Tag Archives: animation

January 16, 2012

Well hello there!

By jay

Ouch, way too long since posting! I started a new job back at the end of October, I’m now the Content Care Admin (of the student site, not the public site) at AnimationMentor.com. It’s an awesome place to work. I’ll get to that in another post.

I’ve been doing some sketching here and there, but I haven’t done nearly as much art as I’d like. Yesterday was the first time in months where I had a sustained session. I ended up doodling and just getting comfortable with painting again. It felt awesome to be painting again.

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January 2, 2011

Daily… Waiting

By jay

Hope everyone had a nice new years, if that’s what you’re into. I did a whole lot of relaxing which included reading, looking up new (to me) inspiring artists and playing video games. I even managed to get some work done, but not much. Today is my day to get caught up on that.

I’ve finished up with school for the time being. Well, what I mean is that I graduated, but I do love school so I’ll see how long I stay away. But now that means it’s time to really focus on what I want to do for work. Right now that’s two things: illustration and animation. I really need to build skills in both areas. With illustration I need to work towards creating finished pieces versus just quick sketches. I also need to continue working on basic drawing skills (which means I can’t shy away from drawing people!). I did a bout of figuring drawing last week that was like pulling teeth. Every time I put my pencil down to the paper I was almost overwhelmed with the idea that I was about to draw crap. That’s a tough hurdle to overcome. In the animation category, I need to start building what I consider a professional portfolio, rather than a student one. A lot of that is going to come from just putting in the time and getting more experience.

Anyhow, that’s a whole of things I need to do. I talk a lot about things I need to do, so now comes the tough part of doing them! Here’s a little sketch on newsprint paper done with a prismacolor pencil. I thought I was done with newsprint paper (and charcoal for drawing), but I’ve been feeling a draw (ha ha) towards it recently. It ends up being a nice complement to figure drawing for me.

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August 5, 2010

Hello World

By jay

I sure have fallen behind in posting my daily images. I think I’m almost three weeks behind, ouch! I’m taking a summer class, Color & Design, and it has been extremely time intensive. Last Thursday I was painting one of my finals, this one a landscape, for almost 13 hours straight. It has been hard to make the time for my personal drawings, so I’ve been doing a lot more sketches, rather than paintings.

I’m almost done though and while I had initially had no interest in this class, I’m very glad I took it. I’ve taken color theory before and so the thought of retaking such a class sounded like a drag. This class though ended up being more of a painting class and we just applied color theory to our projects. I like that.

I have a few work related projects that are really coming together, I’m having fun drawing in my style, but for others projects.

My main computer got hit by a virus of some sort yesterday, so I’m in the process of getting that taken care of. I really hate it when my computer goes down (for whatever reason). It ends up being a splinter in my mind that I can’t really forget about until I’ve fixed it. Luckily there’s a lot of scanning time involved so that’s allowing me to step away and get other stuff done.

Some exciting news, last Friday I got an email that I had been accepted into one of the Pixar animation classes. This class is taught at the Academy of Art, but has instructors from Pixar coming over to work with us and run the class. I’m looking forward to really nailing down my core set of animation skills and building out from there. A good goal for myself is to do more animation “studies”. The same idea as quick sketches in drawing, I need to be exercising my animation skills in smaller, easier to finish, projects. My drawing skills have been really benefiting from that type of exercise, it’s really time I applied that to animation as well.

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December 22, 2009

Time to breathe

By jay

I’m on vacation now, yay. I finally had time to back post a chunk of my daily images. There are still a few (I think from late november) I have to find, I’ll see where they ran off to.

Now that I have more time again, I’d like to start putting at least an hour into my dailies. I have some illustrations I’d like to work on, so I was thinking of using my daily images as a way to explore what I might want to do.

I also want to be animating at least a little each day. I want to start with some simple exercises to get warmed up, then start doing some longer pieces. I want to tackle a physical and action oriented piece as well as some more dialogue tests.

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December 14, 2009

The semester is almost up

By jay

This is finals week at school, my last day of classes is on Thursday. Today I had my last day of animal drawing class, I got out an hour and a half early, so now I’m at home getting ready to work on my animation.

First, a cup of coffee and some relaxing in bed, I feel so tired! I have a lot to get done still, but I feel okay with where things are going. My animation is the farthest along I’ve gotten on any animation project, although even there I see how much better I could have done. Just shows me where I can improve!

For this piece I need to finish the lip sync, smooth out some awkward movements, finalize the arm motions, finalize the ending and then polish, polish, polish!

This animation is for my Lip Sync Animation class; I find it funny that it’s only in the last week I’m tackling the lip sync side of things. When a character speaks, the actual lip movement is such a small part of the whole. I’ve been so much more focused on body language and expression changes.

Beyond my animation class which finishes up tomorrow at 12, I have both my Character Design and Clothed Figure classes on Thursday. For Clothed Figure, I have to choose 12 of my in class pieces and snazz them up a bit. For character design I have to get all my model sheets together in a portfolio, get together my sketchbook and mainly I need to finish my maquette of the Great White Giraffagator.

There shall be much posting of school projects in the next week!

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