Due to Covid-19 our classes had to be online, which made it more difficult to talk with other people in my class.  To help get to know each other better we each had to make a short stop motion video to introduce ourselves and share our hobbies and interests.  This was a lot of fun and I enjoyed watching everyone’s videos, even if I did cringe when it came to my own.

 

This was my stop animation introducing myself, which has a total of 267 images and lasts one minute six seconds (Just enough time to thoroughly embarrass myself). 

In it I included some games that I play, music I listen to, my coffee addiction and, of course, my pets. 

 

 

Chasing Hearts Regular

 

I did few warm up exercises to both loosen up my wrist and feel more confident when doing my line work before starting.  This is something I had, for some reason, never thought to try before, but I can now definitely see the benefit.

 

 

 

I read through Doug Compon’s lessons on 3D basic shapes and how to manipulate them.  These were really helpful in giving me a better perspective in terms of giving the shapes more life and character.  I was then able to convert this into a character – The flour sack, which is a blend of a sphere and a cube.  We were asked to practice drawing the flour sack to help us gain a better understanding of torso positioning and its importance.  Dough Compon’s article covered this so I was able to see his thought process when drawing this, which was very helpful.

Here are some of the images in the article that I used as reference when creating my own flour sacks.

Here are some of the attempts I made at trying to recreate my own flour sack character.  I added a face to each of them as I thought it looked cute and allowed for more of their character to show through.

 

 

 

We were asked to take three of our favourite animated characters and trace over them to find their construction and underlying forms.  I chose to work with Snoopy from Peanuts, Shōyō Hinata from Haikyuu!! and Mitsuha Miyamizu from Your Name.

 

 

After breaking down each of these characters into more simple shapes you can see that the base design of each is relatively simplistic.  I really enjoyed working on these, especially since it was the first homework that allowed me to openly express my weeb side :).   My favourite one to do was Mitsuha, probably due to the fact that it was the last one and I was then more comfortable with the process.

After handing these in, everyone’s work was shown in front of the class so that we could see examples of how each individual perceived the shapes of the characters they had chosen.  I was amazed by some of the people who had managed to narrow the shapes down into their most simplistic form, and yet the shapes still held the personality of the character.

I think I made some areas more complicated than they needed to be.  If I were to go back and do this over, I would change that and make the shapes I pulled out even more straightforward and easy to understand.