T-Rex digital painting

During summer break, I am spending a lot of time working on my digital painting skills.  Here is my most recent work.  I know I still have a long way to go, but I am happy with this as a good step along the way.  As far as looking convincingly three-dimensional and structured, I feel this is a success.  The details could be better.  Also, the lighting could be a lot better.   Here is how I did it.

 Before I started on my own T-Rex, I did a study of another artists T-Rex.  I would have studied photos too, but obviously that wasn't possible in this case.

  First, I sketched the T-Rex.  I focused on giving the sketch three-dimensional structure.  To do this a studied T-Rex fossil skeletons.

Next, I rendered the basic values in greyscale.  I do this so I am not distracted by the colors and can focus only on the form.  However, I did have in mind that the underbelly had a brighter local color.

Then I added a quick color layer.  This is just flat colors on an overlay layer on top of the grey scale layer.

On another solid layer I rendered the forms again in color.  I got most of the colors from the lower layers.  I did use the color picker occasionally but only to augment the colors I already had.   Most of the work is done at this stage.

From here on out, was all adding details.  I also noticed that I didn't have enough dark areas.  Everything was around the same range of value, giving it an unnatural look.  I also noticed that the all the colors were around the same saturation, so just as I added dark areas, I added so desaturated colors to make the saturated colors come forward more.  I finished it off by adding scale texture and details.

I learned a lot from studying the other painting.  Even though I know my T-Rex is much worse than the painting I copied, I still feel as though I improved quite a bit in doing this.  Going forward, I will continue to study other paintings and photos, then try to get a similar result in my own paintings hoping for steady improvement.

Intergalactic Groove

It has been a while since I've posted and I have a lot of work to post.  This post will be for my final model pack.  This was the final assignment for my character design class.  The assignment was to design three characters and a vehicle that fit together in a show, short or feature, and to produce turnarounds, poses etc. 

My project is Intergalactic Groove.  The characters are a funk band that travel through space to bring funk to the unfunky.  The inspiration for this was classic Fleischer cartoons.  Their early cartoons were heavily influenced by the jazz music that was happening in New York at the time.  Instead of Jazz, I took my inspiration from 70s psychedelic funk.  Parliament was the biggest musical inspiration.  The outlandishness of their album art and live shows combine very well with cartoons.

Animation Exercises - week 2

These are this weeks Animation Exercises.   This weeks subject was a very simplified head structure.  I based this structure off of the structure used by Andrew Loomis in his book: Drawing the Head and Hands.  This week I received some excellent advice from Rainplace (I think Mike Nguyen is his name).  He recommended having an emotional motivation for the movement.  I tried to work that in starting on day 6.


Day 1 - a simple turn-around to familiarize myself with the structure and practice turning it in space.
Day 2 - Bouncing cycle with a little rotation.  Ended up looking kind of stiff
Day 3 - Jumping over distance,  this ended up being my favorite
Day 4 - Overlapping action cycle with a cube representing a torso going up and down
Day 5 -Bungee jumping,  I started this one without a clear idea of what I wanted it to look like but it still turned out okay.
Day 6 - So excited he launches out of control.  I was trying to do a stagger effect on the antic but it didn't quite work.
Day 7 - Moving so fast he loses control, but manages to stop himself before going over the edge.

Adding the emotional element to these makes it more difficult, but also a lot more fun.  As I try more complexity and emotion, I am more likely to fail to achieve the look I am going for.  I do go back and try to fix them up quickly if I can, but I have to keep in mind that these are intended to be quick exercises so I shouldn't refine them until they are perfect.  It is good to have this opportunity to try out things and not be afraid to fail.  I figure if I never fail, I am not being ambitious enough.  On the flip side, If I am failing too often then I am being to ambitious, since the purpose of these is to practice the fundamentals so they become second nature.

Animation Exercises

Last week, Jesse Winchester, from Schoolism, came to speak to our class. It was a very inspiring presentation. One of the things he encouraged us to do were daily exercises that isolate specific drawing skills. I know from experience how powerful that can be; so I took this idea, and applied it to animation. This week I did a quick animation exercise every night before going to bed. These took between 15-30 minutes. The specific skill I am trying to isolate is moving-three dimensional objects realistically in three-dimensional space.  I plan to use simple forms, so I can draw them quickly. The idea is to focus on the movement, not the individual drawings.  What I hope to achieve through these exercises, in addition to all the other animation I do, is to reach a level where moving objects in space is second nature, so I can focus more on the character and performance when I animate.
The theme for the first week is a cube. I figured a cube would be good to start with because, by definition, it is three-dimensional and must be drawn as so. The first day, I dropped the cube off a ledge. It bounced slightly, then after coming to rest, pulled itself back up. In the next exercise, the cube does a flip. The third and forth exercises featured the cube twisting one way, then twisting back in the opposite direction. I did this one twice because I was not happy with my first attempt. The problem was, I started animating without a clear idea of what I wanted it to do. As a result I ended up with an unclear action. On my second attempt, I knew what I wanted and was able to achieve it fairly easily. The next exercise was the cube jumping off into the distance. For my sixth exercise, I tried to give the cube a little personality and had it do a take then faint. My final exercise was the cube falling away from the viewer looking downward into a well.
It is early to say whether these exercises will give the desired result, but I am very optimistic they will. I plan to keep doing these exercises every day as long as I can find the time. Each week I will chose another simple shape and gradually get more complex while staying simple enough to remain focused on the movement.

Layouts

These were assignments for my layout class.  I enjoy layouts.  I like composing a scene.  Having the whole frame to work with, and with tones and colors allows me to create contrast.  Working with perspective appeals to my logical side.  Even though I often fudge the perspective, since I know the rules, I can logically figure out which way an object should sit and which planes should be visible.
Layout is important in animation, not just to give the characters a stage to act on, but also to set a mood.  The feeling of the environment can have a profound effect on the mood of a scene.  The look of the layouts and backgrounds is an important element and must match the look of the piece.

For these first layouts, the assignment was to create a composition with two characters, a briefcase, an animal, and a vehicle.

The next assignments are perspective assignments.  The first being in one-point.  I may have 'fudged' the perspective a bit much in this.  I moved the vanishing point away from the center to create a stronger composition.  This means technically it should be two-point perspective, however I still handled the lines as if it were one-point by keeping the horizontal lines parallel to the picture plane.  While technically this is wrong, I think it makes for a stronger composition, which is more important than getting the perspective correct.  For the color, we were aloud to use one or two hues.  The idea was that it would still be similar to greyscale.  Color adds to the feel of the piece.  One color also adds another dimension.  Greyscale can range in brightness.  One color can range in brightness and saturation.  Saturation being the strength of the color vs grey.  I took full advantage of that in this layout to contrast bright, saturated glowing lights, against a dark, desaturated backdrop.  The composition still works in greyscale but looses some of its punch.

The next assignment was two-point.  To create the circular shape of the room, I measure the room as a rectangle, then created a larger rectangle around it.  From this larger rectangle, I plotted out the circles in perspective.  I used a desaturated orange, to contrast the saturated blue of the sea.  I didn't push the contrast quite as much as the last one since I felt it would be distracting in this composition.

 This assignment was three-point perspective.  This was to be the exterior of the two-point perspective layout.  I was told to stop using so much color, since the class was supposed to focus on line and tone, so I kept all the color equally desaturated.

The final assignment to focus on perspective was to use measured perspective.  This means using perspective grids, and evenly spaced elements.  For this I went for a classical look.  I created a lot of contrast by using black against while to highlight the geometry.  To keep this contrast through out, I used only black, white, and 50% grey.

Special Effects Animation

In this post I will cover the two weeks we spent on special effects animation. Any animation that is not a character is considered effects animation. It usually refers to water, fire, smoke, and explosions. Special Effects animation is very different from character animation, yet follows the same principles. The first thing we covered was a flag waving in the wind. In this exercise we animated the wind, as seen by its effect on the flag. The flag follows a wave pattern. This is important because that pattern comes up again and again in special effects. The waves are created by eddies of air as it pushes the flag. To animate the wave, animate the eddies and draw the wave on top of it. Here is my flag waving cycle. The mistake I made here is having the eddies shrink in size further down the flag. This means the trough and peak of the wave are less pronounced further towards the down wind end. These should be the same size as they are on the upwind side, giving the end a snap to it.

 Next we animated a water splash. Special effects animation can be very detailed. It is important to start by animating very general shapes to get the motion down before adding the detail. For this splash, I studied a slow-motion video of a rock being thrown in a lake. Also, as in all my special effects studies, I referenced Joe Gilland's great books: Elemental Magic both Volumes one and two. A splash creates sheets of water, in a shape determined by the shape of the object causing the splash, and said object's angle and rotation. When the object first hits, the water is propelled with a lot of force. This force begins as a hydrological explosion and quickly forms the shape of the splash. As the force dissipates the splash slows at the top of it's arc. Next, the water shape breaks apart as the splash falls back to earth. A secondary splash occurs as the water displaced by the object rushes back into the air pocket created by the object breaking the surface. In many cases, including the splash I studied, this is actually larger than the primary splash. It follows the same pattern of movement as the primary splash, shooting up quickly, slowing at the top of it's arc, then breaking up as it falls. Animating water is difficult because in order to make it work, it must be abstracted yet still look like water. I feel that the biggest flaw in my splash animation is failing to make the splash really look like water.

Our final special effects project was left up to us.  The following clip is my project.  To animate the fire, I first animated the air currents.  Then I created a layer of fire shapes on top.  Next, I animated red and yellow soft layers above and below those fire shapes, based on where I thought the heat would be, to flesh out the flame.  The process lead to a very stylized fire.  I feel my skill were not up to creating a realistic one.  The motion of the explosion is similar to the splash.  The initial force is very strong and creates the smoke shape quickly.  The smoke shape slows down and then breaks up.  It dissipates and flows upwards instead of falling back down like the splash.  The smoke follows the exact same pattern as the flag wave.

I enjoyed special effects, but I am glad to be done with it and back to character animation.  If I were to really devote myself to effects animation I would study fire, smoke, water, and explosions, both in motion and still images.  It would take years to really learn to draw these forces, even longer to animate them.  I will not be doing this study because it will not make me any better at character animation, which is my goal.  However, I do feel like it is important to have at least an understanding of how special effects animation works.  In the future, if I am called upon to produce effects animation, I will have some idea of how to do it.  Also, there is something useful, as well as beautiful in studying the pure physics of these elements and the forces behind them.

Working with Dialogue, Music, and Sound

Working with sound adds a whole other element to animation.  Since the timing of animation can be controlled precisely within the fraction of a second it can be synced perfectly with both speech and music.
First, we covered lip sync.  Lip sync can be done simply by breaking down dialogue into the individual sounds that occur during each frame.  Then, the mouth shape is drawn to match the specific sounds.  Mouths shapes are covered in too many books in too many different ways for me to go into detail here.  It is slightly more complex in practice since multiple syllables can occur quickly in a single frame.  The important thing in making a mouth look convincing is to open quickly on the vowels and close slower into consonants.  Also, the longer a vowel is held, generally the more open the mouth.  Here is an exercise just for lip sync.

Animating dialogue is not simply making the character appear to be talking but to make the character act.  This is something a character animator works on an entire career.  Here is my first taste of it.  The first video is something I did on the side.  The voice is my friend Jarryd Meyer prank calling a blood bank.  This was practice for our dialogue assignment.

The assignment was to record one six second line of dialogue, then animate a character delivering the line.  The character must be shown in a wide shot (full body) and use his whole body to act.  I decided to go for some serious over acting.  The line is delivered by Nathan (sorry, don't know his last name) who is a very talented voice actor.  This was definitely the hardest assignment of the first semester.

Animation can be set to music as well as sound effects.  A beat can be placed at a regular number of frames (for example an accent every 12 frames), then music can be written to match or music with the same beat can be used.  Sound effects can be broken down frame by frame and noted on an exposure sheet.  Of coarse, syncing to music can be much more complex. Mark Mayerson and Amir Avni both wrote excellent posts on the subject.  This is one of my favorite aspects of animation.  Below is one of my favorite examples of music and animation synced.

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Our final assignment for the semester was to animate a character moving around to music.  The actual syncing with the music was not part of the grade.  It was more about showing all the principles we had covered during the semester.  Since the character had to jump around, I did not try to sync it to the music at all.  The jumps take too long to hit every beat. The assignments were linked up to form a class anajam.  At the beginning of each assignment we were to morph the previous character into our character..  This was to be synced with a sound effect we recorded.
The first video is my assignment.  The next is that of the whole class.

Walks and Runs

After an overview of The Principles of Animation, The next things we learned are walks and runs.  Animating walks and runs is simple to understand but infinitely complex in its variation.  Everybody has a distinct way of walking.  The way a character walks says a lot about a character and his/her mood.  For example a confident character will walk differently than a wimpy character.  That same confident character will walk differently when he's sad.  As you can see, there are as many way to do a walk as there are characters and emotions.
The nuts and bolts basics of how to make a two-legged character walk is fairly simple.  However he/she walks, he/she will go through some variation of four key drawings.  The first is the stride or contact, where the forward foot first contacts the ground, but before the weight has been shifted to it.  The second is the down or squash.  Here, the character has shifted his/her weight to the forward foot.  Usually, you would squash the character's leg down to take the weight.  In real life, this squash is very slight, usually imperceptible; however, in cartoon animation this squash gives the walk and up and down action which is much more lively and appealing.  The next key is the crossover or passing position.  Here, the rear leg has left the ground and is coming in front of the front leg.  Without this frame, the leg seems to pop from one side of the body to the other.  The last key is the step or up position.  Here, what was the rear leg has now passed the front leg and is outstretched, ready to make contact.  After the step, the other leg contacts and the cycle begins again.  With these four key, infinite variations are possible.
Walks can be animated from one part of the screen to another, or they can be done in a cycle.  In a cycle, the foot on the ground, that would be stationary in real life, must move at an equal rate throughout the cycle, as if it were on a treadmill.  Also, the first frame of the cycle should follow the last frame.  With a cycle a background could be panned behind it, and it would look like one continuous walk.  The first walk exercise we were given was a cycle of a character with extremely loose joints.  I took this to an extreme.

Walks can also be done in perspective.  The keys are the same.  The only difference is the added complexity of perspective drawing.  Start with a perspective grid on the ground plane.  The length of a grid square is the length of the character's stride.  First, using the grid, draw in the stride positions.  Then it is simply a matter of animating through the four keys between each stride.  The next exercise was to animate the same character from the cycle in a perspective walk.

After walking we covered runs and turning.  A run is basically the same as a walk except its faster and at one point both feet are off the ground.  With a run there are also four keys.  The first is the launch, were one leg is pushing off the ground, launching the body.  The next is the mid-air key, where both legs are of the ground.  Then the landing, where one leg, usually the one that did not launch, first makes contact with the ground.  Finally, in the squash position, the landing leg squashes to take the weight, while the other leg passes in front.  The squashed leg will be the one that launches in the next key.  In a simple 90 degree turn, after the squash, instead of passing the front leg, that leg turns.  Then the step is pretty much the same except now at a 90 degree angle, same with the contact.  Here is a quick exercise I did to practice turning.

For the major assignment on walks, we had to animate the pink panther walking in a way that expressed emotion.  First he had to walk across the screen, then turn an walk away from the camera in perspective.  After four strides he had to stop, turn 270 degrees, then run off the screen.  We were to follow the formula on all the walks, runs, and turns, except for the 270 turn we could be creative with.  The emotion I chose for him was upbeat.  I had him walking with a double bounce, where he goes down a second time during an extended crossover.  For the 270 turn, I had him pirouette.  To do this I studied youtube videos on how to pirouette.

Since the assignment I have continued to practice walks weekly.  There is so much of character animation in this motion.  I created another blog for my class to practice walks.  Check them out a The Weekly Walk.

Principles of Animation

The next subject covered in animation class, after basic timing, is the principles of animation. First laid out by the pioneers at Disney, these principles are necessary to make animation look convincing. They apply to any medium of character animation, whether hand-drawn on paper, 3d, or a whiteboard and camcorder.

Stretch and Squash -  Making the character compress and expand with the forces involved in the movement.  This could be literally stretching and squashing a rubbery cartoon character.  However, stretch and squash can be achieved without changing the characters shape by movement through the joints.

Anticipation - A minor, often opposite, movement that precedes an action.  Anticipation allows the character to generate the necessary force to carry it through the action.  It also prepares the audience for the action.  The classic example of anticipation is crouching down before jumping.  Without the crouch the character would seem to be being lifted off the ground instead of jumping under its own power.

Secondary Action - Parts of the character that attach to the moving body follow.  Hair and clothing do not move on their own unless the character moves or they are acted upon by some other force.  They follow the moving character instead of moving at the same time.


Overlapping Action - Related objects start and end their movements at different times.  If every part of the character moves at the same time and same pace it looks unnatural.  For example, when flicking one's wrist, the arm and hand move in opposite directions, the hand starts later and moves faster.

Follow-through - Things don't just come to a dead stop suddenly.  The motion will continue as it decelerates.  For example a batter doesn't stop swinging after he makes contact with the ball (or not) but continues through the swing,

Slow-in, Slow-out - Objects must accelerate before reaching full speed and must decelerate before stopping.  Objects generally move fastest in the middle of an action and slower at the beginning and end.

Arcs and Trajectories - Objects in motion follow a path and do not suddenly change direction without a cause.  Arcs and curves are beautiful to look at and see in motion.

Drag - Objects tend to remain where they are until moved by an a force.

Pacing - Characters do different actions at different speeds instead of every action taking the same amount of time.  Varying the pacing prevents the motion from being monotonous.

Exaggeration - Animated characters can do much more than real life characters.  Total realism is boring in animation.  It is the responsibility of the animator to take things further.

Appeal - Character and motion should both be aesthetically pleasing.  This is the hardest principle to define.

I have read these principles many times before.  However, you don't really know the principles until you use them.  As you can see, there is a lot of overlap in the principles.  That is because all of these principles should be applied simultaneously in all character animation.
To help clarify these principles we were given four short exercises to apply the principles.

The first exercise is for the principle of drag.  Here a spaceship is dragging a ribbon behind it.


The second exercise is secondary action.  Here nun-chucks swing from a pendulum.  The nun-chucks follow the primary action of the pendulum.  I realize it is unrealistic for the nun-chucks to go higher on the second swing than on the first, but this is just an exercise and I wanted to try both a smaller movement and a larger one.


The Third exercise is for overlapping action.  As the train hits the wall, when the front of the train is being pushed off the tracks the rear cars are still moving forward.


The forth exercise is for follow-through and secondary action.  Here a ball is wearing a skirt.  As it bounces it pulls the skirt with it.  When the ball changes direction, the skirt continues its path until the ball pulls it the other direction.  This was my favorite exercise.


Now these principles are applied to a character.  This is exciting, after using the flour sac, to move onto a character with arms and legs.  It is the next logical step since the character is basically a flour sac with arms and legs.  The character looks very similar to Stitch from the Disney feature Lilo and Stitch, but he isn't; so don't sue me.  Here, he jumps a couple times then falls on his face.  The principle should all be in this animation and every animation I do for the rest of my career.  A few example: Before he jumps, he crouches down, applying the principle of anticipation.  When jumping, he follows an arc and moves slowest at the top of the arc.  Here we see an arc, slow-in, slow-out and pacing.  When he lands on the first jump, his force causes him to use his hand to catch himself, demonstrating follow-through.  When he falls on his face, his hips land before his head and arms;  then his hips bounce off the ground before the head.  This demonstrates overlapping action.
 
This was practice for the principles assignment.  Again, the character is Stitch-like.  He starts on his back.  He stands up; then an object hits him on the top of the head, knocking him out.  He falls to the ground, unconscious, and bounces upon impact.  The above-mentioned principles should all be applied in the assignment.  How he stands up was left up to us to figure out.  Since we know the principles we should be able to figure it out.  I am very happy with the way this turned out. 


It is great to be working with characters already.  With these principles, I should be able to make any character move believably.  I feel like I am just starting to understand the principles.  It will probably take me years to truly master them.  My long term goal is to understand them so well I apply them automatically, without thinking about them so I can focus on acting.

Animation School - The Beginning

So far, this blog has been mainly concerned with self taught art study.  Now that I am in school, I still believe all the same principles this blog was about before still apply.  The only difference now is instead of self-directed study, I will be posting about my study under the direction of the staff at Capilano University.  Whether teaching myself or being taught by someone else, I still need to develop skill through acquiring knowledge and putting it to practice until I have mastered it.  My years of self-teaching have given me insight into why my professor give the assignments that they do.  The teaching philosophy at Capilano is also based on giving knowledge and assigning practice to develop skill.  It has allowed my to learn a great deal in only about a month.

In this post I will cover my progress in developing the skills of animation.  I have spent a lot of time animating and receiving critique on my work.  I will skip the first exercise, which was just to get used to the procedure and using the equipment.   The first real exercise was the bouncing ball.  This is a classic animation exercise designed to teach the basics of timing and a little stretch and squash.  I had done this exercise many times before coming to school.  In fact, I did this the first time when I was only fifteen.  It is not a hard exercise but it does serve an important function.  To make a ball bounce look realistic, the ball must follow an arc, ascending and descending on a symmetrical parabola.  The drawings must be spaced closer together at the top of the arc and further apart on the way up and down to give it the appearance of accelerating and decelerating.   The ball should also squash when it hits the ground and stretch when it moves fast.  This is an exaggeration of what happens in real life to give the animation more life.  I do not have a video of the bouncing ball I animated.

The next animation exercise was slightly more complicated.  This time, the bouncing ball has a single leg.  It jumps and lands instead of just bounces.  On the first jump, the ball had to perform a movement of anticipation.  This is where the subject makes a smaller move to prepare for a larger move.  In this exercise the ball squats down before jumping up.  This is necessary to make the action look realistic and also lets the audience know the action is coming.  Since the ball lands and jumps, it must show the point when the foot first contacts, followed by the ball crouching to accept the force of the landing.  Then, it must show the last point of contact as it leaves for its next jump.  These three key drawings are necessary for the action to read.
I feel my jumping ball moves somewhat stiffly.  It could use less drawings on the assent to make the action seem faster.


The next exercise, again slightly more complicated than the last, is a jumping flour sac.  This "character" is a little more complex than the ball with a single leg.  It is basically two balls enclosed in a bag.  The flour sac was originated at the Walt Disney studio to train young animators.  In addition to jumping, the exercise was also to have it rotate.  He must ascend and descend, stretch and squash, and anticipate just like in the previous exercises; But now it is with a more complicated character and must rotate in addition.  This exercise was also an introduction to using key frames.  Instead of animating the drawings in order, one at a time, (this is called animating straight ahead) the most important drawings are done first.  These are the drawings that define the motion, called key frames or keys.  Next, timing charts are drawn on the keys to indicate how many drawing will be between the keys and how they are to be spaced.  Then the less important drawings are added.  I am much happier with the results of this exercise.


The last assignment I will post, is our first major assignment of the semester.  The previous exercises were leading up to this.  In this assignment the flour sac must perform two jumps before jumping onto a platform on a spring.  The platform swings back and forth, swing the poor flour sac with it.  This tests our understanding of the previous principles and adds another, overlapping action.    This is where different parts of an object start and stop at different times and move at different rates.  In this example, the bottom of the flour sac is pulled by its connection to the moving platform.  The top of the flour sac trails behind it.  When the platform changes direction, the momentum of the top part continues to push it forward as the bottom part changes direction, until it pulls the top to the other direction.  This is also called drag.  I am pretty happy with this assignment, however I feel the first jump moves too slowly.


I have been learning much faster and much better than I had been when teaching myself.  I think this is because I know exactly what knowledge I need to learn and what I need to practice to develop the skill.  Getting feedback from the professor is invaluable to I know exactly what I am doing right and should repeat, and what I am doing wrong and should avoid.  Also, it is very helpful to see the work of my fellow students, seeing what they do right and learning from their mistakes as well as my own.  My fellow students are a talented bunch.  Seeing their work pushes me to do better. In learning to animate, as in learning to draw, learning to see things critically is important.  In this case it is important to be able to look at your animation, see what is not working, and be able to understand WHY it is not working;  then it can be corrected and improved.  I have learned so much in the first month and this is only the beginning.  I am excited to learn more and continue to improve my skills.

Digital Painting

It has been a while since I have posted, because I have bee moving.  I am now living in Vancouver.  School starts in a couple weeks.  In the meantime I have been doing a lot of digital painting.  I'm not new to digital painting, but this time I approached it like a beginner over again, and learned a lot.

The fresh start began at CTRL + Paint, a great tutorial website.  Even though I have experience digital painting I learned a little from the digital painting 101 section.  Next, I did the Basic Photoshop Rendering Tutorial.  This is the best basic photoshop tutorial I have ever came across.  It covers everything you need to get started in depth.  I learned photoshop painting basically by trial and error.  Learning a few simple applications of the software really changed the way I work in it.  I wish I had found this years ago. After completing this tutorial I applied what I learned to my own still life.

Next, I continued re-learning the basics, this time with better control of the medium. I believe the most fundamental skill to know in painting, digital or otherwise, is rendering forms in light in three dimensions.  I found these basic oil painting exercises applied to digital painting.  The first covers rendering basic geometric forms.  The second cover painting with value.  I did not continue with the later exercises as they were less applicable to digital painting.  I practiced rendering basic forms from my imagination as well. 

Then I began focusing more on color.  I found a wealth of information on color on this amazing free resource, Dimensions of Color.   Color theory is much more complicated then I realized.  I feel like this knowledge has helped my use of color.  As I continue to practice and apply it, more of the color theory will become clear.  I made an exercise out of the first section about light and shade.  I made a study of the photograph, placing each area of light mentioned on its own layer, ei: one layer for form shadow, one layer for reflected light.  Then, I painted a similar sphere from imagination.

After becoming more comfortable with the basics, I did some photo studies to have fun with the medium.

I also spent some time learning to paint realistic surfaces from CTRL+Paint.  Again I made my own still life to try out the techniques I learned.

Now I am trying to digitally paint figures from imagination.  I am much better at it than before I did all the above studies but I still have a lot of work to do.

For comparisons sake here is my best attempt at painting a figure from imagination about a year ago.

Cartoon character walk

I have copied several of the walks from Richard Williams' Animator's Survival Kit.  So, I wanted to try my hand at creating my own walk with one of my own characters.  You may recognize the cat from my portfolio for Capilano's Commercial Animation program.  I draw him quite frequently.  I wanted to give him a relaxed, confident stride.  This is by far the most complex animation I have ever attempted.  I am very happy with the results.  The motion of the arms is more stiff than I would like.  Also, some of the frames by themselves are actually kind of ugly.  I think it would read better and boil less with thinner lines on the final colored version. 

Chapter 5 - Ellipses and Cylinders

Chapter 5 expands on Chapter 4 by adding Cylinders to represent the limbs.  This is a useful way to render the limbs as simple shapes, and keep the three-dimensional in perspective.  I have used cylinders to represent limbs before.  I was tempted to breeze over this chapter.  However, throughout the book, Vilppu warns about the student thinking he has advanced beyond the material and skipping ahead.  I put the time into this chapter and it was well worth it.   As I progress in these studies I feel more and more confident in drawing the figure from memory and imagination.  These were drawn in ball point pen at Rittenhouse park.

Rough Animation

I did these short very rough animations for fun. I didn't plan out the action ahead of time. I just animated them straight through, tweaking as I went. My goal was just to play around with the medium.

Climbing over a wall


Jumping Rope - This one is my favorite


Doing Flips - This one was slightly more planned out. Next time I do something more complicated like this one, I will plan it out more. I ended up redoing almost the entire thing after my original idea didn't look right. It still doesn't look quite right, but I am new at this.

Box and Sphere - Vilppu drawing manual chapter 4

In this last chapter I drew figures out of boxes. In the chapter before that, I drew figures out of rounded shapes. In this chapter I combine the box and the sphere. The box representing the pelvis and the sphere representing the rib cage. I did this with drawings of people in the park. Unfortunately the studio where I do longer studies has been closed. So, I was not able to do any longer studies. To bring home the concept I decided to do a very short animation. In order to make the animation work, I really needed to understand the concept in three dimensions.  All studies done on sketch paper with ball point pen.  Animation done in Toon Boom Studio.