12/31/15 - Carol of the Bells (Part 4)

The final product!

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[MUSIC TRACK COMING SOON!]

(Video took a bit longer to create than I planned, so I'll be posting the final final thing tomorrow.)

12/30/15 - Carol of the Bells (Part 3)

Progress...

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12/20/15 - Carol of the Bells (Part 2)

Fine-tuning a second rough sketch, along with a color comp.  And more progress on the music track itself.

12/18/15 - Carol of the Bells (Part 1)

Well, I decided painting fruit was a little too intensive for my daily practice with this blog.  I was getting too detailed with it, and with each post averaging about an hour, it was a bit too much.  I might resume it in the future if I just do really rough versions, but for now I'm gonna try other things.

I have a few new ideas coming up, but for now I'm going to begin a small project much like the one I completed near the end of Halloween: painting a background image for a new music track I'm going to try to create, "Carol of the Bells".  I've been meaning to create my own orchestration/rendition for a few years now and I've just never gotten around to it.  But now that I'm doing this blog, trying to stay active and creative… what better time!  I've always loved the tune of the song, probably my favorite of all the wintery/Christmasy songs for its adventurous and faintly mysterious atmosphere, and it's the perfect track to practice both my musical AND digital painting skills.

And so that's what I'm gonna do for these next few posts: show a bit of my progress on the music track, as well as the background that will be featured alongside it.  I won't explain my steps so much this time though, since I already did that for my "Halloween Gothic Castle" posts.

Anyway, without further ado… my first step:  A bunch of rough sketch ideas for the image, and a basic melody for the track.

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12/9/15 - Painting Fruit (Apple)

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Same process as last time.  This time with a standard apple.  Unfortunately, this post took about an hour as well (approx. 40 min. for the painting, and an extra 20 or so to put the video and this post together).  I may stop doing the videos since they do add a bit of extra time, but then again that's mostly just selecting and editing the music, so perhaps I could just continue uploading without the music.  We'll see.

Color palette below:

And the "speed paint" video:

Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ6MXH5HjIY

12/8/15 - Painting Fruit (Watermelon)

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(it actually looks better smaller though, haha)

Guess I'm painting fruit now.  hehe  Been a while since my last post (about a week I guess).  Got caught up in some major projects recently (which will hopefully start to appear on this blog soon).  But I'm back, and for now I'll be painting various fruit.

Today's post took a little under an hour (eek!), but I was able to try two new things:

1. Preparing a color palette.  I occasionally do this, but more often than not I forget to do this ahead of time and sort of just wing the colors as I paint.  Below are the palettes I created for the exterior and the interior colors:

2. Recording the process.  I also screen-recorded the process, and made a short "speed painting" video with it.  I'm not sure how many of these I'll do in the future (since they would add a bit of extra time to my daily workflow), but I had a lot of fun creating it and playing it back.  It could also be a great communication tool if I were to ever seek critique on my work, since anyone can fairly easily view my process and see where I might improve.  Anyway, here's the video below:

Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6l0a_1Vhfs

12/1/15 - Painting Fruit (Kiwi)

I painted a kiwifruit.  Why not?  :)
Approx. 19 min.

11/29/15 - Dot Animation Test

I have no clue what I'm doing here.  haha

Just bouncing off the idea from my last post of animating via dots.

In this instance, I took a precise circular rotation and duplicated it twice, once stretched horizontally by 200%, and once stretched vertically by 200%.  What the application of this might be… I have no idea.  But it is interesting to note that if you look closely at the two stretched squares they can actually be perceived as 3-dimensional, with either side of the rotation coming closer or farther to us.  You can inverse this as well so that each plane is facing up, down, left, or right.

Which way is it rotating?  Left?  Or right?  :)

11/27/15 - Precision Animation Test (Part 2)

(final animation)

The final animation.  A little wonky, but still fairly accurate, and an interesting test nonetheless.  Obviously, no one would ever animate a square like this in the real world.  They would just set two keyframes and be done with it.  But as I said in my previous post, this was just a simple attempt to maintain precision of an object by hand, since that's really what traditional animation is all about, working frame by frame.

My ultimate findings?  Precision animation takes A LOT of laying things out in advance, and A LOT of practice.

(final animation w/ vertex points)

Here's an interesting alternate look at the animation.  I've provided every final animation point, which I used to systematically plot out the lines of the square.  This gives me a much easier glance at where I went wrong, since the dots clearly don't form a perfect circle.  In hindsight, I really should have attempted to plot all of these on one frame in the beginning (each set of 4 were actually all on their own separate frame), so I could immediately gauge how accurate my rotation would be.

Looking at this second gif also gives me ideas of how various software/computers themselves might actually interpret keyframe commands.  Obviously, it wouldn't just be hitting a set of dots on a grid as is the case with my animation, but something more like a spline curve, with various points dictated by how many frames it spreads over.  I'm fascinated with that kind of stuff, so I could definitely see revisiting this with a set of "math animations".  There's something very cool about translating numbers and coordinates into visual representations/animations.  After all, that's the basis of all computer graphics, right?

Alright, I'm talking too much now, I gotta stop.  haha  But my final takeaways?  1. I need a lot of practice in laying out animations, and 2. I think I'm gonna do some math-based animations in the future.  :)

11/25/15 - Precision Animation Test (Part 1)

(Still "onion skin" image)

Technically, this isn't true precision, since I didn't use math or rulers or anything like that… but I wanted to try to animate a square rotating as precise as possible by hand.  This forced me to play around with laying out the animation first, and fairly systematically figuring out where everything needs to go and when.  Ultimately, this is an attempt to maintain exact size, proportioning, and positioning of an object over the course of a little more than a second of animation.

Gifs below:

11/24/15 - Hand Animation Attempt

A somewhat failed attempt at animating a cartoon hand, haha.  I think I captured a fairly nice flow overall, but there's a lot of inconsistencies throughout the short loop.  The thumb switching sides is probably the most notable.  LOL

I definitely need some more practice sketching static hand poses from my own imagination, as well as a better knowledge of Flash (or whatever other program I might use for animation), before I should try anything more complex than this.

11/22/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands

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And now I'm finally back to sketching freehand.  I'm sure there's a pun in there somewhere… ;)  Basically I just sketched these while glancing at my left hand every now and then, posing for visual reference.  I was not trying to emulate any particular style or pose from another character, but simply letting myself sketch freely.  I still have a lot of practice left to go before I really get a hang of things, but I think I've definitely improved after sketching all those preexisting characters.

11/20/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Phineas and Ferb)

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Winding down with my hand sketches now.  This should be my last sketch using reference from existing material.  My final reference for today's post?  Various characters from another great animated series: "Phineas and Ferb".  Much like Hey Arnold, this style is way more what I had originally imagined when I first thought of doing these "cartoon" hands.  Again, I kept things fairly rough since I wanted to try to pump out more in the 10-15 min. timeframe.

11/17/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Hey Arnold)

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Been missing a few posts lately, just been busy with a lot of stuff and didn't get around to them.  Or it might be that I'm starting to get a little tired of sketching hands, haha.  But I have a few more posts of them to go, so I'll finish them up and then who knows what I'll do!  lol

Today's post is all about the show "Hey Arnold!".  Not specifically Arnold himself, but just various hand designs in general.  THIS type of design is probably what I was really imagining when I first thought about sketching "cartoon" hands, as opposed to more realistic designs like Aladdin, Beast, Chernabog, etc.  Fairly simple and straightforward, pretty much always the "4 fingers" design, and no real texture details.  Perfect for making a long-running animated series for instance, or in my case short web-series (as I vaguely have an idea for one right now).  More info on that in like 2 years.  LOL

I didn't clean it up as much as I usually do today; I just wanted to focus more on quantity under time constraints for this one.

11/14/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Bugs Bunny)

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Basically just a slightly thinner version of Mickey Mouse's hands.  I forget what the origins of these "white gloves" are.

11/12/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Nicodemus)

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Now this guy seriously has some of the coolest animated hands ever.  I spent way longer on him than I should have, but I had fun.  My first non-Disney character: Nicodemus from "The Secret of NIMH".

11/10/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Milo)

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Milo from "Atlantis".  A similar design to Kuzco's, again very stylized.  It'd be interesting to compare those two purely on their differences in body language.  I had a bit of trouble with this design as well though.  You'd think I'd have an easier time with these stylized designs, since they're relatively simple compared to the Beast or Chernabog or something.  Yet, for whatever reason they're still more difficult for me.  I've also never really been a fan of this sort of "box" design with square edges as the fingertips, but it's certainly a unique design nonetheless and has always stuck out to me ever since I was a little kid.

11/9/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Kuzco)

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One of the thinner male characters, Kuzco from "The Emperor's New Groove".  They look okay, but I feel like I have trouble sketching the more stylized designs like these.  That bottom pose looks way too much like E.T. to me.  haha

11/8/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Tarzan)

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This guy was pretty fun to draw, though I did take a bit longer with him.  Tarzan from… well, "Tarzan".

11/7/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Timon)

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Timon from "The Lion King".  Had a bit of trouble with this one.  I don't think I could quite figure out the shape of his fingers/fingertips.  Looks alright now, but this one took me notably longer than my normal posts.

11/6/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Mushu)

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This guy was really fun to draw.  Mushu from "Mulan".

11/5/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Baloo)

Still sketching cartoon hands… or should I say… paws.  Gonna do a few of the more humanoid animal characters now.  First up: Baloo from "The Jungle Book".  Probably the simplest of my hand sketches so far, and a very pleasant design in my opinion.

Interesting to note, he seems to continually switch between having 3 or 4 claws.  I imagine this is to make sketching and painting easier for wide shots vs. tight shots, though I'd just assume stick with 3 claws for everything so there's no discrepancy.

11/4/15 - Sketching Cartoon Hands (Cruella)

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Getting back to sketching cartoon hands again, trying to finish up the rest that I planned to do.  Today's post: Cruella de Vil (I think that's how you spell it?).  Man, she must be the thinnest Disney character ever!  Although it could be Yzma...

P.S. I should totally devote a post to studying the way they did Cruella's smoke effects in the film.  There's at least one shot in particular that has this really unique style, more like flames or something.  It's pretty fascinating.

11/3/15 - Animated GIF Test

This should be the last of these tests.  Just trying out a gif today.  A simple "rubber band" ball bounce.  Approx. 15 min.

I'm actually really pleased with how this animation came out; looks a lot smoother than I thought it would.  :)  Gotta figure out the right frame rate settings though.

11/2/15 - Blogspot Video Test

Another test before I get back to my normal posts.  This time it's all about video, which (if it works) will broaden the scope of my blog to include daily practice of editing, visual effects, complex animations, animatics, etc. (as opposed to just simple gif loops)

Blogspot Video:

YouTube Embed (same video as above):

Blogspot Video (for Audio) #1:

Blogspot Video (for Audio) #2:

Attempted to crop the video to a very thin horizontal size to give it more of an audio track feel, rather than video.

(DIDN'T WORK)


FINAL RESULTS:

AUDIO: (YOUTUBE EMBED) I don't think I'm a fan of Blogspot's own video system (it doesn't have a progress bar while uploading, and my internet is slow, so it's kind of a pain to work with), but it does work.  Although, I'm thinking that just uploading everything to YouTube will be the easiest for me.  Also, that would link it to my various YouTube channels (at least to more knowledgeable users), which is definitely a plus.  I'll probably upgrade to SoundCloud in the future though, cause that was my favorite for an audio experience (but it costs money, so yeah).

VIDEO: (YOUTUBE EMBED) As mentioned before, Blogspot's own video upload system was kind of a pain to work with.  For today's test I compressed the video down to 10 MB, and that took FOREVER to upload, with no indicator that it was even working or not.  It did work in the end, but YouTube will be a much easier system for me to work with.

Anyway, I guess that means I'll be able to do more with this blog!  :D

11/1/15 - Blogspot Audio Test

Going a really different direction for today's post.  This time I'm just testing around with how to upload/embed audio files on Blogspot.  If it works, I'll be able to broaden the scope of this blog to include daily practice of music composition, piano practice, sound editing/sound design, etc.

I couldn't just upload an mp3 straight to Blogspot (there is a video option though, which I'll test in a future post), so ultimately it came down to these two options:

SoundCloud:



Google Drive:

(DIDN'T WORK)

I like the look of SoundCloud's better (and how it links any future viewers/listeners to my SoundCloud music account), but there's a finite amount of minutes I can upload to SoundCloud and I'd rather save that for polished works.  173 minutes left with SoundCloud before I would have to upgrade, and nearly 15 GB with Google Drive left before I would have to upgrade.  So I think I'll stick with Google Drive for now.  But if I someday feel like spending $15/month I'll use SoundCloud's "Pro Unlimited" plan, which would allow me to upload as many of these daily practices as I want.

EDIT: Google Drive didn't work, but I was able to convert the track into a video file so I'll be using that for audio/music files instead.  SoundCloud is still my favorite though, so it may eventually become that.

10/31/15 - Halloween Post 14 - Gothic Castle (Final)

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And now, without further ado… the final image!  I spent WAY longer on this than any of my previous posts, but I had a lot of fun making it.  I'm sure it could be quite a bit better (had to get kind of sketchy with it near the end to fit the deadline), but I'm very proud of it regardless.  Anyway, enjoy!

Here's the link to the final video: Gothic Organ Music - "Moonlit Chambers"

Happy Halloween!  :D

10/30/15 - Halloween Post 13 - Gothic Castle (Part 8)

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Today's progress.  I feel like it's a bit too noisy at the moment, a bit too much going on.  But that should be fixed with the next (and final) post, where I FINALLY add in all the lighting and surface textures to guide the eye.  1 day left.

10/29/15 - Halloween Post 12 - Gothic Castle (Part 7)

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Well, this is certainly turning out to be a much larger project than fits the scope of this blog.  But it's a timely, relatively short deadline, and I'm definitely enjoying myself, so whatever.  hehe  2 days left.

10/28/15 - Halloween Post 11 - Gothic Castle (Part 6)

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Today's progress.  Just filling in some key colors.  3 days left.

10/27/15 - Halloween Post 10 - Gothic Castle (Part 5)

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This is where I break away from Tim Jacobus' instructions, since the rest of what he describes is mostly geared towards working with an actual canvas.  Since I'm creating a purely digital work, I'll be continuing on with my own methods for the rest.

For today's post I scaled my digital canvas to its final output size (1920x1080), where I re-sketched the entire scene and fine-tuned additional details.  This took WAY longer than I expected, mostly because I had a heck of a time trying to figure out the perspective (especially for those two front archway paths).  I can definitely see some future blog posts dealing with that, just managing perspective.

From here on out it's all gonna be about color.  4 days left.

10/26/15 - Halloween Post 9 - Gothic Castle (Part 4)

And some final design tests before the next step...

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Step #6 - Tim Jacobus refers to this step as the "color comp", where you take your final thumbnail sketch and just play around with colors.  This helps iron out the mood and palette before proceeding with the final painting.  Especially helpful if you're working with real paint on an actual canvas.

10/25/15 - Halloween Post 8 - Gothic Castle (Part 3)

Step #5 - Pick your final favorite.

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*Bonus - Some visual research, using "Dracula" (1931) as reference.

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10/24/15 - Halloween Post 7 - Gothic Castle (Part 2)

Step #3 - Select your favorite 3 or 4…

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Step #4 - Rough them out a bit.  Redraw them in slightly more detail, but still keep things fairly rough.

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10/23/15 - Halloween Post 6 - Gothic Castle (Part 1)

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"In these lonely halls, abandoned and decaying, an unseen organist plays a tune.  A chaotic, gothic medley that spreads along the walls… elegant, gloomy, and grand."

*Brace yourself for a long post today…  ;)

Back to Halloween now!  Missed yesterday's post, but I figure that's just gonna happen every now and then.  I'll keep trying to post daily though.  Anyway, I've decided that the remainder of my October posts are going to be a sequence of smaller parts culminating to a larger project at the end.  My project?  Well, every October I like to create and post a new track to my music channel on YouTube.  I'm still working on the music track itself (which will be done outside of this blog), but I'll need artwork for it by the time I post it, and that's where this blog comes in.

My main plan is to create a fairly fine-tuned digital painting (1920 x 1080) as the video's background, and I'm going to be following a certain set of instructions to create it.  The instructions (or process) comes from Tim Jacobus, who, if you don't know, is the creator of all those awesome covers on the "Goosebumps" books (the original set) (which I've always been mesmerized by, ever since I was a little kid)!  Obviously, my painting won't be anywhere near as cool as his, but following his process should give me some insight into new methods of creating a work like this.

I won't give away all his secrets (you should read his book or check out his website for that), but the way it usually starts (Step #1) is with a simple 1-2 sentence description of a story element, character, plot, etc. of the book (or in my case… music track).  You may have noticed my little description at the beginning of today's post.  That's the general description I'll follow for the remainder of these posts.

Step #2, which is FINALLY what today's post is all about… is creating dozens of "thumbnail" sketches, very rough, just scribbles basically, where you play around with things (patterns, shapes, character designs, camera angles, etc.) based on that description.  I forced myself to do 12 of these (exactly a dozen), which is what you see above.  And I'm thankful I did.  If I followed my normal process I would've skipped this stage altogether, just done it all in my head, and never really played around with things.  But doing 12 of these little sketches really forced me to be more creative with it and come up with things I wouldn't have otherwise.

Anyway, tomorrow comes Step #3 & #4, which is basically selecting my 3 favorites of these thumbnails and roughing them out a bit.

P.S. Here's a link to Tim Jacobus' book if anyone's interested, published way back in 1998.  It's mostly geared towards kids, so it's a fairly short and simple read, but it really is very inspiring.  He's a really cool guy, with a lot of helpful information to give:

http://www.amazon.com/Came-Jersey-Artist-Goosebumps-Cover/dp/0590108530

P.P.S. He also gives a simplified version of his process on his website for free.

Alright, this post is getting way too long now, I gotta stop talking.  ;)  That's all for now!  See ya!

10/21/15 - BTTF Clock Tower Split (1885-2015)

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It's finally here!  "Back to the Future"… October 21, 2015… The day Marty goes… TO THE FUTURE!

I spent WAY longer on this than I should have.  And even so, it's still fairly rough (and definitely not 100% accurate, haha).  But I had a LOT of fun making it!  :D  I'd love to continue it further and really add in all those extra details, textures, fine-tune it, etc., but for now this is it, and I'm very happy with how it turned out.  :)

Anyway, that's all for now…  Happy "Back to the Future Day"!

10/20/15 - BTTF Clock Tower Sketch

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Gonna switch gears today and tomorrow for a special couple of posts dedicated to one of my favorite movies and franchises of all time…  The special day occurs tomorrow at precisely 4:29 pm, and if BTTF in the title is enough of a hint, you'll know what that means… ;)  For now, enjoy this preliminary sketch.

10/19/15 - Halloween Post 5 - Haunted House Silhouettes (Part 2)

Continuing from yesterday's post, here's three different tests I did for conveying inner details in a silhouette.

For the first one, I chose to completely cut out all windows to 0% opacity (full brightness):

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For the second one, I dimmed some of the window details to more accurately reflect whether light was shining through or not:

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For the third one, I added extra details (non-transparent items) into the mix, but kept them as the darkest details:

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Out of the three designs, my favorite is probably #2 or #3.