Eseld: Small colour/style update

I was a little unsatisfied with how I was approaching the scene layout and interaction between the background and the characters.

I felt like I had forgotten all the style research I did at the start, particularly the A J Casson pieces.

I therefore looked at compositions and styles for the character I really liked. The two main influences were yellowcake by millionfish  and the concept work for Spider-man- Into the Spider-verse (1) (2)

Examples of what inspired me below-

yellowcake/ millionfish

yellowcake is an abstract character study comic based around the Metal Gear franchise. I love how it switches styles between comics, uses the square shape of the frame differently in every shot, and incorporates multimedia to tell the story. The top middle and right have a similar style to my background works, and seeing it work so successfully here has encouraged me to work more with it.

The shading and shadow use really stuck out to me. The colour schemes are all really thought out and show what a vital part of the design colour is.

I love some of the complex character positioning and would love to include similar staging in my own work. At the moment I don’t feel like I could go as far with that in my own piece but it’s something worth exploring.

Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse

(click for full view)

The art style for Spider-verse has had a huge amount of research and effort put into it. These concept pieces (the two left by Vaughan Ling) show the commitment to giving the film an impressive and unique visual look.

The main feature I love are the deep shadows, small bright patches and smooth colour schemes.

From this I have made a small amount of progress with working on the style. I think I need to start my colour boards in combination with this and set design and develop as I go along-

Becky Lynch 11/12 Raw Match used as reference

With the above piece I found using a textured brush really improved the style, I liked pushing everything slightly purple as well as it made everything cohesive but allowed the black and super bright highlights to stand out.

I liked the blood being bright red as well- I think that’s one element I will make less realistic and almost its own character.

Eselds’ hair was fun in this style too; I particularly like the top left and bottom middle pieces. I think the key is having the black textured lines to animate but also having the grey underlay so that the hair looks solid and consistent.

The bottom right was an attempt to draw a scene in the style, but I think the line art is messy and lacking detail. It’s an okay start but I need to redraw it with more effort. Also I think texture line son the clothes could be experimented with

2005: Storyboard Trial 1

In the review I was told to change the personality of the customer to make her contrast more with the toothpaste girl.

I tried making the character more pushy, then a vampire (for the teeth), before settling on her being the face of the brand and therefore reluctant to take the samples as she has enough of them already.

I need to pace this a bit more and show more inbetweens, but for a first pass I think it’s worked out well.

summer work: rabbit

I made one of the cartoon animals in Maya and I also decided to rig it. I picked the bunny as it looked the simplest.

All done in about 2 hours.

Step by step- I curled the ears with a lattice. I also ended up using HumanIK to rig as making my own rig ended up being too annoying.

Poses-

summer work: animal designs

For practice I drew animals in different styles with different levels of humanisation.

I also drew different reptiles, amphibians and water animals in my sketchbook 🙂

Summer Practice: Head turn

For summer work we were told to make short animations and I made a quick head turn as i still need to get better at them.

(two different speeds)

Made on Autodesk sketchbook with the flipbook feature

1004: House designs continued

For the chicken and fox houses I finished up the exterior work I needed to do.

I trialled a few different chicken designs based on my favourite-

I then checked the silhouettes to see which one worked best-

I decided that I still liked number one so I didn’t change anything except for making the design a bit neater.

I then drew the placement of the fox and chicken house in the forest/estate. I put the fox closer into the forest so the house would look in worse shape and the stilts would make sense-

I’m going to do more angles, such as wide, from the front and eye level from the fox house.

Here is a reference page for the tire swing-

1003: Creature modelling update

I managed to model the body and start on the facial features. I applied a temporary skin as I find it easier to see than the grey.

I also started working on the teeth but I don’t have a screencap for that yet.

I found the model easier to make than I thought so I might go back to the design and work into it more.

VFX: Layers

In VFX we were looking at layers and channels and how they can be useful.

Here is the original image-

Through Shuffle I separated the layers. Below is what they look like individually-

It was really useful to learn about this as it gave me a better understanding of what Nuke does with each editing technique.