Drawing for Animation Final

So for one of the class assignments we got to design whatever we wanted.  I had a character in mind named Hyacinth based off of the macaw, so I decided to do her.  However, none of the silhouettes really worked, but I picked a favorite and went ahead anyway.

After the silhouettes I did several sketches.

I colored the final sketch up with the Hyacinth Macaw blue and yellow, but then my husband pointed out that she looked like the cartoon hero Static Shock (who I had no knowledge of up to this point).  They had super similar outfits down to the yellow goggles.  I decided to try and make my character different and tried a Red and Green Macaw for the colors instead.  It turned out much more fun and my character Red was born.  She's from a future post-apocalyptic bio-punk type of civilization and is a genetically engineered being.

For the final project we had to come up with three characters, an animal, a prop, and two environments.    I wanted to create a story around Red, so I kept her in mind for the entire project.  Again, the first step was silhouettes.

I chose the silhouettes I liked best and also chose birds to base the colors of the characters off of.  The birds are, from left to right, Chestnut-backed Chickadee, Ornamental Hawk-Eagle, and Blue-winged Mountain Tanager.  All of them are genetically engineered as well.  Their wings work, but they can't fly with them.  They're not quite structured right for that, so they need mechanical aid.  Red has no wings, just feathers where the wings should be.  Fledge has a robotic arm.

For the animal I decided to base his colors off a Tiger-striped Tree Frog.  They are so awesomely cool looking.

I struggled really badly with the environments.  I need to practice on those a lot more.

 

And the prop!  I decided that they would use speeder bike things to provide the thrust to let them fly.  The bike provides the propulsion, while their wings provide the lift and steering.  I think it's pretty sweet, and my teacher like the concept as well.

So there you have it!  My drawing for animation final.  I do intend to use all of this for a story someday, so please don't steal any of it.  :)  All this stuff is copyright to me.

Drawing for Animation with Jake Parker

Warning, it's another long post.  Lots of pictures.

So, my last semester at BYU I was able to take another class from the amazing Jake Parker.  Of all the teachers I've learned from, he is the one I learn the most and grow the most with.  The drawing for animation class is a basic concepts of drawing kind of class, and it was nice to go over those again.

You can see all the lectures and student's work on the class blog.  It's good stuff.  You should check it out.

Okay, now let's go through the whole semester!
The first assignment was to draw every day so that by the scheduled final we had 106 drawings.  I'll put the best of those together in another post and upload that another day.

Assignment #2 was to redesign a Mario universe character and practice inking styles/mediums on it.  I chose Princess Rosalina, who I did not know existed until this assignment.  The first time I used a micron, brush, and ballpoint pen.  I basically failed the assignment since I made them look all really close to the same.  

I redid the assignment with mechanical pencil, ballpoint pen, and a brush pen to try and get different results.  Jake like these much better.  :)

Then I colored her for fun and practice.

The third assignment was to redesign a character from the Nintendo franchise.  I picked the Mailman from Twilight Princess.  He weirded me out the first time I saw him and I decided he needed to be fixed.  The first step was to do silhouettes and design a character based off of the silhouettes.

The Silhouettes

   

 

My first pass.

 Jake didn't like this one so much.  He really liked the outfit, but the design was fairly standard and didn't push the shape of the figure.  I waited until the end of the semester to redo him since I wanted to learn more and improve my drawing skills before trying again.

I did more silhouettes.

This was the final redesign.

I don't know what Jake thinks of this one, since I turned it in after class was over before the final deadline for everything, but he did help me pick out the silhouette, so maybe he likes it?  I like it.  It's very different from anything I've done before, and nothing like the original character from Twilight Princess.

The fourth assignment was to draw a sea captain.  I decided to draw a lizard pirate.  I like lizards.  We had to do silhouettes for all of the assignments from this point on, but I'm not going to show them too you so that this post doesn't get horrendously long.

For the fifth assignment we drew different poses with our sea captains.  We were to do two expression poses, and two action poses.  This was the first assignment I didn't have to do any reworking on.

For the sixth assignment we got to draw anything we wanted, as long as it was a character.  I drew Red, but I based the big final project around her so I'll save her for my next post.

For the seventh assignment we drew animals.  I decided to take a stab at designing the llama in my webcomic!  Her name is Maple.  Jake really liked her and praised me for doing the structural drawing over the silhouette since that's what made the design really work.  This was the only other assignment I didn't have to do any reworking on.

Then the last assignment before the final was to do compositions with an environment, five exterior and five interior.  Environments and backgrounds are not my strongest thing, I struggle with them, but I'll still share those scribbly drawings with you.

Some of these drawings influenced my environment designs in the final project, so those might look a little familiar when I post that later.

So there you have it!  This is a significant chunk of what I did during my last semester of college.  There will be more posts following this one with more stuff from this class, but this is most of the big assignments.  I love learning from Jake Parker.  I grew a lot this semester and I finally feel like my art is on the good side of borderline!  I made a couple drawings for this class that I thought looked professional or better than I thought I could draw.  Drawing every day helped a lot.  I need to get back on that again.  :P

It's Campaign Time!

So, right now I'm playing as a character in a campaign run by my friend.  It's being loads of fun and I've drawn some for it.  My character is a thief called Jay Bird who has been passing herself off as a boy for many years.  She has flame-orange hair, a ton of freckles, and a troublesome/bratty attitude.  I love her.  :D  She has somehow also turned into the tank of the group.  So far she's gotten an arm broken, burnt to the bone on the same arm, tied to a bedpost while all her strength got magically sapped from her, poisoned and left for dead in an alley, mauled by a bear... and I'm probably forgetting something.

This is Jay all dressed in her boyish attire.  She had a pet rat at the start, but lost it pretty quick.

Here's what Jay looks like as a girl.  She doesn't like dresses.  Pants are much better for running away from things in.

This is Jay and the rest of the party.  They are, from left to right, Caylin, Sittaid, Jay, Chandra, Banen, and Sumi.

Jay first meeting Sittaid.  He blackmailed "him" into working for him.  Then Jay ran away that night.

Jay took Chandra, the priestess girl, out on a rooftop date to thank her for helping "him" with "his" broken arm the night before.

After getting burnt to the bone, then healed, Jay ran off to a brothel to relax and calm down from all the craziness.  Trouble followed the group, so the group followed Jay.  Jay was not happy about having her relaxation/dress-up time with the girl she'd bought for the night interrupted.  Sittaid's brain kind of broke  when he found out Jay was a girl.

Turns out the bad guys were trying to kidnap Chandra since she's apparently the daughter of Johnna.  That's Jay's mother's name.  It's a pretty rare name.  Chandra doesn't like the idea of being Jay's sister, and Jay has no idea what to think of it.

Sittaid logically decided that since Jay seemed to not like physical attention, the best way to discourage her from walking next to him in her immodest attire after getting soaked was to kiss her forehead.  It worked, but not for the reasons he thought.

Oh yeah, and Sittaid got spots on his nose from upgrading his sense magic for smelling.

This is how I would like Jay to be someday, or something along these lines.  We'll see how long it takes to get there.  This is also my most recent drawing of Jay, from around Christmas time, and you can see how much better it is than the very first on of Jay and Sittaid.  I'm improving!

Like I said, I am very much so enjoying this campaign.  I should draw more for it!  I should write up more of the story sometime to to share with you.  It really is fantastically fun.