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

Let's finish catching up, shall we?

Hey!  It's the first day of almost-freedom for me!  I'm all done with my classes, but have two projects to rework by Tuesday next week.  I should be at work today, but I caught the plague my parents had and didn't want to expose anyone.  Hopefully I'll be better tomorrow.  I better be.

Anyways!  Now that I have (almost) no more homework, I have a little time to finish catching up moving stuff over to this blog.  Let's start with Fur and Fangs stuff, and for simplicity's sake we'll focus on the two main characters.  Warning, this might be long.

This is my very first ever drawing of Walter, done way back in early 2011.  I was trying to figure out what he looked like in the short story I wrote about him when he was a kid, before he and Kevin were in the same universe.

I think this is the second drawing I ever did of Walter, and the first one I did of Kevin.  I thought I had their relationship dynamic down in this image, but I was wrong.  It's very different.

Now I started trying to develop them into workable characters.  I took this drawing of Walter and showed it to my teacher, Jake Parker, and he did a draw over on it that dramatically changed my approach.

This was my first attempt at a new style with a skinnier Walter.  I wanted Walter to be skinny, and Jake encouraged me to push that.  Looking back now, this drawing is atrocious (I cringe looking at it), but it was a step in the right direction.

And the next drawing of Walter!  Now we don't look as horrible.  I was trying to figure out how he would look different in vampire-mode.

Now we have another drawing of Kevin and Walter.  At this point I was seriously struggling with Kevin.  He refused to be drawn by himself.  After this, though, he started cooperating more.

An attempt to figure out Kevin more.

Meanwhile, I'm also trying to figure out what Kevin's wolf-form looks like.

It still needs work.

And another attempt at a full-body ref for Kevin.  His face still isn't quite right.

A friend of mine decided to draw some fan art of Walter after hearing some of my story, before I'd decided what he looked like, and I really liked what she did with his hair.  I decided to play with his hair and get rid of the stupid downward-facing curl on the top of his head.  I came up with a "cool" hairstyle for him that he will get later on, and then a regular hairstyle for before and when he's being lazy about his hair.

Walter has a sister.  This was more practice drawing Walter.

More trying to figure out Kevin.  I decided most of his siblings sleep with him.

And the wolf-form is still needing work.

A straight pen drawing of Kevin just before the end of the year in 2011.

Now on to 2012!

So, I started drawing them every now and then while I wrote a significant portion of the story.

And we still haven't gotten the wolf-form figured out yet, but it's much better than it was before!

Another drawing!  I wanted to try and see what ways I might try to ink the comic once I started making it, so I inked it up in Photoshop.

We are then brought to this image.  It's been around a year since I drew and inked it, but it's still one of my favorites of these two.  They finally settled into looking like themselves, and they've stuck to this since, and the inking style has stayed similar as well.

Then we have some expression practice to help me learn about Walter better and to try to draw him consistently.  I should do this with all of them.

However, I still didn't know what Kevin's wolf-form looked like, so I sat down and pounded it out until I was happy with it.  I ended up with this.  Granted, it still wasn't perfect, but it was good enough for me to start working with it.

And there we pretty much have it!  That is the evolution of Kevin and Walter over the course of a year, pretty much from June-ish 2011 to June-ish 2012.  To see how they've been doing since the comic started in September 2012, please go read the comic!  :)

(Wow, I was really terrible at drawing back when I started working with them!  o.O  This was an eye-opening post to do.  Not that I'm amazing now, but wow!  I'm a lot better than that.)