Back to Basics with Digital Drawing

  I've been going back to basics lately with my drawing skills. I've had a nagging feeling for honestly quite a while that my colour depth palette has been rather muddy. I've noticed I get lost in getting the shade just right at the expense of how clear the composition is. So, back to basics; getting familiar with the essentials of blocking colour first before moving on to tackling light and shadow.

  After all, many projects are 20% crunch, 80% cruft. You want to get that 20% foundation right or the whole thing just doesn't work.

  This new approach I feel has also given me a chance to back away from relying on dark lines to delineate shape. The pictures I have been drawing lately have been moderately popular on Reddit which is good for exposure. I'm getting plenty of feedback and starting plenty of conversations about what I've been working on. It could be some time before I'm back to full-shade digital painting like I've been doing before: I'm taking this one step at a time, so when I am ready to start adding shade again I am definitely ready.

  Moving away from the same old character subject, I've experimented with map design using Adobe Illustrator. I've found it and PDFs amazing for condensing enormous images into something I can easily send to clients. When I tried buildign something like this on Photoshop, it would slow my computer down as the images, plus layers, might be over a gigabyte in size. Which my computer did not like.

  But it was mostly fun to try map-making, which I have found to be an amazing way to build a setting as they say you can tell a lot about a place by reading into how the local inhabitants drew their maps.

Repost: The Best TIme Of Day To Not To Take a Selfie

  A re-post of my info-graphic animation The Best Time of Day to Not Take A Selfie. Created earlier this year before I set ot work on Colo Colo.

Yiquanhuabanyiulu: Composition complete

     After a hard few days the composition is complete. While looking for a background I came across photos of Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, world famous for its hundreds of vertical pillars of rock which for me really hit home with the vibe of the Treacy city which is that the designs reflect patterns and structures in nature. So a mountain range that is the opposite, resembling an urban environemnt, seemed like a perfect fit.

    Its unlikely the Chinese government would actually build a city i nthe heart of the park, but such is one of the liberating things about fiction. Who knows, this might not be a unique sight if you look though China hard enough. It is a very big and diverse country.

Personal: Photoshop Practice

More painting practice. But also unlike other drawings, above was made purely on Photoshop rather than using a sketch as a template. While I had originally planned for the physique to be a rough Idea, something perhaps stemming from my life-drawing classes compelled me to draw the musculature in detail.

 With the musculature down I used a different colour to sketch up the outfit, the nonhuman tail and feet posed some logistical challenge when it came to mapping out the footwear.

Not entirely finished but this stage of the drawing provides a cross-section of how I composed the colours of the piece. The key feel I wanted from the outfit was a sense that it was sophisticated, futuristic, but would not fall into the fashion prediction traps suffered by shows such as Star Trek.

I looked at styles fro mthe past to look for patterns and noticed that as time went on, the outfits worn by the upper echelons of society became less gaudy and elaborate. While puffed shoulders and ribbed undercoats were the height of Tudor fashion, the male elite of Victorian society settled for dress uniforms or velvet-lined suits. Those suits evolved further to to the suits popularly seen in today's award ceremonies which ditced the tweed, the top hats, the elaborate tails and the waistcoats and settled for more uniform and finer fabrics. It posed the question of what a suit of an older and less human society would look like.

Thinking about it now, I should go back and alter the outfit further. While the character isn't actually wearing a his answer to a fine suit, I could probably lose the brestplate and replace it with something else. His left coat sleeve is also still bugging me.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Art Of Document

Art Of Infiltrate Exploit Spread

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Final Video

Animation is completed and uploaded.

Abstract Animation Progress

I spent a couple of hours on this to get it jut right but this is my abstract animation based on the taste from a ginger biscuit. The track the piece plays to was acquired from browsing for salsa music on Freesound.org.

Soundscape Submissions

Soundscape: Sonic Concept

My three final soundscapes. Despite my best attempts to refine the volume, the tracks still seem a little quiet, so viewers should their master volume sliders accordingly.

    I discovered that when videos are made with Adobe's Premiere Pro rather than After Effects, I can upload much more high-fidelity video clips that are much, much smaller in filesize.

Ethan Van Der Ryn: Designer Profile

    This video is a collection of my cropped and postprocessed sounds, of which there are 43 in total according to Windows explorer which made it slightly impractical to upload each one separately. In order to fit them on the blog I assembled them in After Effects then compressed the files in Adobe Media Encoder after upping the volume a little in Premiere Pro. So hopefully the sounds should be a lot clearer on lower-volume machines.

27/2/15: Adobe Flash and Illustraator

    For a while I had wondered about using Adobe Illustrator and it feels good that I had the chance in this morning's CG art tools.class The task today was to use the knowledge of the pen tool that we had gained to trace over a logo found on the internet. The logo I selected  is one of the emblems of the Forerunners from the Halo franchise - although I am unsure which of the known Forerunners or AI that uses this one, The parent file was titled "Flood(1)" so it may be connected to The Flood.

    As usual, the doodle-page that comes with every new piece of software I encounter.

    In the animation class today we were given more bouncing balls to animate. Though I wonder if this clip might be a little too fast.

Artist's Toolkit Updates

    These items were long overdue for upload but with final preparations for Friday's presentation being made tonight I took ten minutes to compose this. Above, as usual, are evidence of Maya tutorials, below is the second video I made in my first session with Adobe Flash. We were asked to make an animated line which, after getting into my stride came out fairly smoothly for 12FPS (or was it more?). The background did not take long to compose although I would have liked to improve it with moving light rays from the surface. 

    This is the other tutorial I had finished recently which was designed to teach how to travel and distort an object. The distortion I thought was quite clever: duplicating the ball, parenting it to the original, making the original transparent while giving the duplicate the skin and then turning the duplicate ball to face a random direction. The texture would then act as if it were applied at an angle.

    It is certainly more advantageous than creating a tilted texture (which for a sphere would have been quite complicated and there would be the matter of twisting the texture in another direction.

From Script To Screen: More Environment Concepts

    I'm mulling over what to do for the bench that will be the setting for the bulk of the composition. Because this is supposed to be within the imagination of the mother I want to convey a sense of surrealism about the location. At first I wondered about keeping it monochrome based on articles that suggested that the majority who grew up with black-and-white television (the transition to colour if I recall was in 1975) experienced monochrome dreams. I figured it would not be too much of a stretch to assume that as a daydream and being part of the generations that grew up with monochrome, Clarette would potentially envision the ordeal in black-and-white.

Regardless I experimented with some colour samples for the bench. Because of the mood that will dominate I'm still inclined to keep it a little washed-out. An alternative is that as the scene gets happier and more optimistic, it gets a little more colourful (perhaps though use of a filter on the camera?). Perhaps Clarette, her bag and the marionette are in colour while the bench is black-and-white in order to amplify the idea this is an unreal space.

Although I included a shaft of light only in thumbnails 1 and 2, I might consider using it for the final concept.

Bibliography

• Alleyne, R., 2008; Black And White TV Generation have Monochrome Dreams; The Telegraph; available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3353504/Black-and-white-TV-generation-have-monochrome-dreams.html (last accessed 16th February 2015)
• Robson, D., 2008; It's Black And White: TV Influences Your Dreams; New Scientist; available at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14959-its-black-and-white-tv-influences-your-dreams.html#.VOIau6NFCHs (last accessed 16th February 2015)

Maya: MEL Scripting and Batch Rendering

    A long-overdue tutorial that I meant ot upload. I had decided that for efficiency's sake I would upload evidence for both the MEL scripting and the batch rendering tutorials in the same session. Due to the time it was when I had originally done the vieos I had ot leave batch rendering for another day. But, finally, it is done. It also gave me the chance to try using Premiere Pro again. This software I feel more comfortable using for assembling videos tohether.