Having no artsy fartsy background, it’s really hard for me to figure out how to go about colouring in drawings. I’m always trying to refine the way I colour in my scans because my process feels really slow. I did a couple of photoshop tests – 2 layer (ink + paint) on the left and 1 layer (ink + paint on the same layer) on the right. Both seem to have their own look which also took around the same time to do (roughly an hour or so). I found doing everything on one layer gives a more pleasing, painterly feel but a real pain to do major refinements. Having the ‘ink’ on the a seperate layer sort of gave me a good sense of security but I have no idea how to go about cleaning up lines in a way that wont drive me insane. It also got a little confusing which layer I was working on at times.

Preston Blair theories starting to click i think.

Sometimes life just surprises you.

No, really I’m a little ahead on AM assignments this week so I thought I’d do some concept work for the short film classes which isn’t for about another year or so, but i’m little bit of an early worm!
First Idea: Minotaur trying to cross a river infested by hungry, hungry piranhas. I think it will present some cool animation ideas.
We’ll see how it goes.

Just wanted to draw a character looking happy about something he’s not really sure about. Kinda how I feel at the moment.

I had a bit of time to animate this weekend – so naturally I spent it surfing the net. I found some cool stuff too:

Crazy dynamics fur thing in maya. Have to watch the video to see the full use of it but it basically lets you select your fur poly object which it instances to a character and gives you a bunch of controls for deformations.

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/dynamics/ho-particleFur-mel-4839.html

Dynamic parenting script

http://studentpages.scad.edu/%7Ejdoubl20/rigsScripts.html

Dynamic giggle thing

http://mcbob.altervista.org/vid/dynamics.html

Pose saver with thumbnails!

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/animation/PoseMAN-5226.html

Frame filter: great cinematography resource, if it doesn’t crash your browser.

http://framefilter.blogspot.com/

Acrylic tuts. I just got a bunch of paint and I dont know how to use them!

http://www.elfwood.com/farp/acrylics/introduction.html

http://www.artinstructionblog.com/acrylic-painting-tutorial-by-harmony-steel

Fixed single gear bike I ordered.

I’ll be starting animationmentor.com in about 6 weeks. Which will mean a few things: sleeplessness, no-money-ness, less-bloggy-ness.
It should be fun.