fifth page (which is the third one up there) for some reason. Probably because the random enemy pirate character that I just made up on the spot actually turned out pretty nicely. And we have Unnamed Character from a different angle; an angle which I don’t think I’ve ever done before. The fourth image up there is actually from the afternoon class. It was from a drawing activity where we each got a different set of cards (one was a mouth, one was a set of eyes) and we had to draw our characters with that face. These aren’t really faces I use very often (or at all), so they sort of look weird.
I made this yesterday when I was bored. The cat’s running animation isn’t really that great, because I had a hard time visualizing how its running animation would look like due to its short legs. Other than that, I think it turned out nicely, especially for something I just decided to do for no reason.
And here’s what we did in the afternoon animation class today. We made animatics, which are basically like storyboards with the pictures put on an timeline. After setting up a few important keyframes, we went and animated some of the stuff in between them, which you can see in the example above. All of our animations share a common theme, which is to have a mouse enter at the beginning and exit at the end.
My story basically goes like this: there’s a cat chasing a mouse, and they run up a tree. Unnamed Character is like “oh noes” when she sees the cat in the tree, so she goes into an imagination sequence where she tries to save the cat but is stopped by a government agent for whatever reason. The agent shoots at Unnamed Character, and she does a matrix dodge and flies into the tree and saves the cat. Then the mouse exits. It’s clearly not done yet, but I guess I’ll be posting what I have at the end of each day.
(Nicovideo / Comparison Version)
Here is a Touhou parody of the “Love Cheat” animation.
(Nicovideo)
And here’s one for Hidamari Sketch, since I happen to be watching the second season right now. Well, not at this exact moment.
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