#ax1011

Observational drawing!

This week we decided to draw objects that appealed to us within a nearby museum. I was eager to draw skeletons, particularly animal ones, as they would help me visualise how to correctly draw animals when I finally need to.

I tried to start simple and just draw what I saw in front of me, which happened to be a pillar. However, it became apparent that my drawing wasn’t accurate nor good looking and so I left it be and went to find something else. I was a little frustrated at this as one of my goals is to become adept at drawing buildings. I believe I struggle when it comes to translating the angles I see onto blank paper. To improve this I plan to draw architecture only on graph paper, or even better - isometric paper - until I become more confident with my drawings.

After finding a selection of skulls to draw I picked what appeared to be the simplest one, though I did struggle with the proportions and ended up drawing a spear head instead - something so simple that there would be no way to mess it up. On a quest to find easy to draw objects I located a jug and was relieved by its gentle shape.

It’s not terrible but I think it could be better, it lacks depth and though I could improve it with the use of light and shadows I was too afraid to ruin what I had already drawn.

Rocks are cool, and there stood a rather large one behind me with some interesting decorations across it. Since its outline was basic enough I felt more confident while drawing this one, though the proportions of the decorations are completely off.

A painting containing a pack of dogs caught my attention, however I wasn’t confident enough to draw the entire pack and thus decided to select the dog at the easiest angle to draw. Its legs were obscured by another dog and so I had to improvise slightly, even if it didn’t go well. The original painting is below.

I did draw a couple of other items, but none were particularly good drawings or they were rather incomplete. The view from the second floor to the ground floor created a stunning, almost warped, image and I wanted to draw what I was seeing. However, I couldn’t seem to capture what I was looking at.

Observational Drawing!

For this lesson we were instructed to wonder and draw things we had likely seen a hundred times before but never paid attention to. I decided to draw a church window, a small bush garden, a bird, a tree and various pottery ornaments. Some came out better than others but the aim of the lesson wasn’t to come up with amazing drawings it was to help us become more spatially aware of our surroundings

I appear to have drifted to the more natural objects after my failed attempt to draw a church window, and though I would like to learn how to draw buildings in detail I don’t enjoy it like I do when drawing nature.

The next task along the creative thinking brief included sketching four things that made use of the rule of thirds and depth. The drawings had to be A4 and had to demonstrate at least one of the two concepts at a time.

Firstly, Rule of thirds: A method used to compose visually appealing images, where an imaginary grid is applied to every image that split the image into thirds both horizontally and vertically. Along where the lines cross and the lines themselves are great places to position things of interest within the image.

Depth: Simply making use of foreground, midground and background to portray the illusion of depth, along with line weight and clarity.

For my first drawing I decided to use a cat in a window because already it has great composition, with the cat and it’s point of interest off on the left third of the paper. I wanted to implement depth into this image better than I have by including houses or clouds in the background, however I felt as though it would clutter the image and take the attention off of the cat so I left the right side blank. One thing I attempted was to help frame the shot better by curling a tree branch around the window, as futile as this was it ensures that the right side isn’t completely blank.

This one was easy enough, I wanted to draw something with hills in the foreground, midground and background but understood that it may not be interesting to look at. To fix this I added trees into the right third of the paper, giving them some depth by making one lighter and softer than the others. I wanted to add more detail, such as a distant forest, but that may have made the drawing look tacky.

I remembered this shot from one of my favourite games; Skyrim. A dragon soaring through the sky with scenery in the background, and I never realised until now how perfectly composed it is. The majority of the dragon’s body is in the right third, with his eye placed directly on a grid line and the palm of his ‘hand’ also positioned perfectly so. The span of his wing stretches across the left third of the screen and the faded mountains in the background are exclusively in the upper left third - the incline is at least. I wanted to include some midground but knew it may mess with the depth and how close the dragon appeared to be - hence the hesitation in that tiny bit of midground on the right side.

One lesson was focused on easing us into the world of 3D animation, and we spent that time learning the basics of Maya - following the tutor as he modelled a basic humanoid shape.

Though I can’t seem to find my screenshots, we went through a process of creating a cube, extruding that cube in multiple directions and splicing it up to create markers for joints and limbs. Though our working was rough, Maya did most of the work, as when hitting a certain key the blocky model would be rounded and refined and resembled a human.

Except mine seemed to have a refrigerator for a torso.

Lip Sync

A new brief arrived; find a line of dialogue and create a lip sync for it. The line had to be between 8-15 seconds long and the lip sync not only had to include a believable mouth, but a head shot too.

I picked Nagito Komaeda’s (a popular character from Danganronpa) iconic line from the moment he snaps during a class trial. I simply adore the effort and emotion the voice actor puts into the manic laughter, and had always wanted to see it animated, hence why I was eager to be the one to do it.

One problem was that I couldn’t have the laugh alone, it would make no sense and it would be a cop out - since the mouth doesn’t move much during laughter. I wanted to push myself, so I cut up some of Nagito’s lines to make the spaces between laughter and dialogue shorter and allowed myself some speech to animate. Unfortunately, the whole line I wanted to animate surpassed the 15 second limit, so I had to cut it further - but I believe it still gave enough context for the laughter to make sense.

What I was really excited about was the character animation, I’d always imagined how Nagito would behave during his insane moment and I was planning to make his whole body shake with laughter while still making him appear menacing and unstable.

I had many difficulties during production but the main one was time. Each frame took far too long to draw as I kept getting positions wrong and I disliked a lot of what I drew.

I did have plans to add a court room background and some colour, as well as eyes for Nagito throughout the whole animation. However, I cut my losses at the end and added some shadow for depth. I only included his eyes on the close up, wanting the viewer to witness the insanity within them.

The above video shows how amazing work can be created with little CGI and lots of After Effects. As an introduction to the power of After Effects we were shown a rather impressive animation that was seemingly all CGI. However, it was made apparent to us that the only CGI in the animation was the shape of the chapel - and not even all of it - and the characters.

This blew my mind and was sort of a relief, that one wouldn’t have to model absolutely everything in 3D and wait forever for it to render. No, one could make the base shapes for structures and draw over them, adding lighting through After Effects.

My final flour sack animation with the theme of joy. Unlike the others, this animation was done in straight ahead; animating each frame one after the other.

I took this one down a different route. Naturally it would’ve been easier to do the typical ‘jump up and down’ option for joy, and I was originally going to do that. However, after being curious for a long time about if I was able to animate a background to help an animation I decided to do that instead. It was my first time animating a background but it was coincidentally a lot of fun.

I started off having the flour sack jump for joy, except it ends up in the clouds and falls downwards to do a little show of happiness. Its trip through the sky was to represent ecstasy more than joy but it’s all in the same genre really. Just to ensure I had completed the brief I made the flour sack show how happy it was at the end of the animation.

My second flour sack animation. The flour sack was supposed to be shown in some sort of struggle as it pushed a box.

This one I enjoyed as I got to work with more than just one thing on screen - and I got to crush the flour sack that had been tormenting me for so long. I animated the flour sack first using pose to pose again just like before, and animated the box after it - roughly positioning it where I think it should be as I went.