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Barbarian with Sword & Shield: drawing exercise
As I try to maintain my self-discipline, I’ve been making a point to do some drawing every day… or as often as possible. I won’t necessarily be posting everything I draw each day. Some of these drawings will just be practice for my hand, and will be absolute garbage in every other respect… those drawings I usually won’t bother to save… and I really wouldn’t want to show them to you… so too bad.
But whenever one of these drawings does show some promise… then I’ll save it, and look at it for a few days… and then maybe I’ll decide to post it here… either that, or I might decide to go back and work on it a few more times, and then post it here. I’d like to see myself posting something new every other week at a minimum… once a week would be even better.
This is one of those “drawing a day” exercises that I decided to save and post. I started out intending to sketch an exaggerated male superhero figure – ala Mr. Incredible (you can still see that basic shape here, with the huge barrel chest & tiny little legs)…
But pretty quickly, the figure I was sketching started to remind me of the terrible Northmen (aka Viking Raiders) from the animated film “The Secret of Kels” (btw – that film is one gorgeous piece of animation [IMDB page here]) and so I ended up morphing my drawing from a superhero into a barbarian warrior. And then once I’d drawn the basic figure, I decided to try him out in a few action poses.
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Headshot, Zombie Down: an Animation Exercise
Here’s another animation exercise done in Pencil.exe. Yeah – it’s a bit gory… but if you’re gonna draw zombies, then you’re gonna have to scramble some brains now and then.
I know I’ve complained about the buggy-ness of the freeware Pencil 2D program, but I really love the rough, sketchy feel it allows you to create. It’s like drawing with a PENCIL… lol. If this program got some serious funding behind it, it could be straight-up awesome!
This is by far the most detailed animation I’ve done in the Pencil 2D animation program to date.
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Gunshot: an Animation Excercise
gun shooting animation pencil test
Here is another quick animation exercise. I did this one because I wanted to work out the shape of a handgun being held along with the action and rhythm of a handgun being fired. I exaggerated the muzzle flash and the kick for effect.
Like the rest of the animations I’ve posted so far, this one was done in the freeware program, Pencil 2D. One thing I love about this program is the awesome “sketchy” feel it allows me to get… as opposed to Flash, which has this annoying tendency to smooth out my lines too much. The best hand-drawn animation program I’ve used to date, is Toon Boom. But I fouled up my install many months ago, and I haven’t gotten around to repairing it.
Like I’ve said before, Pencil 2D is great for short exercises like this one, but it’s not at all suited for full-length scenes – let alone an entire film. But as I churn out more and more of these little quickies… I start to wonder… what kind of short film could somebody actually create as a sequence of 5-second & 10-second clips? Hmm… that’s something to chew on… for me anyway… *
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I’m a World-Famous Animator… sort of
It’s only natural that my love for drawing and my love for music would come together as a love for animation, and – – – Oh… I didn’t mention that I dabble in animation…? And I forgot music too? Huh – weird…
Historical Note: I’ve been told that the KO Title Sequence was the first ever Animated Theme Song intro of any YouTube Channel… And while I’m not at all not sure how true that really is… it’s still really cool that I’ve been told that!
===> * * * WATCH THE VIDEO… IT’S SHORT, I PROMISE! * * * <===
Well, I guess I just figured that the Opening Sequence for KatiesOpinion made that kind of obvious… I mean, you do remember KatiesOpinion – right…? What… NO…?!? Why that’s preposterous!!! EVERYONE knows KatiesOpinion! On what planet do you spend most of your time?!? I mean seriously – WTF!?! Why don’t you try pulling your head out of your – – – !!!
I know, I know… of course I’m just kidding. I know KatiesOpinion was never THAT big… But it was kind of popular… back in the good old days… waaaayyyy back when in the olden times of 2006-2008
. . . cue flashback . . .
ZOMBIE!!!
So I was talking with my friend Craig, from the KatiesOpinion project (blog on that soon) and we got to jawing about Zombies… which isn’t really all that unusual, since Zombies have been a serially-recurring topic of conversation between me and Craig since like… forever.
Now it’s not like Zombies are our primary common interest… I mean, we don’t talk about Zombies everytime we hang out or anything like that. But it’s also not random or strange for one of us to just spit out a question like “OK – so what’s the best weapon in this room, if the Zombies came right now?”
And please keep in mind… it’s not a question of whether Zombies might come… cuz they are coming, alright.
It’s only a question of when will they come… AND when they do come… will you be prepared?
So anyway, me and Craig got to jawing about Zombies, and he was telling me again (cuz he’s told me before) about how much he would love to make a really great Zombie film.
Now Craig has some really sharp ideas about what would make a really good Zombie flick, and so we ended up spending the next hour or so going over plot devices, settings and storylines for the world’s BeSt EvaR ZomBie movie.
On the drive home later my head was filled with images of the Living Dead, so when I got home I started in to sketching, and this gentleman [below] is pretty much the 1st thing that came out.
Now in the interest of full-disclosure, I did come back to this drawing and clean it up a couple of times after the initial sketch, but I tried to leave it pretty much the way it was born.
I liked this one so much, that I followed it up with a few others… not all Zombies, but all character drawings based on the very loose storyline Craig and I whipped up that night. I’ll post some of the others soon.
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puppetZ in Adobe CC
Working on some new material…
I’m a little late to the party, but I’ve just started really working out with the puppet features in After Effects, and it’s pretty fricken awesome. I was sitting back thinking about my next move and I noticed my screen looked really bad-ass, so I grabbed a screenshot and threw it up here :)
Post It Note Doodle #4: So Smokey
I can’t seem to stop doing these Post-It Note Doodles. This has been an interesting and refreshing exercise – actually putting pencil to paper, which I really haven’t done in a very long time, since I’d become so reliant on my Wacom tablet and Photoshop.
So here’s the latest installment in this series.
This one is a somewhat androgenous character, inspired in large part by Tank Girl, but also bearing more than a passing resemblance to 2D from Gorillaz.
Post-It Note Drawing #2: Sly Smirk
I liked the way my last Post-It note doodle came out when I photographed it at high-resolution and posted it here larger-than-life sized, so here’s another one.
I really miss doing Photoshop drawings, and I hope I’ll get my hardware/software setup back up and running soon.
I picked up a used Macbook Pro recently, which I’m hoping will be a great new tool for me. I still need to get it loaded up with the programs I use… and that could take a while… hopefully not too long.
At least I’m posting drawings again! :)
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Post-It Note Drawing #1
The computer I’ve been using for my drawing and animation for the past 5 years or so finally succumbed to an unceremoniously-abrupt death….
This happened several months ago, and as luck (or the lack thereof) would have it, my life became very busy right at the same time…
Suffice to say, I have not replaced my dear old friend yet… which explains why there’s been such a gap since my last posts to this site.
At any rate, I’ve found myself doodling a lot lately… mostly on scraps of paper… backs of envelopes, etc… and now… Post-It notes.
They look really interesting (to me anyway) when photographed at high-resolution with my phone, and then posted at larger-than-life size.
More to come…?
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