Digital Speed Paint - 3 Colour Challenge

I decided to promote my artwork by doing art challenges on YouTube, so I did the 3 colour challenge, where you use a random colour generator to select 3 colours that you can solely use to paint with. I ended up with two nice teal colours and a deep purple, so I mixed them to create more colours to work with and designed a cabbage patch fairy. I had a lot of fun and it was interesting working on a new project. Setting up my YouTube account and learning how to record and edit a painting video was a lot of fun and I feel like I've learned a lot from it. I hope to work on these more over summer.

Final Animation - Playground Project

I finally completed my playground animation after a lot of long stressful nights and an abundance of changes from my original animatic. It was a very interesting experience and I feel that I've learned a lot of new things through this process. I found it was a lot easier to visualise my end product by colouring a scene as soon as I completed it, rather than animating the whole thing first. Being able to see how it would look finished was motivating.

I tried to incorporate different movements, such as running, punching and swinging, things that I hadn't practiced animating before. I feel that I pulled it off well but with more time I could have given the movements more realism.

Experimental Project

I completed my experimental project and although it greatly differed from what I originally meant to do, I'm satisfied with the result. My original intention was to show a progression of my artwork, from my earliest drawings as a baby to my current art style, since it's my strong belief that you can tell a lot about an artist from the way that they create their art, and the styles they choose. However, due to time management and tests turning out badly, I was unable to create a film that satisfied me. Therefore, I went for something a little different and experimented with a video editing software I hadn't used before. It was fun incorporating myself into the film, and experimenting with typography, masking layers and flashing imagery, as well as different video effects and transitions.

2D Design For Animation - Parallax Shot

I finally completed my animation background and created a parallax shot. It took me a while to understand how to create the shot but I'm very happy with the result. Although I feel that with some more time I could have added some animation to the figure and also created the illusion of moving water or reflections, I'm still for the most part happy with how my work turned out, as I don't have much experience with drawing and painting environments and backgrounds. It was a lot of fun and has inspired me to practice drawing more background art over summer to improve.
I based the shot off of a photograph of Lake Luzern I took in Switzerland in 2016. I found it while looking through old files and thought the framing and angle of the shot was interesting, and also wanted to experiment with using a mainly blue-green colour palette, as normally I paint in warmer tones. A cooler environment was a lot of fun to paint, and I felt as though the cool temperature came across in the colours and lighting I used.

Playground Animatic

My animatic for my playground project took longer to put together than I expected, because it was my second attempt. It was my decision to change the structure of the scene entirely. The final product looks a lot different because I fixed up the timing and removed several shots.

Experimental Animation Concept Artwork

For the experimental film, the aim is to tell something about yourself. So I decided the best approach would be to show the development of my artwork through the years. If you think about it, unless you google a famous animator, all you can really guess about their personality is by looking at the way they animate, the way they draw and the way their characters interact. I would like to leave some things to the imagination after all!

For this task, I enlisted the help of my parents to dig up any old drawings they had hidden away from me in the past (since a few years ago I was hellbent on destroying any 'bad' artwork from my past that I could find). Then the key would be to draw them. I relied on workbooks from my nursery years, notebooks where I had drawn hideous comics, and finally some embarrassing digital fan art I have created in the past five or six years, in order to tell my story.

Playground Scene Concept Art

This week we were given the brief for our motion studies project, an 8-second sequence wherein we have to animate children playing on playground equipment. This entailed creating character designs, designing an easy art style to animate quickly with, and drawing up a sequence of thumbnails and a layout of the environment.

I wanted each character to be colourful and unique, so I worked hard to create individual colour palettes for each character. When I had drawn all of them, I did a line up of both the boys and the girls. This was fun as I don't normally draw children, and it was interesting creating different personalities for them that showed through their outfits, hairstyles and attitudes.

Next came the layout design. I practiced drawing playground equipment using reference I found online, before creating a simple playground scene. I didn't want the viewer to be distracted by the background since the movement of the characters is the focus of the piece, so I made the background very simple, surrounded by cloud-like bushes to allude to the playground being in some kind of clearing.

Finally, the thumbnails. Originally I had been confused by the brief and mistakenly believed that the animation would be a minute long, so I began developing a narrative. However, this had to be simplified in order to fit into an 8-second slot, so the original story (a shy boy coming to the park and the other children dragging him onto different equipment to try it out) was cut short. Instead, I focused on a bully character fighting this boy instead, and the other kids leaving their games to attempt to pull the two boys apart. While I was told this would be a complex piece of animation to produce, I am willing to try it and prove that I understand the way the body moves well enough to construct a convincing fight scene. It will also be a chance to try something new as it is something I haven't tried to do before.