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.

Adaptation A: Initial Animation Sequence

  Creation of these scenes has so far taken a little longer than I expected.  But some progress is better than none at all, and this is 50% of the considered scenarios done yet admittedly without sound. There was a little time taken out of the process understanding how to make this possible, but this potentially means I can approach the next sequences faster.

This is only 17 seconds so far but with the extra scenes and transitions I might be able to approach closer to a minute with the complete sequence.

Adaptation A: Character designs

  Provided are the planned characters for each of the scenes I have planned: Two general characters (1, 2), a surgeon (3), a policeman (4), a clerk (5), a teleportation technician (6), a bartender (7) and a squirrel (8). Each figure consists of multiple layers that can be used to as control systems for the various limbs and body parts. Nothing too complex, the policeman is probably the most complex with 7 controllable layers due to the peak of his cap.

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.