What I have been up to for the last couple of weeks…

So it hasn’t been an incredibly busy last two weeks. What I am mainly doing with my days at the moment is improving my artistic ability. By studying various aspects of human anatomy such as muscle movement and understanding how tones of shades work. I’ve also been practising my sketching by using a method that establishes goals that I can set myself.

Since last thursday I decided to set myself a method in which I would be able to become better at my style of art. These are the rules that I use to follow through this method:

1. I have to draw something new everyday. As soon as it turns 0:01 am, Whatever sketch I am working on at the time I must cease working on and If I want to continue sketching It must be a  new sketch.

2. Once I have started sketching one image, I can’t start a new sketch until the next day.

3. Any sketch that I do does not need to be completed, but should be at such a quality that it shows that I have attempted to make a reasonable effort with anyone sketch.

4. I must attempt to incorporate something that I would not normally attempt into each sketch. This does not need to be on a wide scale and just has to be something that I can’t normally draw.

5. Sketching does not (but can still be) attempted on a weekend and this time can and will probably be used to paint some of the sketches.

Rule 1 is mainly to get me to work on different areas of sketching that I am not good at without getting precious about one image in anyone day.

These are the rules I use to accomplish this goal each day and are necessary in order to not fall into old habits. For me, rule 2 is the most important as I have a high tendency to begin something and way before its finished I’ll see something appears wrong and give up on it. This habit is bad as it means that I don’t try to correct the problem which is an important lesson to learn in sketching. It also bad because it shows the quickness to discard an image after one problem instead of putting in the time to improve. This part of the method will hopefully teach me to become more patient with my work and to also realise that everything I do won’t be excellent first time round and have to work on it for it to become better.

The third rule just means that I don’t get concerned that a sketch did not come to a completed state and it also remove s the pressure of a time limit as there is no quality of the image that I have to meet. The second clause of this rule just means that i will still follow through with the other rules by not trying to just skip out on the sketch as well as showing (at least for myself) that some progress has been made.

The fourth rule gets me to incorporate something different such as a new angle of a person, legs, a type of material etc that I would not normally attempt to do as I am not very good at it. This just allows me to work on some area no matter how small so that I achieve something from each sketch.

Fifth rule means I can have a break and gives me a dedicated time to work on digital designs.

Although it appears it, not a lot of thought was put into these rules, they mainly came from the realisation of the bad habits that i have when sketching and were designed to combat these. Although I won’t digitalized all of the images, I plan on taking some that I believe I did a good enough job on and digitally paint them. This will be to help me improve my abilities with digital artwork.

One thing that I have found as soon as this method was put into practise was that I started using reference images as I drew the sketches, meaning that I could get a view of structures that I was trying to incorporate.

Anyways, here are the sketches that I have done since the method began and in order:

Sketch 1 was done a week before this method was applied, but I thought it would be a good inclusion as I’m pretty proud of it.

 I’ll post more as i do more, hopefully as a day by day. I uploaded this as a bulk because I only just got my scanner working yesterday (been a heck of a battle hehehe).

Stopmotion development… Late!

I think its two… maybe three weeks since my last post. either way I simply haven’t posted much because I haven’t really had anything relevant to post. Well I have but minute that it would have been no more than a few sentences long for the post. But now I have pictures.

So a couple of weeks ago the animation group (That is me and these guys: Tom, Alex and Maddy) began some designs for a stop motion animation. The week before this we all put together our own models and gave a try animating them, which I showed in my last post I think, Stop Motion in Motion. Needless to say this character was scrapped. As i mentioned in that post, there was many things wrong with it, not a bad thing but still needed changes.

So here are some various ideas I had for my next character. Modeling has been considered but I haven’t drawn it down, going to get the materials on Wednesday when I have a bit of free time:

That is the concepts for my character. This was actually a character that I had been working on while i was at college and was never intended to be for stop motion (I was and still am really big into writing a novel), but decided it might be interesting to use him for this. If you want to know more about this character then just click here: Post to be made. The structure of the armature will be made out of metal. I am thinking of using a 1.5mm-2mm wire as this should be easier to bend the 3mm wire used on my previous armature.

I plan to use tape or a type of mold that I can wrap around the forearms, legs etc, to act as muscle but to also stiffen the parts of the armature that should not bend. I planned on using material such as clothing from dolls to cover the armature, with an adapted jacket to fit the obvious appearance of Mr Briggett. I decided that using just straight up material would give him an unusual human like appearance and also to make him look thin. Alternatively, if this does not work as I hope (I plan to test it before it is required) I will go back to using clay, although I am not too fond of it.

We also discussed the narrative of the story that our models would act out. It will be a short video, about three minutes long, of each character waking up to a typical day in the community flats that they share (the kitchen and living room are shared rooms… basically a student flat without it being for students). Each of the characters wake, get ready for work, have breakfast and leave in their own unique ways which involve large amounts of hilarity.

I have more developments in progress at the moment but as it is getting late, I am going to wrap this up for now and continue this in a part two post. The next post will include what I have done for the design of the kitchen for the kitchen scene. Development on the storyboards that have been done by all four of us and also, if I have managed to find the time to do it, an anamatic of the kitchen scene. Until next time.

Who Inspires Me

Without a doubt, the number one animator that gets my drawing hand jiggling and the ideas flowing for some serious cartoon action is Jhonen Vasquez.

Now this is where its a little unusual as, in some cases, an artist that is inspired by another artist tends to incorporate that style into their own work. Unfortunately I have never been one to be able to do another’s style so my artistic style differs from Jhonen’s. The only real thing that our style’s have in common is the grim, gothic nature of the characters and narratives.

another reason is because he is the creator of my number one favourite cartoon character in the whole world (and any other character would be hard pressed to beat it). Gir, from the cartoon series Invader Zim (for people who don’t know who Gir is: Gir Moments).

Jhonen attended Mount Pleasant High School, San Jose, California, where he created Jonny the little homicidal maniac after his entrance into the school contest for a new mascot was rejected.

Jhonen graduated, went to  De Anza College in Cupertino, California as a film student, then dropped out to become a cartoonist.

in 1995 Jhonen went to the Alternative Press-Expo (APE for short), were he met Roman Dirge (future writer of Invader Zim), Rosearik Rikki Simons (Future voice for Gir and background artist for Invader Zim) and Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons.

During his time after dropping out of college and before he went to APE, he had turned Jonny the homicidal Maniac into a successful printed issues and by 1996, he officially announced his sixth issue and the point in which he was making enough money from his art to not do anything else… so he quit his day job.

Invader Zim was very short-lived. Aired in 2001 (Up every morning in anticipation for Invader Zim on a saturday… was the best time ever) and cancelled in the same year, he carried an unfortunate one and a half series. Aired on Nickelodeon and was cancelled due to its crude and what was quickly becoming twisted humour. Here is a link to the first episode, hopefully you will get hooked as much as I did:

The Nightmare Begins

Jhonen got a lot of his inspiration from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Comics by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastmen, but also from various other artists such as:

David Cronenberg, Chester Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, H. R. Giger, Terry Gilliam, and David Lynch.

There you go… a little bit about a particular artist that inspires me to go do stuff with my drawings, odd stuff. No go gorge your head with knowledge of things and stuff that I may not of put in this post about the man, or anything that interests you about him such as the people he gets inspiration from.