I saw a drawing from Jake Parker's Inktober digital edition book and loved it. So I thought I would recreate it. Check out his book here: http://agent44.com/blog2/?cat=12 Check out his other artwork too, great stuff. Inspiring artist!
ASketch is a procedural sketching app that generates some shading based on interaction between current and previous sketch lines. You can see such effect in this drawing and the previous one I posted. I am really liking this app for doing pencil like sketches.
I have started sketching again after a long time. And it feels really good. Thanks to my lovely and kind wife for a great gift(ipad) and inspiring me to post :)
Here are a couple of drawings that I did as part of my story-boarding class during Spring'07 at SCAD. We had to come up with a rough story concept and design an imaginary place for that idea. It is very difficult to design something without any reference at all. The best thing to do is to study references for all or some elements of the environment and add your creativity to it. References help making the environment more believable when all the elements are put together. Hence it is very important to study real life references, be it a drawing or an animation piece.
I became speechless after watching just the first few seconds of the film. And absolutely gorgeous drawings in every single frame. Watch it in HD!
Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.
I am back to animating and so far I am learning what my shortcomings are and what should I do to improve myself. It is a great feeling when you know what the problem is and what could be the solution.
The biggest problem in my animations is that they look very pose to pose. The solution to this is simple! Add overlapping and not have all body parts reach the key pose at the same time. I understand this and I have added overlapping in my new animation, but it still looks pose to pose to an extent. Here are some points from my learning so far,
- Body parts reach the pose at different times and some body parts overshoot a little bit in the follow through action
- There are few times when in real life we go pose to pose.
- So overlap is good, but not all the time. Depending upon the emotion or the action we have to do partial overlapping, only few body parts overlapping. (This comes from James Baxter's notes taken by Amrit here)
- Too much overlapping makes animation feel like rag doll. It depends a lot on style of animation of course e.g. slapstick comedy needs quite a big of overlapping. But in general for a little more realistic action we have to be careful in using overlapping.
- When adding overlapping you have to think what is leading the action. Or what makes action clear and stand out. In a simple example if character is punching somebody, you want to delay arm as much as possible and have arm hit the target in the last couple of frames with bigger spacing.
*-Always push the poses for overlapping and exaggeration to find the limit where you feel that it's not too much and too obvious. If we don't push the poses to extremes sometimes overlapping is too subtle to even notice and it can make animation pose to pose and stiff.
(I think this is where my main problem is.)
So in conclusion it is important to remember that we are creating feeling of natural motion and not actually showing overlapping itself.
I feel very excited to have my own website. I am still in the process of updating the pages with more detail and better layout. But mainly I have my demo reel up!
I want to say thank you to my lovely wife :)
http://maulik13.com
I am posting few links and notes (mainly for myself) as I begin animating again. Wohoo!
"Pretty movement vs good acting"
LINK
"Cut the fat from your shot, don't give too much to digest to your audience. Make action and acting clear to get the emotion and story point across."
(from author's comment at LINK)
I generally end up putting extra fat to the acting. While I am animating I suddenly think oh man this would look cool or this action would be very pretty because it has awesome use of overlap and arcs. But, as Brad Bird says, It's about acting man! Not the cool looking motion. (paraphrased)
