Personal Work
This wasn’t personal work, it was a task given as part of our storyboard lecture. We were given a short one page script and we had to storyboard it.
I haven’t done a lot of storyboarding in the past, but it’s a skill I would like to improve on because storyboard artist are always in high demand in the industry. Also, having this skillset would mean that I have a good understanding of cinematography, layout and composition, story telling, etc.
On top of that, one of the more common ways to become a director in the industry is to start from being a storyboard artist. I did research on different directors and most of them started with being a storyboard artist. I also reached out to a director named Wip Vernooij–who also studied the MACA course at UAL–and he talked about how he became a director from doing storyboards and, of course, building credibility.
This is a WIP of an art collaboration challenge I’m doing with my friend. I took this as a chance to work on my perspective. I alway run away from foreshortening and perspective, but unfortunately I had to deal with it eventually if I want to improve on my skills.
The challenge is that we both get a word from a random word generator and create a mood board from that word, then switch our mood boards and draw based off of it, plus one rule (her word was sharp and the rule she gave me was to include a wing aspect somewhere)
The perspective isn’t the only thing that’s out of my comfort zone with this piece, I’m also using a different colouring style and it has more details than I’m used to. And I’m also planning to attempt a sort of reflective background, as if he’s lying on water or glass. (Finger’s crossed it goes well rip)
Aside from trying to improve my perspective drawing and anatomy, I’ve also taken an interest in trying to colour and render differently.
This piece was a lighting study where I tried to do a more realistic render and I looked up a bunch of tutorials on colour theory and shading skin. I didn’t just use a dark shade of the base colour, but I paid more attention to trying to use dark reds and purples, and oranges and yellows.
If I were to do another study now that I’ve gained more knowledge, I would make use of blues, and more obvious purples, to add more depth and contrast to it. At the moment it’s a little flat because it’s coloured with all warm tones.
There’s an artist I’ve been following for a while and I really love how she colours. She also does digital art but it looks very much like watercolour (which is my favourite traditional medium) I did a study to learn how she colours because it would fit my art style and I also find it very pretty. From observing her style closely, I’m learning more how to use colours like purple, blue, and pink when shading. Other artist I follow also do the same and I’ve been meaning to advance my colouring in such a way as well.
Whenever I have time I watch cartoons or anime, recently I’ve been watching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2012 series. I find myself paying attention to the show in a way I never did as a child. I’m paying far more attention to the animation, cinematography, and anime influence. The show is 3D, but there are some comedic moments where they have 2D facial expressions that is very anime style. I’m mostly fascinated by a lot of the shots, the show is about ninjas so there’s a lot of shots that I find very cool and badass. The shot above really caught my interest, especially when paired with the sound of the thunder after the previous shot was silent. So, I attempted to reanimate it using two characters from an anime I really like. I also edited it on top of the audio (unfortunately, I can only upload gifs/images).
I didn’t have a lot of time to work on this, so I only animated the hair blowing in the wind. Which was fine because I did this mainly to figure out the timing for the characters flashing in. Overall, I think I was pretty successful with that (and it’s much cooler with the audio)
I low key really enjoyed doing the facial expression animation because in general I like drawing facial expressions and it’s something I want to improve on as well. I saw a video of someone who animated an anime character changing their facial expression in sync with the music, so I wanted to attempt that as well.
Animating half of a face is harder that I thought it would be. And with my character’s eyebrows being the way they are–round and fat–it’s slightly more difficult to show the emotions. It’s still a WIP, but I think I was able to capture the main emotions I wanted to show.
With this animation I tested out the line boiling effect and the pupils shrinking and dilating to add more emotional intensity. As well as a bit of sfx animation with his eyes transforming colour.