Father-Daughter Time

Yeah, more of this. I did this drawing yesterday. Honestly, I'm surprised and amazed with how much I've been able to get done in the last few days. And it's all from taking a few minutes to not do anything. See before I was always filling up my time with little things trying to get myself to relax. And now I've been just sitting in a chair for 10-45 minutes just chilling with God. The first day it was really hard. I couldn't sit still, but I feel great. I've even been sleeping better and falling asleep quicker since my body already knows how to relax. Would recommend for anyone struggling with insomnia. I didn't realize it, but I was basically stressed out all of the time. Now I just sacrifice my time to God and watch how much he can help me do in just a few short minutes, including this drawing. Praise the Lord.

Anyways, this drawing is of Harrison and his daughter Moira. I drew it with barely any coloring in at first because I was worried I'd mess it up, but I think it turned out really cool. I wanted to show the progression. When I took the picture I was getting this weird lens flare effect on Harrison's face. So I fixed it with one of the crazy filters on my phone called "Vogue." Which I thought was humorously appropriate for this picture even though I don't know anything about vogue.
At first I was trying to go for a low-angle effect, but I guess I kind of dropped that in the process. It would've looked better if I'd tried to do the same thing on the car (And if I'd gotten Harrison's thumb on the correct side. I mean seriously, I have thumbs. I could've checked. No excuse.).
I think Harrison looks a lot better in this picture than when I drew him before. The night before yesterday I tried to start this drawing right before bed, which I knew was a bad idea but I did it anyway, and I just totally couldn't do anything. It's amazing what you can't get done when God is trying to get you to go to bed. Inversely, it's amazing what you can do when God is on board with it. Before I was having trouble getting Harrison to not look like a thug since you couldn't see his eyes. So I ended up basing his head shape on Slade from the classic Teen Titans cartoon. I added another scar because why not. The trick with Supervillain Family is to get it so they aren't super obviously evil, but they're just off enough that people would avoid them like the plague.
Moira was really fun to do. I wanted a little bit of her hair in front of her face, but when I was drawing that line I just sort of kept going. I like how it turned out. What's crazy about her expression is that originally it was reflected past the center of her face, and it looked too actually tough and disinterested. I flipped it around and bammo.

Thanks so much for this God. I love you.

Character Exploring

 

"Yeah. Why do you come on these trips with us?" 

"...I'm just here to call 911."

Just a drawing of two characters in this idea I have. Originally I just wanted to draw this for myself, but I ended up liking it so much I thought I'd put it here. Rarely have I gotten quite such cartoonishly expressive expressions out of my drawings, but this time I felt like I exaggerated it enough. On the other hand I didn't draw Kinsley's book well enough. Just to be clear, the little girl behind the tree isn't super tall; she's actually very tiny. She's just climbing (which would be clear in context). Funnily enough this also marks my 100th post. I'm very happy. If this idea ever became a reality too, I don't even know if this would be the style. I feel like I've evolved so much when it comes to drawing, so imagine how much different I would draw something like this in a few years. I don't know. God's will be done.

Half of Halves

This is a little picture I've been meaning to post for awhile. It's of the two DC comics characters, Tim Drake, the third Robin, and Stephanie Brown, Spoiler. In the comics, Spoiler's an anti-heroic criminal who butts heads and eventually partners with Tim. My reason for drawing them is a little complicated. See I sometimes think up games for my cousins to play, and one of them, for my oldest cousin on my dad's side, is a game based around the third Robin. I was trying to think of how I wanted to characterize Stephanie, because as far as I can tell in the comics she has no set characterization other than that no one takes her seriously (even though at this point they really should) because she doesn't have the personality of a typical dark, brooding, vigilante. So I was thinking about it, and something I've noticed that Tim and my cousin share is they both get tunnel-vision levels of intense focus on whatever problem they're concerned with solving. They're incredibly smart, just they have difficulty getting out of one mindset (kind of like me now that I think about it). I thought it would be fun to have Steph contrast with that; in that despite that she's a super-competent gentle-lady thief, she's also kind of all-over-the-place. The next step was epitomizing that relationship in a drawing so I didn't forget it.

I used the style of a series of comics called "Li'l Gotham" just as something quick and fun to draw. I drew Spoiler in her first costume. With the new series DC is putting out, her original costume was changed so that her mask was basically a bandana over her face and her hair was spilling out all over. The first one makes more sense to me. I like how I managed to capture Steph's motion. Tim was done basically completely by reference. (By the way the picture looks way better if you click on it to look at it enlarged)

Side note, why is "halves" the plural of "half?" That just looks weird. I know because it's from Middle English, but still. Some people have already seen this drawing and thought it was good. That feels nice. Thanks God.

Evil Queen

When I was constructing my super villain family, I wanted them each to be a different type of super villain, as is only natural. The mom being a half-alien just seemed like a natural fit, I couldn't really say why. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted her story to subvert the typical "beautiful alien girl" stereotype. I wanted her alien features to be weird, not just weirdly beautiful. It made me think about what it would have been like to grow up like that. So this is Vejle (it's Danish, pronounced sort of like "VEYE-lah"). Blotches of her skin along with her eyes and part of her hair are discolored. She has an undeveloped set of second arms, wings, etc. Usually she covers this stuff up with contacts, dye, and makeup, but it's still not easy. Originally I was going to color in one of her eyes, but I decided not to mess with it.

After I drew Vejle, I also wanted to draw Harrison in the same more realistic style. I know he's not quite as visually interesting as Vejle, but he's more colorful than her under the surface, psychologically speaking. I used actual pictures of humans as references for these first two drawings.

These two I did just today. This style might end up being more realistic than what I would actually draw them as if this won't be a book. We'll find out. Anyway, in the above picture you can see more of her features from this angle. The picture below is of when she was younger- maybe a few years before she met Harrison- when she was still part of a pro-alien extremist activist group. Ironically, despite the group she was in at the time, she was actually less comfortable with her identity than she became. Hence why her blotches are covered up on the second one. I drew them and then erased them, just to see what it looked like. I didn't do so well on her hand. I messed it up too many times, but I think it turned out okay now.
Interestingly enough it was easier to do the picture above than the one below. I used more references, so that was definitely part of it. It was cool to do the wings, since I don't usually get to do transparent stuff- means I don't have to erase so much stuff from earlier.

This last one, as you can see, is the earliest of all of them. It's from before I'd even designed Harrison's costume. I just had this image of the pair of them in my head, and wanted to draw it. Their children imagine that they were always in love. They think he was the mastermind and she was his Shego-like enforcer, but it was not so simple. I wish I'd thought to at least attempt her wings then... I like the visual contrast here between her and Harrison. I'd like to draw more of them together. They make quite the team.
I had a really nice weekend. My dad came up to visit and we mostly just hung out and walked around. I'm really thankful for the life God has given me, not least of all because of the perspective it lends me for stuff like this. Feels good. Thanks so much God, please help me through these next few weeks. I love you.

Boy Behind the Mask

Someone else I was thinking about in class: this is Franklin "Frankie," aka Titan-Boy. I decided I wanted to draw his face and the under-suit he wears that controls the smart bots that make up his super-suit. This was also good practice in giving my characters distinctive visual features, since I tend to give them all sort of the same face whenever I'm not using a reference. Originally his chin was more triangular like many of my other characters, but I made it a bit squarer when thinking about Optimus Prime again. I did a side-by-side drawing with the mask on just because I think it's cool. I like masks that actually obscure the character's face. That being said, the hair is a dead giveaway. I should have drawn the outlet on his suit bigger and flatter probably. It was funner than I expected to design his civilian outfit and think about what that said about him.
I had a similarly interesting time designing the second character, who I'm calling Odella for now (maybe just Odell?). I had a hard time deciding what exactly I wanted her to look like so the audience would understand as much as I want them to. As you see, she knows Frankie in his civilian identity, and she knows what he does with a lot of his time. They're friends, sort of, but not in the way you might expect. I want to say more, but I'm still hoping I can make this into an actual animated webseries when I have the experience for it.
I'm really happy to see Frankie come to life more in front of me. God's will be done, thanks for helping me to put this stuff out here today.

Supervillain Dad

I've had an idea in my head for a long time about a family of super villains (given my intense love for the Incredibles) who had once been the terrors of the earth and were now raising the next generation in hiding. I'm planning on making it into a book, though I'm not sure if that's the right format yet. I've developed them a lot since then, but I only recently took the time to visually design a few of these characters. The man in the first drawing, the head of the family, the paterfamilias, was known in his prime as Judge Executioner, Hangman to his friends. Imagine his costume there as almost all-black and grey. I imagined his hood as a cross between an executioner's mask and the hoods one would put on someone they're interrogating, etc. I used quite a few references when designing him until I finally got what he looks like in my head. This might not be the final design (it might be more like the smaller ones), but it's much closer then I had originally.
The fourth image is a doodle I did in class when I was trying to figure out what the mask should look like. The one here is scary, sure, but I didn't feel like it evoked Hangman. However, the drawing itself is of Hangman's daughter Moira when she finds his mask in his old stuff. I liked the idea of that moment so much I kept it here (whenever I see it I kind of hear the music from when Luke is taking Vader's mask off). 
My mom has noted on more than one occasion that I have a strange fascination with villains. I think a lot of which just comes from the fact that they're different from other people. I think that's a lot of what I'm going for with this story. God's will be done, who has mercy on the righteous and the unrighteous, the good and the wicked. Thank you for having mercy on me.

Entertainment

It's my first computer generated animated short! My first computer animated anything, actually. I took a class this past semester at college where all we did was work on different aspects of this one video we each created. The only premise was that it had to be about a robot interacting with something that doesn't work as expected. I got to try my hand at character modeling, rigging, texturing, lighting, sound, (among other things) and especially actual animating. It was incredible. I definitely most enjoyed story-boarding and animating. It just was exactly like what it looked like on screen, no extra bells and whistles. I was super excited to go back to my room after the first class and figure out what story I wanted to tell. I left the class having no idea what I wanted to do and had a complete story by the time I walked back. From watching previous films students had done, there was a lot of slapstick comedy and robots losing body parts very easily. So I thought I'd do an action sequence that didn't make light of itself. I also mostly saw just one robot, so I thought "What about two robots?" (oh so brilliant)

I did alright in the class overall, but there's a lot of stuff that isn't correct about this final product. The biggest animating thing I should have thought about was that the chests don't move hardly at all when they're walking. And though I tried pretty hard to correct it, there's still a lot of shapes crossing each other when they shouldn't. Those were the big things, but there's a bunch of other little errors. Beyond that, turns out the story is a bit unclear. I've had more than one person ask me why Red was acting how he does at the end. Some people got it and some people didn't. To say that disappointed me the first time is a bit of an understatement.

So... it's been a few years since I started calling myself an "aspiring" animator, and I'd still say I'm not really an animator yet. I mean after this class I am in a technical sense, but I still don't think like an animator. I don't think about how people move and what that says about them. What emotion that conveys. I haven't yet put in the hours needed for such a thing, but I will. I've learned so many things in such a short amount of time this year. I've become better at telling stories for one thing, even if I haven't improved as much at drawing them. I know everyone progresses at a different pace. I guess the important thing is to try to progress at all. I'm going to be good at whatever God wants me to be good at.


I thought I'd also include these.

I saw a lot of overly-complicated robots, so I thought I'd make it easier on myself by making the characters' designs largely geometric so I could focus on the other parts. Turns out I need the extra time, because I didn't think about how complicated it was going to be to animate two characters instead of just one- and in an action sequence.

This is the first storyboard I did. Part of the grade was to duplicate the storyboard as closely as possible (in the end he told me to change the shot of the hands because it communicated the idea even less well than the current ending). We also had to move on from camera work pretty fast, so we couldn't really go back and move it around. Which was unfortunate because while animating I found a bunch of cooler shots like this one:

Anyway, thanks God.