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Saturday, July 14, 2018

Animation - The Rest of the Week

Again - I have all the animations up on my Patreon page - take a look!

I stayed up late inking the pencils and scanning them, then ruined the whole thing with a botched batch processing...


But this morning - I realized the black background actually looked better... so I cleaned it up and added the pink cheeks!

For the walk cycle project, I needed to reconstruct the basic walking form - to work with a large-headed stick figure!



Here are the pencil tests for this character - one of my daughter, Lilah's, comic characters - AMMI.


Here's the final version - I worked really hard to get it finished before her own cartoon camp finished today so she could show it to her class. 

She's got a little skip to her walk!



SPEED READER was my final project - but I only had less than two hours from concept to GIF! So it still needs some work, inking, etc. I like it even though it's rough. Elephant is a character from the picture book I just finished - "Ready, Set, GOrilla!"

Look carefully - a lot happens in just 14 frames! He uses his trunk to turn the pages!


I got a few questions on how this works. The very basics:

For the Flipbooks - 36 pieces of card stock are held together with a big binder clip. When you flip the right edge of the paper, the image drawn on the pages, appears to move.

For the other animations (like SPEED READER) - each drawing (14 or more) is drawn on a piece of copy paper with three holes punched along the top. The holes are to slip onto the peg bar and they keep the image and pages aligned. These get scanned into the computer and assembled in Photoshop into a GIF.

I had an amazing week! There are more details on my Facebook page, and more flip book animations on my Patreon page. Right now, I am seriously crashing - I am so exhausted that I am falling asleep as I write this! 

To sleep!!

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Animation Reflux

I'm so glad I decided to take the Animation workshop with Alec Longstreth at the Center for Cartoon Studies -- AGAIN! I enjoyed it last summer too, but I didn't get the concepts, techniques, etc. firmly planted in my brain in a way that would let me actually USE them.

This time, I think I'm getting it. And Alec is such a great teacher that he found new ways to present some of the material, so it makes more sense.

If you want to see all the GIFS I've created so far (including a few of last year's), take a look at my Patreon - click HERE for all the animation posts.

I had forgotten how difficult it is for me to be in class all day - physically and mentally. Especially since I don't live here anymore. Lilah (she's in Comic Camp) and I both miss our apartment terribly. It is not easy "living" in a tiny hotel room, eating breakfast on the bed! But, it is convenient to be so close to the school. I think, just about the time we get the hang of this again... class will be over!



Alec really packs a lot into the classes and I'm trying to make sure I push myself a little bit further with each assignment. Right now, there are so many unfinished projects - each one I hope to go back and finish, but I have to move on to the next...

Today's big "AHA!" was the "Squash and Stretch" project. It's a basic circle (ball) that stretches and squashes as it bounces (harder than it looks!)



Since I did the basic project last summer, I decided to try using a Lilah Bean instead of the ball.


Halfway through, I started wondering what kind of insanity had possessed me!?

I finished the pencils with ten minutes til critique time.
I finished filming (with Stopmotion software), five minutes later!


When I got back to my hotel room - I imported the pencils into Photoshop and made a cleaner looking GIF:



Still pretty rough, but worth the pain! Notice her little hands and feet flailing away as she bounces through the air?

Tonight I need to come up with a few characters that I can try to animate tomorrow when we do Walk Cycles!

Saturday, July 7, 2018

Illustrator Saturday!

I am SO excited to be the featured artist on Kathy Teaman's WRITING and ILLUSTRATING blog for Illustrator Saturday!

 Click HERE to read the full post and see the images!

Click HERE to read the Interview and see all the images on Kathy's blog.

And here is just a little preview:

How long have you been illustrating?
More than 30 years.
What and when was the first painting or illustration that you did where someone paid you for your artwork?
I think it was in High School… I did comics for a local newspaper. I also painted the windows at our comic book store!
Did you go to college to study art?
No. And Yes. I went to summer programs at art schools when I was in High School – but I was expected to go to a “real” college. I went to Brown University to study Egyptology. I left after a while and went to the School of Visual Arts (NYC), then to the Rhode Island School of Design.
How do you find illustration work?
I trip over it. Seriously. It never comes from where I expect… marketing? Nope. Someone sees my work in the science museum while shopping with their kid…
What is a Certified Zentangle Teacher? How did you get certified?
Zentangle® is a meditative drawing process. It’s blasphemy to describe it this way, but it’s “focused doodling”. I was one of the original guinea pigs in the certification program – class #1!
And I wrote the first books on the subject. It changed my life – it’s kind of “trendy” now – but it’s true magic is that it teaches “creative confidence”.
Click HERE to read the rest of the Interview.


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