Flour Sacks

Every animation student has to animate flour sacks at one point or another. It's like having to animate bouncing balls. 

We had to do a perspective and an orthographic jump as our final project.

It was a lot more difficult trying to apply timing and staging to an actual character, but it was fun to have more freedom with a project.

I don't know why the orthographic's background shot the way it did, but it's alright. Just looks dark now.

Wave Action

We spent a long time in animation learning wave action. It's hard! Really hard! This was the first assignment that everyone really hit the wall with.

We had to do two animations: one applying the wave action to a dog's tail and one to an arm waving a flag.

People either got one or the other, but only a few understood both.

I animated the dog tail just fine. It made sense. We just had to copy the standard wave action formula from our text books.

But, the arm was bad. I redid my arm animation probably nine separate times, and it still wasn't clicking. About an hour before it was due, I realized I just had to submit what I had, so here it is. 

I feel like if I got an in-person critique from my instructor, I would have been able to grasp it better, but my lab class fell over thanksgiving break. To make it 'fair', he gave us written critiques via email, but in terms of animation, it's really hard to make a critique clear unless both parties can see it as it happens.

I asked him for a critique after anyway, anticipating having to resubmit mine. He said I probably wouldn't have to, and lo and behold, I got an 86%, but I still plan to fix it up.

Art Dump 12/11/2013

It's been a hard time for personal art. School has been really busy with finals and final projects, so nothing I've made has been too serious. Just little warm-ups to vent or keep my wrist in shape.

Then there's this: 

I started it back in September but never finished it. I finally accepted the other day that I probably just never will. I'll post it for now, but yeah. Totally unfinished. Which is a huge shame; I really liked how this piece felt.

2013 Summary

I compiled the best drawings I had from each month from 2013. I'm surprised how little art I did this year? There's two months missing, even. For having such a heavy-art life, it's a bit embarrassing to see the proof of me not being about to commit/finish a drawing. 

At least I know what to shoot for next year.

Eastern European Animation

I mean, we went over everything in film class. Not just anime. Anime was only a brief hour lesson.
We focused a lot on the animation movements in Eastern Europe after the wars.

 Animation went through some pretty cool stuff.

cowboy bebop

If y'all want to skip to 14:35, you'll get to watch a real treat.

I really like Digipen because even the older teachers can all agree on what's good and what's not, even if it's something like anime. 

I don't know, it's worth it. I promise.

If you don't want to skip it yourself, here's a link

L'Absinthe Glass

A few months ago we had to recreate a work of art we had gone over during Art History and write a paper on it. My roommates and I threw this together in our school's cafe. We put a lot of effort into it, considering how different they turned out.

Eggscellent

For my Art Theory final project, we were given three themes and had to illustrate them. I wanted to put a lot more time and effort into them, but having to juggle all of my other final projects really didn't help.

Regardless, I am very pleased. I tried a lot of new things with them and feel like I pulled them off pretty well.

The themes are Inclusion, Three's a Crowd, and Outcast

Mastercopy Redux

My teacher said it looked unfinished and gave me a C, so I reworked it. Doesn't look much different; I just darkened a lot of it up, but you can't really tell with the photo. Stinks.

We'll see what I get, anyway.

Edit: B-

DP Thanksgiving

The school's cafe had a free Thanksgiving meal today, thank goodness. 

The upperclassmen warned us that holiday meals go fast. The moment my morning class got out, my roommate and I rushed to the line. We were 40 minutes early, but we were still probably 20 people away from the front. It was ridiculous. It was like waiting for a concert. By the time the food was being served, the food line was wrapping around the entire first floor.

People kept trying to cut us and act like we knew them, but thank goodness, we still got some food.

The cafe actually has some really tasty things. They serve a lot of food for the price (whole chickens? a mound of brisket?), but it's still not worth paying $8 every meal. 

They have soup, sandwiches, pizza, and salad for cheaper though, and their desserts are usually $1-3

But hey, this is a cupcake. Isn't that the most intense cupcake you've ever seen?

Chocolate with a white chocolate mousse topping and a lemon cream filling, dipped in white chocolate. Yoooo.

Pizza is the main food source of the students here since it's the cheapest option at the cafe next to the salad (but how many people choose to get salad when they can get pizza?). There's always crazy flavors like mayo (? really just a pizza with only mayo?), cheeseburger, and the infamous Digimac. 

I had Digimac for the first time on Friday. It's just mac and cheese, bacon pizza. If you ask any of the students how they feel about it, they just say, "death."

I understand that now.

but here's a picture of some of the pizza boxes after this semester's big school-wide LAN party. This doesn't include the JJ sandwiches that were available.

Mastercopy

We had to do a master copy of a Renaissance portrait for Art 101. I wish I had another day or two to render it more, but oh well. We'll see.

We had a critique in class, but ran out of time by the time we got to mine. My professor ended up not giving much feedback, but as the next class was filing in, the professor went straight to mine and complimented it. That was nice.

Rain

The people here who say the rain isn't that bad simply aren't the ones who have to walk everywhere in it.

Bouncing Balls

We had to animate three bouncing ball cycles: 

The gifs don't do the animations any justice (It looks like it cut out some frames?), but I figure they're still the best way to show them off

We had two weeks to work on them, and this is only our second 'real' animation assignment.

Next week, we animate tails.

Ray Guns............

Okay, a few weeks ago we also got one hell of an assignment. It was one of those assignments that the teacher assigned for the sake of giving us all a 'break' but ended up stressing everyone out 100x more than if they had just given us a normal assignment.

And, I guess in some ways, it was easier. He didn't dock us for poor layouts or if every shape was perfect or not (he left it pretty open ended anyway), but for the past month, everyone has been cursing "Ray guns..........." under their breath.

Most everyone had to redo it multiple times and it eventually got to the point where our professor just kind of apologized for assigning it in the first place.

As for me, I had to redo it once. My professor gave me a very low B, which came out as a C because I turned it in late.

 Assignment-wise, we had to design 5 'silly' ray guns. We'd get a failed grade if they actually looked threatening (school policy?? there's some no 'gun in art and games rule'), and they should follow a theme.

Shadow Plotting

We had to learn how to plot shadows a few weeks ago for Art 101. 

Master Copy WIP

Work in progress...

Art Theory and Lines

The picture quality's not the best, but for this assignment, we had to come up with some illustrations to cover so many variables (proportion, density, quality, quantity, etc) with only one design element (line, point, shape, color, etc).

It's for Art Theory, which is still a really, really weird class. The teacher doesn't give us much direction on our assignments but also grades very harshly.

Got a B-, regardless.