Atrus and Anna

Expressions and Body Language practice - Arrested Development

I've been trying to work on being able to draw more "strong, specific acting." I tried doing some drawings from arrested development. This was the result:

"The warden was intrigued. Less about the stunt and more about the prison beatings this brash young magician was sure to receive":


"Gob set about swallowing the key ..."

"Anything for a buck, Michael. You are so materialistic"


Buster: "Mom said you could tie this for me."
Lucille: "Make it long ... so he doesn't seem so ... round."


Marta: "I said ... career is one thing, but family is forever."
Gob: "To prove that no prison can hold me, I will incarcerate myself in the same penitentiary that holds my father. Only to escape 24 hours later ... No shackles can hold these hands!"


Michael: "I bet you don't even know what the auction is for tonight."
Lindsey: "The Wetlands."
Michael: "Yeah ... to do WHAT with them?"
Lindsey: " .... dry them."
Michael: "SAVE them."
Lindsey: "-from drying!"

(It was soon to be midnight and my boyfriend was starting a movie ... so I got a little lazy on the last few panels of the last one ...)

Myst Story Art

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="620" caption="Anna shows Atrus a D'ni book for the first time"][/caption]

In the Myst script that I'm writing, Anna first exposes Atrus to the D'ni when he shows her an unusual rock that he's found. She hesitates, then decides to show him a big D'ni volume on geology. This book ignites his interest in the D'ni, and goes with him to D'ni when he finally travels there many years later ...

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="prep work for above painting"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="prep work for above painting"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="620" caption="Anna"][/caption]

Sketches from a Bathhouse in San Francisco

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="620" caption="Sketches from a bathhouse in San Francisco"][/caption]

In Japantown, San Francisco, there is a communal bathhouse called "Kabuki." I desperately wanted to go, since I hadn't been to one since leaving Japan. The hot bath, the cold bath, the sauna, the steam room ... afterwards, you feel like a million dollars!

After an hour's happy bathing, I had curry rice for lunch and did these sketches.

Stripes - scene 1 sketches

Here are some sketches I did while working on the animatic for scene 1 of the Stripes story. This is a very biased sample. I did many times this many drawings, and most of them were pretty bad!

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="620" caption="Sketch work for Scene 1 animatic"][/caption]

Battlestar Galactica Storyboards

Here's some quick storyboard sketches I did while watching Battlestar Galactica. I used a uni-ball "micro" pen and side of a pencil for shading.

Stripes story art

Some pen and copic marker sketches I did while working on the script for Stripes:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="tortoise"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="413" caption="a man bringing sticks to sell for charcoal"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="496" caption="zebra!"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="464" caption="yay!"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="a stripes problem"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="fighting"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="lamb and oryx "][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="boys meet zebra"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="new friends"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="uh-oh"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="ostrich"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="no no no"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="lion!"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="rolling"][/caption]

Copic Marker and Colored Pencil Sketches

More Copic marker sketches, but with a layer of colored pencil on top! I had a lot of fun doing these guys. I'm considering using this kind of thing for my comic.

It feels like a fun process because I'm building the image three ways, making it stronger each time. In the ink drawings I was doing, it's hard to build a cohesive image because I have to think about how all the pieces will work together separately (like the ink linework, the ink shading, and the tones). With these drawings, I start with a rough blue sketch, going for good shapes. Then I block in the values with the warm gray Copic markers. Then I just lightly go over all of it was colored pencil. Because the tones tell most of the story, the color is just spruces it up. And the colored pencil glides right over the marker. Fun!

Copic Marker Sketches

I'm working on a comic book. I'm trying to figure out what process will work for me ... I'm looking for a good balance of speed and quality. While waiting for my computer to handle working on several 300 dpi 9" x 12" files, I started doodling using an erasable blue pencil and warm gray Copic markers. I liked the process, so I continued and did a few more. These are the better of the lot.

Something about the cool blue of the pencil and the warm gray values felt nice. Complete. More so than the labored black and white inked drawings I was working on.

Storyboard Study – Troy – Part 1

After getting a lot of feedback at Disney a few weeks ago, I'm ready to jump back into making storyboards. I wanted to get another look at staging and cinematography in live action, and I started with Troy. Here are four pages of storyboards I did while watching Troy (with a finger on the pause button). If you know the movie, this is the scene where Paris and Hector are being toasted by the king of Sparta, Paris all the while ogling Helen. (If you don't know the movie, then this will all look like chicken scratch).

Myst: The Book of Atrus Storyboards based on Japanese Text

Sometime in 2007 I was living in Japan and ordered a used copy of "Myst: The Book of Atrus" in Japanese on Amazon. BoA is my favorite book of all time and I'm studying Japanese, so it was very exciting to finally get my hands on it.

At some point, I decided to make a Japanese style manga comic book using one scene from the Myst book. I never finished the project, but I was recently preparing my portfolio and saw the storyboards I did for it.  I liked them, so I'm posting them here.

The scene is where Gehn is telling Atrus that his grandmother is to blame for the fall of D'ni. Gehn judges Anna harshly and Atrus feels confused and angry. Finally, Atrus stands by what he considers true, making Gehn very mad.

2D Animation in Flash – Part 1: Idea and Storyboards

This is the first part in a multi-part series about the process involved in making, “Link’s Prize,” a short 2D animation done in Flash. This is by no means the best flash animation ever, but I wanted to write about the process in making it because I found it a was a highly educational experience. I hope in writing about it, you can learn something too! Ok, here we go!

Materials used:

Pencil, paper, ~~brain~~

Outline

-The Idea
-Storyboards

The Idea

So, I know I wanted to do some short animation featuring Young Link, from The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time. I draw him all the time (he's so cute!) and so I've been longing to do an animation of his character for ages. However, the last time I tried to animate something with Link, it was disaster namely because 1. I had designed it to be a HUGE project and 2. my time management skills at the time were somewhat ... weak (in the sense that one week I would work my ass off, and the next do nothing but play Grand Theft Auto and drink diet coke.)

I must admit that this short, humble project was a huge first for me. It was the first time I ever have taken a personal animation project from start to finish, all without overeating, losing sleep, ingesting illegal quantities of caffeine, or generally going insane. Yay! But more on that later.

So the idea goes like this: Link wakes up, starts to get ready to start the day when he is suddenly and rudely is reminded that he has a cow in his bedroom. The whole idea fits in one sentence. Now, it's not Oscar material, but it is short and I was excited to get started.

Storyboards

I took the idea and started drawing very rough sketches of how I would layout the shots. Here's all the storyboard-related pages I drew (5 total):



(You can also see on the last page, my ideas for what I was going to do next, including writing about this whole thing here later ... ^_^)

So, about storyboarding: In the past, I used to labor over each shot of a sequence until it was "perfect" before moving on to the next one. This was a huge creative buzzkill and I would get frustrated and quit quickly.

So, this time, I first drew those main ideas, whether they were quick thumbnails of a shot, or a few keyframes of animation, those main-POW!-ideas that were the inspiration for doing the sequence in the first place.

With those down, I went back and started to fill in the rest of the sequence. For each shot, I started by drawing the very first idea that popped into my head. In the "each-shot-must-be-perfect" method, I wouldn't dare even draw my first idea, I'd just ignore it, pass it off as cliche. By drawing even that first weak idea, then I could build on it, change it to make it a better, stronger shot. For each shot, I drew several versions before moving on to the next one.

After reaching the last shot, I went back and tried to strengthen any shots that I still thought were weak. When I felt satisfied with the shots as a whole, I put numbers next to them to put them in order. If this had been a longer animation, I would have redrawn the shots so they could be easily read in sequence. However, the whole thing was only 8 shots long, so I felt I could imagine the events without redrawing it.

This way of doing things felt very organic, and less stressful than the way I used to do it. Time and time again, a theme that I've been learning is this: That you can't start off and suddenly make something perfect. But, if you make something crappy, then at least that's one step closer to making something more perfect than crappy.

That's the end of Part 1. I'll be writing the rest of the series very soon, and I hope you come back for a look!

Next: Making the Animatic

Part 1: Idea and Storyboards
Part 2: Making an Animatic
Part 3: Drawing the Backgrounds
Part 4: Animation Preplanning and Animating
Part 5: Painting the Backgrounds
Part 6: Coloring the Animations