Brain storying for new project.

We have been given a new project to start off the new semester. We have to come up with some 3 initial ideas based around some key words, fears and phobias, memories, a moment in time, commercial, identity. I have created spider diagrams to help me come up with ideas and particular roots that i could go down. I decided to concentrate on fears and phobias, memories and identity.

Eyewitness to Space: Over 1,500 drawings chronicling the American Space Program

AMAZING SPACE ILLUSTRATIONS

I found this page via doodlers anonymous which is one of my favourite databases to find inspiration, and fresh ideas. I love the techniques used in the sketches, they remind me of tasks we have done in the drawing classes.  If you go to the clip about you can see the whole collection, i have picked out some of my favourite illustrations.

I love the use of bright bold colours. We have not done a task in life drawing where we used colour, we have used chalk and charcoal. Even in my sketch book i haven't included any colour, this is something i should change and experiment with. Colour can really change the mood and feel of an image. For me, the image above looked like the character is in a crisis, everything looks frantic, the character would be in trouble or being attacked. I think it is the use of reds and oranges, as for me those colours represent danger and heat.

I LOVE the three illustrations above, the artist is extremely talented - i cannot find the name of the artist anywhere - as i got the images from somebody else's blog. (link at top of page) - I think its Smithsonian. The drawing style is great, it really caught my eye. Probably because it is so different to the way i draw, i have quite a confident neat line, i do not seem to put a lot of detail of depth or texture into my drawings; where as these illustrations do. Also what i think is fantastic is the use of negative space, some designers believe that a full page makes a brilliant eye catching design (and they could be right) but i also think that minimalism can be just as affective. A designer that can work with the paper he has been given, is someone that inspires me. Clever positioning can be key to make drawing look wrong or right. I remember one of my lecturers telling me, "When you are drawing a character running away from a threat, do not draw them in the middle of the box/paper, draw them to the edge, use the negative space to help piece the story together. The negative space will mean the character is traveling in a direction."  I also enjoy the use of brown and black ink in the lower of the three illustrations, for me it seperated three different aspects of a story on one page.

It is like looking at stills for a film, images for a story board. I love how the drawings just give the viewer so much information. I must look into how to do that myself... And therefore i have borrowed - 'Ideas for the Animated short - finging and building stories' by Karen Sulliban, Gary Schumer and Kate Alexander.

Inspirations...

BRANDON ORTWEIN...

I stumbled across Brendon when i was looking at blogs for inspiration and ideas for our up coming group task for Animation principles. I found these images which are created on post it notes using felt tip pen. Brendon drew his coffee every morning for 100 days and ended up with a huge display. I love how the bright vivid colours represent the coffee which is drunk for that good kick start in the morning. I also love the bold black out lines, i think you need to have these outlines to make the colours hand out, apart from each other. I also enjoy the consistency of the background, using outwards stripes, it creates a unity and it also creates a feel of depth, the lines draw the viewers attention into the coffee cups.

more on brendon's work

New stagger exercise

I hade done a new stagger exercise as i didn't like my butterfly on. For me it didn't work, and I'm not sure this works too well either. I decided to so a character lifting a heavy object - and since i have done it after my character walk cycle i felt quite confident to jump straight into it and get it onto paper.

My new stagger task

Final animation for character walk

Here is the link to my final character walk cycle

FINAL CHARACTER WALK CYCLE