Wednesday, December 9, 2009

There will be more!

Cartoon update coming as soon as I can get my hands on a scanner!

In the meantime I took a picture with my webcam.. Muhahahaha!



Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Couple new things

So I'm working on a reality tv show right now, so I'm finding it hard to find time to update while working 12 hours a day! Anyway, I'm trying to draw during whatever down time I have during the day. Also, I finally got a copy of the Preston Blair book from a very awesome person... You know who you are.



So first up are some Squash and Stretch sketches from the original Preston Blair book. (The new one has new drawings which I have.) A lot of these are not bad. I'm finding that my biggest foe in drawing these is proportion so I'm going to try and find some exercises to work on that.



These drawings are some of the new ones... I think the one at the top left is the best drawing I've done with the Preston Blair practice since I started. The proportions turned out good and the lining and clean up turned out really nice. I was smart enough to draw these all a lot bigger than I normally draw which was helpful as well. The other two turned out pretty well also, although they are unfinished. I need to start putting up more comparison blogs now that I have so many drawings. Next up I hoping to compare the Donald Duck drawings from my previous posts.



Here's a little treat. It's a cartoon based on myself. I'm hoping to be able to use this as a basis for the cartoon I'm planning with the Rob character I've posted before.



This last one is a mish-mash of a bunch of different sketches. A lot of them are using the skull construction that I've been playing with. I also practiced some cartoon hands here and tried to do an angry Donald from memory. I think it turned out alright. The main attraction on this page was an attempt at a full body drawing of a character, the cat, that is. Drawing a full body cartoon character and making it look solid and correct is a lot harder than I expected it could be. I'm hoping that as I come to understand line of action this stuff will get easier.

Well, wish I had more but that's all for now. I'm gonna try to get those Donald comparisons up next time, but until then, here's the link to the page I found the Donald model sheets on so you can look for yourself if you're really that interested. Haha!

http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/index.php?s=disney+model+sheets&submit=Search

Scroll a little bit more than halfway down the page and you should find it.

-k

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

More Donald and introducing some preliminaries...

So I've been doing some more Donald studies because it's a hell of a lot of fun. Hopefully it's not a bad idea, but I've started to develop a character of my own as go through the lessons, mostly for fun.



Here's some standing Donald poses... in all their awkward, unbalanced glory... I thought they were good at first, but then realized how off they were. You might notice that Donald on the left is sort of hanging forward a bit. Donald Right is drooping to the right a bit. The clean up was really messy on these too.



A bit of an improvement here. Donald is standing upright. A big improvement from the first in construction and line of action. However, my hand seems to be terribly unsteady when trying to line these. If you look at the close-ups it's more apparent. I need to find something to practice for that. Still, a good improvement.



This one didn't turn out too bad. My one major complaint is that I constructed the head too wide and hence his eyes are too far apart. The eye on the left doesn't look like it's attached in the right spot because of that. The line of action is pretty good, I think.. Body construction is pretty good too.



Now the really fun stuff.. These are the earliest preliminaries of a character based off of the Rob cartoon sketches I posted before. I did a bunch of sketches that I'm too ashamed of to put up here, but they helped me get to the next page.



So here's the first draft of the character from head on, side view and expression. The one from head on is probably the best of them. I like it the most. The one from the side looks like a South Park character and therefore needs to be changed. I just need to rotate his head and bit and do a 3/4 profile. The last one has a maniacal smile and a wily eyed look. But something is wrong about the nose. It seems to be in the wrong place or something.. Also, the points in the cheeks make him a little scary.. I'm not sure that was the intention.

Well, I'm going to be reworking these a bit and it will hopefully lead to a cartoon. Also I'm going to get back to doing the Blair lessons!

-k

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Comparisons #1

Ok, so I finally got together a comparison post. This took more work than I thought it would. This is lesson three from the JohnK/Preston Blair lessons.. Compare your work...


So I figure I'd start with this atrocious old woman...




This one's pretty painful to look at.. construction isn't great. The eyes are way too wide apart and look pasted on her head. Nose isn't long or crooked enough. the Chin is too long and the glasses are too tall. Eyebrows are in the wrong position too. I need to take another crack at this one...



I like how this wolf turned out. The construction is pretty good aside from some proportion issues. Also the ears don't point straight back like Preston's does and the eyes aren't stretched far enough. Lastly, the nose is too small on mine. Not bad overall though.




I thought this ram was a pretty good copy until I compared it. The head on mine is slightly tilted forward. The snout is pretty good, but the eyes aren't angry enough. Construction is pretty good though.



Again, mine is tilted slighty on the wrong angle and the head isn't tall enough. Good proportion on eyes, nose and ears. The mouth isn't as wide. Another not so bad copy.



This one's pretty good, only two complaints. Eyes are too small and so is the nose. Other than that pretty good.



Here's some sort of sexy mouse or something. Mine actually looks more feminine than Preston's, not sure if that was intentional. The ears are a little off on this one and again the nose and eyes are a little small.



What can I say about this one? The construction seems kind of shabby on this. The eyebrows don't seem to be shaped right nor do the jowels. Looks like Butch lost a few pounds in my copy.



I'm proud of this one because I feel like I really caught the feel of the character in my copy. There are some construction issues with it like the smaller snout and small ears, but I mostly like this one.

Well, that was fantabulous! Next up I'm gonna do some more of lesson 2 drawing and compare my Donald Duck drawings to the originals... Stay tuned!

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Donald Duck and heads!

Ok so I was on JohnK's blog looking for inspiration and I caught this Donald Duck model sheet and couldn't resist..



I picked all of the harder head positions and did two expressions... The head positions were much easier than the expressions. Also, I tried drawing first with an HB and then attempted smooth, dark lining with a 6B. The clean up was a little messy for most of them. Especially the last expression. I probably looked a lot like Donald after drawing that. That expression is deceivingly hard.

Next, I'm going to move on to body positions for Donald so I can learn to draw him using my own poses.




A lot of this is practice with head construction. You'll note the Donald heads here as well. Another attempt at lining, this time with pen. I find that I don't have a very steady hand when trying to do this.. My strokes aren't relaxed and it shows.



So there's a few squash and stretch bits from lesson two of the animation course. I'm going to do more of those tomorrow. I really like the deranged looking dude. He was designed using the head and jaw construction and turned out pretty good. The hand is awful unfortunately, but it's still an exciting expression. The hand looks like it might fall off though. The generic cat is reminiscent of the Rocko stuff from the other day. Not super amazing..

I'll need to start doing the side by side comparisons for the animation course. Here's more info on that: http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/media-preston-blairs-animation-first.html

alright! back to drawing!

-da99et

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Human Studies!

So this is less John K lessons and more human studies.. but there's a little cartoonage in here.




So you probably recognize the ugly guy.. that's me. Also, my buddy, Rob, got me some Rocko's Modern Life episodes so I've had some new inspiration. These drawing are all pretty raw. Heffer's head is set too low on his body. Rocko's giant eyes are kinda wobbly and my one eye is lazy or something..



My self portrait was a culmination of these human skull studies. I'm really trying to step up my drawing skill in all facets. I have a couple more pages that look a lot like this, but it's all the same and kind of boring. This is what my practice looks like. I came to find that the best way to construct a human skull is by first drawing a circle representing the cranium. This covers the top of the skull to just below the nose. Next I draw lines wrapping around the circle to visualize the third dimension of depth. There's a North to South line (straight through the face and back of the head) and a East to West line (straight through both ears). These lines cross at the top and bottom of the cranium. From the East to West line, I extend a jawbone line that completes the head. The neck attaches to the base of the cranium and underneath the jawbone. Hey, I learned something! Blog accomplished!

Well, I wouldn't go that far...



***WARNING WARNING NAKED GUY COMING UP!!! *******








Seriously... I drew his wiener and everything!







Ok, you asked for it...



So he's carrying a big heavy box.. and I'm not talking his junk... The giant weighted box he has in hand is for offsetting his balance and exposes different muscles that wouldn't normally be visible. As I was drawing this I was cursing myself for how awful it was, but once it was done I thought it didn't look half bad. That means it's only half good. I really need to learn to draw bigger and sharpen my pencils so I can fit in all the little details instead ranting and raving. I need to take a note of advice from an article I read that talks about how drawing should remain fun; that's the reason anyone does it in the first place. It helps.


As always... Feel free to comment!

-k

Thursday, August 6, 2009

How about an update, asshole!?

Well, if I keep forgeting how to log in to this thing I'll never be able to update, eh? But, since you asked so nicely, here's an update:

So this a a little more of lesson 1 and a little bit of lesson 2...



At some point, I realized that I could draw pictures bigger. This way fitting in the details isn't as hard! I must be a genius!



This is a drawing that was inspired by a doodle I did that looked like my friend Rob. Here's Rob in all of his computer programing glory. Chained to a desk with a broken ping pong paddle. (He likes ping pong... and paddling heh heh {not really}[The paddling part I mean]) It turned out pretty good except for now that I see it on the computer I can see that the table is lop-sided... sigh... FAILURE!



Here's some of the lesson 2 stuff. Squash and Stretch. So as you might have guessed, a face stretches when the mouth is open or the jaw is down and squashes when the jaw is up and clenched or smiling.. so these are the sketches I did from the Preston Blair Book.
I give myself an A... for Asshole!



A few more lesson 2 things with another pose of Rob being very very angry. I was trying to understand line of action.. which I still just don't quite get..



More practicing line of action with Rob.. the bottom one kinda sucks.. the top two are alright..



Last one of angry Rob. Damn, Rob, who peed in your Cheerios?



This is probably the one drawing where I kinda got the line of action working a bit.


So that's it for now... The rest of the drawings were junk. No need to scan them. I know I always say this, but I'm going to try to update more. Hopefully once a week. I'm really gonna make an effort to carve out some time for this... Or maybe I'm just telling myself that.

Time will tell!

OUT

-k

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

still working!

Hey folks,

I know it's been a while, but I've been doing a lot of traveling and moving to another city. I'm still working on the animation course and drawing in general. Hopefully, I'll have time to get some of it up soon. Stay tuned...

Monday, March 23, 2009

Just a little something I did a few weeks back.. I drew it from a picture I found on flicker of a grumpy looking little girl. I wish I could find the link now, but unfortunately, I can't.
Anyway, here she is...



A stare that could stop a grizzly at 50 ft... I feel like the nose is a little weird now, but I don't have the original picture to compare it to. Then again, little kid proportions tend to be weird and that girl looked to be around 4ish or so.. maybe it's fine? Meh. I like it.


-da99et

Friday, March 20, 2009

Lesson 1 - Animation School


Ok! So I started this thing to get me motivated to actually do what I like.. That doesn't make much sense does it?

Anyway, I'll get straight to the chase... I recently started John K. and Preston Blair's Online Animation Course. What a gem! And just like John K. promised.. I hate doing these drawings! I hate them terribly because they prove to me how bad I am at it... However, I'll persevere until I start getting this stuff to look good! Maybe if I'm lucky John K. might even take a look and give a pointer or two..

So anyway, here's the work I did for lesson 1. Drawing heads...






I was surprised to find that even though I've been drawing since I was a wee little kid.. I had somehow lost the basics which I've known and practiced, but still lost somehow. Basic construction is what I mean. I could barely draw a nice looking egg shape when I started this lesson! The goat is the one cartoon I actually copied from Preston's book in the above image.





I also made the unfortunate mistake of doing some of these on lined notebook... a mistake I shan't make again. I also did a little experimenting; guesstimating how the dog's face might look from the front. Looks like crap apparently...




Most of these notebook drawings turned out semi-ok overall, I think.




I used a red sharpie to correct mistakes.. not realizing that was a mistake in itself.. The line is so thick, I couldn't see the correction! Moved to red pencil after that.






Again.. I did a bit of experimenting with what I learned to try and do a few of my own characters. They didn't turn out as well as the cartoons from the book.



I used the turning egg model to try and predict what this bear would look like from some different angles. It didn't turn out too bad I think. The two at the bottom and the one near the bottom off to the right turned out good. Also, the one at the very top is a copy of the exact position in the book and I think that turned out pretty nice. Of course, this is all well and good until I get to lesson 3 and start having to compare my work over Preston's and pick out all the flaws in mine. Haha! Can't wait...



Lastly, I have a little treat. I did a Kowalski sort of inspired dude based on the things I learned from lesson 1.. Even though lesson 1 didn't get in to body's, but hey.. I'm an over-achiever.. what can I say?




So, of course I welcome feed back of any kind. I'm trying to get better here, so lay it on me! Also, If you are interested in doing the course or just want to see where I'm getting a lot of these classic cartoon examples to work from.. you can check it out here:

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/meta-100000-animation-drawing-course.html

There's also a link to John K's blog at that link. If you love cartoons check it out, funk master!

Alright, well thanks for looking at my crappy work! There's more to come!


-da99et