Reflection

Over the course of this module, I was happy with the work I did on perspective and scenery. It would usually be something I would avoid, however after learning how to draw from reference and use Clip Studio’s perspective tool to my advantage, I found I enjoyed it more than I thought. I thought my final rendered scenery piece was successful in my use of texture and perspective.
One thing I feel I need to improve on is animation itself. I felt my final animation worked well, but was slightly stiff. Improvement in animation is something that can only come with practice so to improve I will keep working on and refining my skills. I also felt that my character design could be improved. I don’t think my art style works well for full animations at the moment – at least with my current animation skills. For now, until I am better at animating, I should create simpler designs and learn to work with shapes more.
Teamwork was definitely a challenge, considering the pandemic. Not everyone in the group would always be in and we would often have to chase people down for their storyboard/animatic/etc. It’s difficult to work in a team with a lack of communication, as when you’re working with a team you’ll usually be bouncing ideas and thoughts off each other, and you’ll need to come up with ideas to keep your animation consistent. I learned that communication is absolutely key when working as a team. I also found working in a team to be beneficial for animation because work can be spread out between the group, and there is more room for generating and discussing different ideas.
If I were to start this module again, I would definitely improve my time management. I would often spend too long on one piece of work and then neglect the next week’s work – i.e., I spent too long working on rendering my scenery and feel I didn’t get to spend enough time on character drawings because of it. I would also have done some more animation practice before my final animation – perhaps some animation tests of the characters doing various things before animating them in my final animation, to get an idea of how they would move.
I think I definitely need more practice with character drawing and animation. I feel like life drawing would really help me get a sense of form. For now, it may be a good idea to practice by drawing models online and doing my own figure drawing sessions for practice. Maybe I could get stock footage of people moving and study their movements and animate them.
I would also like to improve at animating effects – such as smoke, transitions, lighting, etc. Some youtube tutorials may help with that.
Overall, I was happy with the progress I made learning to animate – it’s not perfect and I do need more practice, but I was happy with the animation I could make with my current skills. I was also happy with my progress on perspective drawing.

Animation – Demon Portal

For my final animation, I was working on the part of our story where the little girl, Eden, discovers her way home after trekking through the demon world.

My classmates and lecturers were overall happy with my animatic, however my lecturers recommended cutting it slightly shorter, as my animatic ended up being 20 seconds long. Myself and my group also decided, after getting advice from our lecturers during class, that we would add a scene at the beginning that links my animation more with the animation preceding mine. The animation before mine features a Tengu-like demon chasing the duo into a castle. I cut out the scene from the end and instead added this scene to my final animation.

Rough illustration of the tengu’s nose breaking through the castle door.

This was my final animation. I ended up not making my animation shorter and was a little pressed for time making it. In the end, I feel I sacrificed the quality of the background artwork to get the animation done and coloured. To save time, I created simple backgrounds and used texturers to flesh them out a bit.

I used lots of blues to portray the dim interior of the castle, and it contrasted the tengu nicely, as well as Eden’s shirt.

For one of my scenes, the file corrupted while working on it and it was unable to save as an MP4. I was able to save it as a gif. This clip is just before Eden pulls herself up onto the platform – Bubs helps her up.

I used a blue overlay to keep all the colours uniform, as well as a grainy overlay to give my animation some texture.

Overall I enjoyed working with my team. Some of my teammates were not present in class and I did not see their animation or storyboard, so It was slightly difficult piecing it together. Luckily, I was able to see the animatic of the scene before mine, so I knew where to continue from and was able to come up with a scene to link my animation with the previous one.

The style of this animation was extremely different to styles I’m used to working with, so it was definitely a challenge working with the characters. I usually would draw more detailed characters, and drawing in such a cartoony style was a challenge. I found it difficult to keep the characters consistent. Overall, however, I was pleased with how my animation turned out.

Character Design

During class, we were tasked with creating characters using different shapes -Squares, Circles, and Triangle.Using squares and rectangles, I created a delinquent style character. I gave him a rectangular pompadour hairstyle and built his body from squares. Using circles, I created a young and bubbly girl character. She seems as though she’d be bouncing around a lot and very animated. With triangles, I created a snooty, high fashion woman. With her nose in the air, she seems like a very snooty/stuck up character.

I did some character sketch sheets for the character of Eden in our animation.

I liked my more detailed designs more, but knew they would be harder to animate. I also did more traditional/older style clothing alongside some more 90s style designs, because we were torn on having our animation set in either the 20s or the 90s.

My designs on the left were inspired by Suehiro Maruo’s Shoujo Tsubaki. My design for Eden was inspired by the young girl.

Movie: Midori / Chika Gentou Gekiga: Shōjo Tsubaki

For her 90s style design, I went with dungarees and some bright colours. I looked up pictures of 90s kids fashion and decided to give her bright colours and stripes on the sleeves, with denim dungarees.

How To Wear 90s Trends - Retro Style Tips

This was sheet of some more simplified faces. Her face is rounder and looks more childlike, and more simple to animate.

 

Below are some robot designs from when I was originally doing designs for the cyberpunk group.

Animation

When starting off with animation, we started off with a simple bouncing ball exercise. I animated using Krita. When animating the ball, I had to keep in mind physics – what a bouncing ball would look like, how high would it bounce, how long would it bounce for – as well as timing. I used more frames for times where the ball would be going slower, and fewer where it would be going faster. When the ball begins bouncing there are fewer frames, and when it begins to slow down there are more frames. I would have the ball slightly squished when it lands, and stretched when it’s bouncing off the ground. I would generally have slightly more frames as it’s in the air to give the impression it almost ‘floats’ in the air for a moment before descending again.

When I got home, I did some bouncing ball practice using Clip Studio Paint. Because I planned to animate my animatic in CSP, I decided I would use some tutorials to learn the program and do some simple bouncing balls to get used to it. Whyt Manga is an artist I follow online and I found he had a beginners tutorial on YouTube which covers basic functions of CSP animation, including colouring.

This was the first practice ball. For this one I didn’t have a solid foundation for the floor and accidentally had it land slightly too high on its second bounce.

This was my second one – I think this one went a bit too fast and could have used more frames.

 

This was my third practice ball. I wanted to drop this one from a height rather than have it bounce across the screen.

This was my fourth practice ball. I think this one worked well but I wish I made it smaller so I could have made it go further.

 

After doing the bouncing ball exercise in class, we animated a ball on a track, like a roller coaster. I used more frames to make it slower going uphill and at the peaks, and then less frames to make it faster when downhill. I tried to make it seem as though there was some resistance when it was at the peak of each hill.

I also animated this amogus getting squashed when learning how to colour in clip studio. poor guy </3

Storyboarding

This was the first storyboard I did for practice. We were given set prompts for the scenes and were tasked with using a sack to storyboard it. Because the sack has no human features I had to really work with its shape to convey emotions. In the first panel, I have the sack slouched over the cauldron and used some menacing lighting to set the tone. I used the sack’s ties almost like animal ears to convey emotion – they are up in the third panel because it is alert/shocked, and down in the fourth panel because it is nervous/cowering.

 

This was my rough storyboard for my animation. My animation depicts Eden discovering her way home through a TV found in the castle. I later ended up changing this storyboard and making it longer.

After altering my storyboard, I added scenes of Bubs noticing the door to show his reactions too. I also added in a close-up shot of the TV.

Tonal Study – Rendering Exercise

 

For my detailed Tonal study, I chose to render this cityscape thumbnail. I thought this one would leave me room to experiment with colourful lighting and different textures.

I used pictures of Times Square in New York as a reference for my piece.

 

NEW YORK CITY, NY - JAN 30: Times Square Is Featured With Broadway Theaters  And LED Signs

 

The image is made up of mostly square shapes. I distorted squares using clip studio’s perspective tool.

For the background, I used brushes from DevinDraws’ cityscape brush pack, which can be found here. I used some of their tutorials to learn how to compose a cityscape using the brushes. The brushes were very helpful for repetitive aspects of the piece such as  windows.

This was my final piece. I used a textured eraser to create the effect on the road. I used one of the window brushes and lowered the opacity to create reflections on the road. I wanted to give the appearance of a rain night. I used the droplets airbrush tool to create raindrops on the pavement.

 

I experimented with different overlays and levels of saturation to create a few different variants of the piece.

Week 4 – Colour Studies

This week we have moved on to my favourite topic-colour! Colour is the area in which I feel most confident, and is where I am interested in specialising for a future career.

My first task was to take screenshots from some films and observe colour palettes in them. I chose colours using Adobe Colour Wheel, which I found to be a very helpful tool during this week’s tasks.This scene is from The Last Unicorn.It uses a monochromatic blue colour palette, evoking a melancholy feeling.

This scene is from the film Promare from Studio Trigger. We can see a complementary colour palette used here, whith the pinks and purples complementing the blues and greens of the city.

Next, I chose these scene from Perfect Blue. The scene is largely analogous, with shades of green and blue, creating a bleak and dreary scene. The character Mima completely contrasts the green in her pink dress.

 

Next, I had to take this pre-drawn landscape image and add my own colours. Using colour, I had to convey 4 different moods from the same image.

The first mood that came to mind was “fear”. To create a sense of fear and foreboding, I added a red light source to the image. I referenced this light source when adding bright red highlights to the piece. The bright, saturated red contrasts the darker tones of the piece and gives a sense of danger. For the landscape, I made the dark areas extremely dark to create the sense of fear – I used pure black for the darkest areas of the piece. I used dark shades of grey for the rocks and had the water pitch black, with red ripples reflecting the eclipse. I used an ominous dark turquoise colour for the sky.

The next mood I tried to convey was “tranquil”. I used pastel colours for this to create a calm atmosphere. I added some fluffy clouds and a crescent moon to make the piece feel somewhat magical. I used a pastel pink for the trees in the background and coloured in the line art to remove harsh black tones from the piece.

For this one I created the piece first then thought of the mood later. I wanted to draw a type of Mesa environment, like a cowboy canyon. I wanted to use fun and saturated colours. I used a bright blue for the sky to make the tone light and whimsical. I think there’s an optimistic, hopeful mood from this piece.

The final mood I decided to convey was ‘melancholy. I was inspired by the palette shown above in The Last Unicorn for this one. I think the monochromatic blue palette evokes a melancholy feeling. I think the brightness of the moon and white highlights keep the feeling from being too close ‘hopeless’ kind of feeling, and create a more pensive tone.

Week 4 – Colour

Colour Around Us

In order to study colour, we were tasked with observing colour in the world around us. I found three examples of colour palettes from real life – analogous, monochromatic, and complementary.

The first example I found was right in front of me – my keyboard. My keyboard is various shades of pink ranging from shades closer to purple on the colour wheel, to more reddish shades. I picked this analogous palette from this photo.When looking for a monochromatic image, I went to my kitchen. This image of the kitchen counter and all its appliances created a monochromatic palette of white, black, and various shades of grey in between.For a complementary colour palette, I looked to the wardrobe and found a few articles of clothing with complementary palettes. My girlfriend’s Halloween jumper is an example of a complementary palette, with orange and purple being complementary colours. Similarly, the jacket with sheep used a complementary palette of pink and green. I found that I could see complementary colours around me in a lot of art pieces and fashion items around me.

 

Week 3 – Tone and Value

This week I did 6 more value studies set in my world. For this one I did more detailed studies than previously. Two of these (the first and last ones) were thumbnails from last week which I liked and refined. I tried adding more texture and detail to the first thumbnail to include rain and puddles.

I found it easier to work on values in night time settings where lots of lights are present, such as the cityscape – the totally black sky gives me something to work with, as everything gets lighter from there. I struggled a bit more with the interiors, such as the diner on the bottom right, and trying to imagine which light sources are present.

Week 2 – Perspective 

For this week, I took three screenshots from media I liked and studied perspective using perspective rulers.

I first took these two screenshots from the film Promare from Studio Trigger. These are both examples of two point perspective. Both of these backgrounds have vanishing points outside of the frame itself. I found these points by drawing lines from using items within the frame as a guide, and finding the horizon line.

This still from Akira is an example of one point perspective. It was easy to find the vanishing point here as it was right in the center. This scene has a low horizon line; tall buildings make up most of the frame to create a cityscape.

 

Using what I learned from these studies, I created some thumbnails based of the worlds we have been coming up with in our groups.

These thumbnails include a mix of three worlds we had come up with; A neo-noir 50s inspired city, a mystical swamp, and a Lovecraftian seaside village.

These thumbnails hone in on our final chosen world, the Neo Noir City. I focused on key areas from our ideas, such as a detective’s office, red light district, and a diner.

I found it difficult working in just black and white as it’s easy to make a scene too dark or to create wrong tonal values with no colour as reference, so I found these studies to be challenging but very helpful.

 

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