Youths

I've been back home for Easter weekend, getting a break from Dundee and playing with puppies. It's been awesome. Whilst I was home, I discovered an old sketchbook I'd had when I was in first year high school (about 8 years ago?) and remembered a couple of characters I'd drawn in it that I recall being incredibly proud of when I drew them:

I think they were created as a frustrated statement against how my sister used to watch "Sailor Moon" and how annoyed I was at how girly it was...

I never used to draw cartoons as I never knew what I wanted to do until the end of high school - I've only really been working on drawing from my imagination properly for the past couple of years. These two are examples of the very rare instances that I dared to draw from my mind.

Anyway, as a break from SUSHI work, I decided to try redrawing these now - 8 years later - as a gift to my former self. They're soo far from the kind of theme of stuff I draw now, but they were fun to do. I tried to keep it as close to the original drawings as possible - I don't think younger Andrew would have been impressed if I'd changed them...

Who knows... Maybe in another 8 years I'll come back to them again, hopefully having improved a bit more...

Floating

Both a metaphor and an artwork description. Been sort of floating about recently. Airily dipping half-heartedly into one project and then into another and so on... Which of course doesn't do much for either morale or motivation...

However, I don't know what's happened, but I feel kinda re-inspired. Probably something to do with the purchase of this:

Mock me all you wish, but until you use one for yourself, you will never understand... Never understand... So yes. Hopefully things will start to come together now. Only a few teaching weeks left, so gotta get my life back together before I'm stranded in the wilderness...

Let's wrap up. I'll bring you to the second reason for this title. Started doodling. Finished doodling.

I was going to go and add shading/coloured pencil into this, but decided I'd give digitising it a go first. My first attempt made me sad. I really need to improve my digital work beyond flat cell shading. Hopefully get the coloured version to you one day... One day...

Make Your Own Title

Titles can be hard. This one allows you to be creative. This is me giving back.

Just a short post this time I think... I did a wee doodle for a friends 21st last night... But then got a bit carried away...

Hand inked then digi-coloured.

I'm pretty pleased with it actually. But am well aware I greatly need to improve my digi work. Currently in an internal battle with my love of linear work. I love line work, but most of my favourite illustrations that I aspire to don't have it. My goal is trying to find a happy medium. Pffffffffff...

The robot character is from my friend's comic which you can (and definitely should) purchase here:

GALERON AND TEGEN

Whereas the fox is from my comic which you could purchase here, if you so wish...:

THE SUN AND THE FOX

Oh and finally, I uploaded my linetest from a PREVIOUS POST, so have a gander, and please leave any constructive comments you have. Now I've spent some time away from it, I can see a few things I need to tighten up anyway.

Final(ly)

To be honest, I can't really believe I'm saying this... But I started animating...

This never happens.

So, on (probably) my final post of the year, I can show you some key frames. They're really rough, and I'll need to go in and add some more keys for clarity/fix some volume control, but to be honest I don't feel it's too bad for a first pass. I don't know... I'm too close to it to tell now:

Normally, I'd wait until it was further on than this, but unfortunately I've come to the end of my free trial of AfterEffects which was my only source of easy line-testing...

As a bonus here's a wee doodle I did then coloured. It's me in a van with an easily distracted driver...

Happy New Year y'all - see you on the other side...

I Survived Christmas

A bold statement, but a true one. I made it through, managing to avoid the threatening food coma. Just about. And to celebrate today, I decided I felt like getting back into a wee bit o' animation. Using a life drawing pose as inspiration:

I quickly thought up an action, jotted down some key poses and drew this character over the top. Nice and complicated to suit my over-ambitious nature.

Now it's just to start the animation. I'm hoping that by posting this up here, it will stop me from leaving it by the wayside. I'll post y'all the keys once I've got them jotted down. I'd maybe ask for feedback... If there were anyone watching...

*tumbleweed*

To Grinch Or Not To Grinch?

Well... The world didn't end... So I now have no excuse not to blog. My goal was to post something before Christmas, so here we are. My other goal was for it not to be coursework just yet, as the feels like a cop-out, so coursework, this is not.

In my feedback for this semester, I was told I'm not making enough use of my life drawing. Therefore, I'm using it to create small illustrations which is proving to be rather fun. Unfortunately, they're not quite finished yet, but I feel I need to blog them now, otherwise I'll never blog again. You see? I even put them as GIFS so you can see the progression/I'd never done one before.

So here you go. A slightly underwhelming present from a distant relative if you will.

I'm going to come back and get these backgrounds done, but I've got a turkey to demolish first.