Gobelins Master Class on Character Animation

Just a heads up for anyone in Manila interested in learning more about animation concepts.  The Gobelin L'ecole De l'image Master Class on Animation will be holding a workshop in the DeLasalle CSB campus from October 20-22.  Alexandre Heboyan, an artist who has worked on Dreamworks Animation movies like Kung Fu Panda and Monsters vs Aliens, will be the guest speaker.

I'm not actually interested in a career in animation per se, but some animation principles can obviously extend into still illustrations.  The schedule is below, with emphasis on the classes I'm intersted in attending:

Day 1 My Personal Approach for Organizing a Character Animation Sequence

- Getting in a creative mode

- The right method to walk through the animation process

- Key principles of animation

Day 2 How to Bring Life to Your Character

- Bringing expressions out of body articulations

- Breaking down facial features

- Lipsynch method

Day 3 Locomotion and Weight

- How to approach a walk cycle

- Each walk is unique

- Perfect your action scenes

If you're interested check out their Facebook event page or get in touch with Ms. Carla Ting at  carla_ting3@yahoo.com or call 09273810745 Globe/ 0933-313-31-30 Sun.

"Water Gun Sky Attack Solves A Problem Like Maria" Back Cover Process pt1

A couple of weeks ago Aissa emailed me asking if I was interested in helping create artwork for a friend's Ep that involved "drawings of zombies and scared people".  I figured this would be a good way keep up my art education while at the same time giving my work a bit of a wider audience, so I talked to Water Gun Water Gun Sky Attack Solves a Problem like Maria's Mia and we agreed over the course of a few emails to have me do the back cover or their EP.

The basic storyline of the album is of a young woman named Panic trying to make her way through a zombie apocalypse to her old house, where she hopes she'll find her boyfriend.  I wasn't given any particular story line to illustrate, so I chose to illustrate a scene where our protagonist runs out of gas right outside the town and is bracing herself to go in and see if anyone's alive.

Over the course of the past week of creating this image it's morphed so much from the original thumbnails that I thought it would be instructive both to me and any readers out there to go step by step over the changes that were made to it.  A lot of the changes were suggested by the people at conceptart and cgsociety, which I will be crediting here.

Thumbnails

Here you can see the thumbnails I sent to Mia to review and choose what she liked the best.  I only showed her the ones that I felt were worth showing, but in total I must have gone through about 15-20 thumbs (not nearly enough, some people would say, and I'd agree).  They chose option 3, a thumbnail that had a relatively simple composition that started from the girl in the truck up to the town and into the moon.  A good enough start, but I could already see that it was going to need changing.

WIP1

Here is the first large WIP using the thumbnail as my base, with some changes in the basic composition. I've changed the flow of the composition by making it in a sort of S shaped form.  I've given some thought to the areas of interest and arranged them according to this flow to end up at the moon, which I hoped to use to frame the 5 tracks of the EP.  I wasn't feeling very confident about this so I put it up on conceptart and cgsociety for feedback and this is what I got:

Tinybird: 

...the story doesn't really come through for me. It looks more like she's waiting a church to explode or waiting someone to come down the road so she can shoot them or something. I don't get a real sense of wearyness or anything like that from her pose and the town doesn't really look like a town either. I figured the zombie thing with the bodies but it's not very strongly conveyed either.

If you change all the main elements to silhouettes, the "town" turns into one large house, her gun and pose are totally hidden inside the car which is also bit awkwardly cropped and one of the bodies is lounging pretty casually.

Also the way she's sitting doesn't fit the car, her lower leg would be phasing through the car to achieve that.

Lunatique:

Your vanishing points all seem to line up (from me just eyeballing it instead of actually measuring), but that wheel looks pretty wonky to me. Why didn't you use the circular marquee tool and then right-click and stroke it? 

Your composition is a bit too evenly spaced between each main element right now. I would suggest varying their spacing a bit. You might also want to overlap the house and the moon a bit--it's a classic composition trick that works every time, creating a compelling contrast of both values and silhouetted shape.

I've put the comments that I decided to focus and work in bold, so you can see my thought process going into the next image.

WIP2

I'm excited to make changes now.  When people give good feedback that I know is workable it excited me to explore their ideas and see if I can make them work in my piece.  Based on teh comment about the truck being cut off, I moved it completely inside the frame.  I changed the protagonist's pose to address the issue of her not looking weary, but as we'll see later on that wasn't a success either.  I moved the town to the right of the image to keep the S flow going, and placed the moon behind it as suggested to enhance the visual interest in the town.

As a result of these changes, all of which I think were for the better, certain unexpected things came about.  The songlist was now floating in space.  This is a bad thing, since the song list is actually the most crucial element of the cover.  I haven't placed much emphasis on it thus far because I got lost in drawing the other elements, but that's something that I'll have to consider later on.  Second, shifting the elements around led to two visual elements instead of four as in the previous image (well, three if you count the songlist, which I really should!).  My gut feel is that this is actually a good thing, and it makes the image more focused.  I put the image up on the forums again and waited for feedback.

Lightship69:

The girl on the truck looks like she is out sun bathing, not resting from a fight.

I would play with the perspective more to go for something that suggests that there is still more road to go, Road sign saying 20 miles to "Zombieville" or where ever she is headed and the road going down to a town in the distance.

Lunatique

I like the changes at the top, and while the changes at the bottom is good too, I think the main focal point is placed a bit too close to the bottom border of the image, making it unnecessarily crowded at the bottom. Try raising the stuff on the bottom a little. 

Also, what if she's actually on the S shaped road and walking towards the building at the top, and there are dead zombies all around the truck?

WIP3

 This is the image that I came up with after the previous round of comments.  This feels much better and getting close to done, but there will still quite a few changes left!  While I was initially going to go over this in red (marker) like the previous images, this post has gone on for quite a bit already and I think it would be better to split it up into two different posts to allow time to absorb all the information here.  I'll put up the next post in a couple of days so stay tuned!

Illustration of the Week #4: MtG: Even the Odds WIP

I'll admit I've been a little lazy lately and I've mostly been reposting older work. This one's from a the Illustration of the Week challenge on conceptart.org a few weeks back.  We were tasked to reimagine a Magic:The Gathering card called "Even the Odds":

Action: This spell "calls for reinforcements" when you're up against the ropes, in the form of three soldiers. How to represent this is up to you. One idea is to show a fallen soldier whose sword, helm, and shield have fallen onto the ground around him. The armaments reflect the fallen soldier's form, and those reflections have magically come to life and are emerging from the armaments, stepping foot into the real world.

Focus: The arriving reinforcements

Mood: the tide has turned

I really wanted to work on and finish this challenge since one of my end goals is to paint an M:TG card.  I toyed around with it a lot, even experimenting with what I think is a cool framing device for the central character using the bodies and swords of the ghostly reinforcement soldier (see the red outline).  Unfortunately the way I composed the piece doesn't really work very well when shrunk to the size of a magic card.  I was too disheartened to continue the piece, especially since the deadline was so close, so it's another one of those artworks that I've abandoned.  I may go back to it sometime, but I'll likely just try to redo the whole thing instead.

I could just pick out one of the ghostly knight to complete as a rendering exercise, since I kind of like how they turned out, especially the chainmail of the knight on the left. 


I actually am working on something new right now, which I'm going to go more in depth on in my next post.  One of Aissa's friends is releasing an EP and asked some of her artist friends to contribute artwork for it.  I was assigned the back cover, and that's something I've been working on little by little over the past week.  I learned a lot just trying to get the composition right for that, so it's something I'm keen to share with everyone else.


Update: I apologize for the oddness in this post, with regards to the size of the text.  In Blogger's editing mode everything looks fine but when it gets published it's all wonky and I'm too lazy/stupid to fix it.

Urban Sketching : Manila Bay

Spent quite some time sketching in Manila Bay the other day while Aissa was taking care of a Synergiea event. The sketch above is probably one of the most polished I've ever done, which makes sense since it took me about an hour to finish it.  I was actually sketching it outside in the wind and rain until some employees of Yellow Cab Pizza took pity on me and invited me to stay inside since there weren't a lot of customers that day. I wanted to order something in thanks but I was really full after one and a half sandwiches at Starbucks, so I slunk away after I was done with my sketch.  This one was done with a pencil outline, then brush pen and gray marker brush for shading.  The little squiggles on the upper right were supposed to be birds flapping in the wind, which I wasn't quite successful with.

This sketch was done in the aforementioned Starbucks.  I must have looked suspicious to the Starbucks crew and customers because I spent maybe 10 minutes just walking around Starbucks trying to find the best view.  These were all sketched in Harbor Square opposite the CCP complex.  I'd actually had no idea that this structure existed before that Saturday, but it's a pretty nice place to go and view the sunset or the boats and yachts moored in Manila Bay with skyscrapers and the piers in the background.

The Art Department Tutorial Review : Donato Giancola's "The Mechanic"

Aissa and I have been watching Donato Giancola's tutorial for the past couple of days and i wanted to do a quick plug for it while it's still on sale.  It's an excellent value since it originally cost $60 and can now be had for only $7.99.  Since these files were originally released on a DVD they're pretty huge so be prepared for some lengthy download times.  I was initially quite surprised that Aissa was drawn into the video since I always feel like art tutorials can be very boring for someone who isn't an art practitioner.  I'd just been watching on my own when she plopped down on the couch and within minutes was absorbed in the video enough that she was concerned that I'd watch it without her.  Perhaps that's testament enough to how good the tutorial is, but I'll try to  go into it in a little more depth here.

Donato goes through his entire process of creating a painting, from photographic reference using a model and still life(s?) to a more refined drawing which he then scans and transfers onto the masonite which will hold his final painting.  Throughout the tutorial (we're only halfway through btw) he drops some very useful advice about portaiture, lighting and color, and his thought process when painting.  I like that he's very liberal with his use of reference material, since there's a stigma among many non professional artists that using reference materials is "cheating".  However he does take pains to say that one should not be a "slave" to reference material, only borrowing from it to help establish your painting more firmly in reality but also knowing when to ignore the reference to suit your own needs.

Digital artists may be hesitant because it's a tutorial about an oil painting, but don't let that deter you.   While I do have aspirations to one day try out oil painting in the future, I can already see ways that I can incorporate his techniques in photoshop by using layers and possibly artrage, which more closely mimics traditional media.  I will also reference this video a lot when I have trouble with choosing colors, especially when painting skin tones and metallic textures because he goes pretty in-depth into discussing what he's doing when he's painting the mechanic's face and armor. He also spends quite some time talking and painting a galaxy as the background for his subject, which is something I'm sure I'll find useful down the line when I try out some science fiction work.

As I said I'm only halfway through but I highly encourage anyone interested in painting science fiction covers, using reference material properly, and learning about light and color to download this tutorial while it's still at the bargain basement price of $7.99.

Update: Definitely get this if you want insight into how light reflects on mettalic objects.  Donato explains that it doesn't always work the way we logically think it does!