Partington’s Proficiency

I drew this in December and never got around to posting it.  This is for all my Twilight nerd friends (you know who you are haha).  Enjoy.

First semester of second year is finished!  Wow, I can’t believe how fast it went.  I have a huge amount of work from the semester that I want to post over the holiday.  Although, I’d like to catch up on some sleep first.

In character design, we had a semester-long sketchbook project that called for caricatured people from everyday life.  Below are a few sketches I did in my new sketchbook.  I’m slowly starting to work bigger, I find my drawings have become more successful because of this.  The new sketchbook is 11″ x 14″.  Aside from the ‘book, I’ve very recently started working with marker, which I only dabbled in during first year fundies, but gave up almost immediately.  I couldn’t grasp the medium, but now I’m dabbling once again; hoping something good comes from it.  The caricatures all have a little marker incorporated into them.  I’d never drawn any caricatures until this semester, so it’s still pretty new to me.  Hoping to improve greatly in the next couple years.  Merry Christmas and enjoy!

After many story beats, mountains of rough boards, and a few changes, my leica reel for storyboarding is finally finished.  We had to create our own stories, based on the theme ‘I hate you’.  We had to add music and sound effects.  Adobe Premiere is easier to work than Pro Tools.  Over the holidays I might post all the rough work that came before this.  Hopefully you can follow along with the boards.  Enjoy.

Like always, I wish I could have spent more time on this animation.  We had to create two contrasting characters and animate them in a walk cycle, run cycle, and include some sort of small interaction between them.  Both characters are supposed to be gangsters from the 20’s or 30’s (Bonnie and Clyde-esque), only the female is the tough badass and the man’s a dumb wimp.  Hah.  I love animation for that reason.  I spent the majority of my time animating the woman, and it shows.  The timing is off but I blame Flipbook for that haha.  This was my first run cycle and the first time I included smear drawings.  Enjoy.

Alright, alright.  So perhaps I’ve been neglecting my blog… a bit.  This will change, I’m hoping.  Second year’s been doing a damn good job keeping us all busy and hidden away from the outside world.  Once I’m on holiday I’ll be sure to go through the mountain of work from first semester and post something.  Only two and a half weeks until the semester’s over, and second year’s half finished.  Surreal stuff.

I’ve been developing concepts of kids for our last character design assignment of the semester.  This is one of those concepts.  A sad girl, wondering if I’ll ever update my blog again.  Enjoy.

This animation assignment nearly killed me.  Not because it was overly difficult, but because I couldn’t manage my time properly.  There are several mistakes (no, really), and I want to go back and fix them because I actually like the animation for the most part.  Timing and spacing is something that’s going to take awhile (forever?) to master.  But hey, I’m trying!

We had to create our own character (yay) and animate them anticipating, struggling to lift something heavy, struggle to throw said object, follow through and end in a believable resting position.

Midterm tomorrow and then reading week.  Hoping to update this thing more.

Really, really, really want to fix this up.  Enjoy.

In my character design class, our professor, Pete Emslie (http://cartooncave.blogspot.com/) had us watch ‘Rabbit of Seville’, a Looney Toons short from 1949.  Pete paused on great action poses from the short and had us sketch them out quickly.  He wanted us to capture the gesture that is the foundation of a great action pose.  It was the best in-class assignment I think I’ve ever had.  Below are my sketches and the short.  Maybe you’ll spot them in the film?  Enjoy.

The first animation assignment of the year really stressed animating on different levels.  By that I mean, simply animating every object on a different sheet of paper and combining them when shooting the animation.  Does that make sense?  Hmm…

We had to animate the flour sack in a boat (or anything, I chose a bowl), and show the sack being forcefully tossed into the air by the water.  When he falls back into the bowl, we had to animate a large splash.

I animated each object at a separate time, so after three weeks it’s all come together.  The splash at the end is barely visible, thanks to the bad compression.  Wish I could upload the Flipbook file instead.

I probably would have made the bowl and flour sack bigger.  After four long months of sans animating, it was nice to jump right into an assignment.  A little rusty though ;D  Enjoy.

Wow, I can’t believe we’re into third week already.  I feel a little stressed and semi-swamped with assignments.  Need to get back into the swing of things, back on school time.

The first part of our first assignment in storyboarding was to interpret two poems and create concept story beats for each one.  In class everyone pitched their ideas, chose the best from the two and created rough story beats that were more refined, cleaned up and applied proper tonal renderings.

The poem I ended up working from is called ‘I’m Nobody’, by Emily Dickinson.  It reads -

‘I’m nobody!  Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us - don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.’

‘How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!’

And based on that poem, below in yellow post-its are my concept beats and on white index cards, the rough story beats.  The beats read from left to right.  Below those is a rough character lineup/size comparison.

Storyboarding is a bit different than last year, so this was challenging, but fun and rewarding.  I’m becoming more and more interested in story and wouldn’t mind being a story artist someday too.  Enjoy.

The final painting assignment asked us to reproduce a painting by an artist whose style influenced us.  From that painting, we had to create a second piece based only on passages from selected books, mimicking the artists’ style and technique.  

I adore Miyazaki’s concept sketches from Howl’s Moving Castle, and reproduced the original ink wash to gouache on water colour paper.  I’m actually content with the outcome of the painting.  So much that I won’t be posting the second painting because it’s not too good.

I’m never happy with my work.  Weird feelings.  Enjoy.