Visited Macy's for the first time this season and I immediately got high on the ol Christmas spirit. Went back home and doodled away with Mariah Carey and the Elf soundtrack destroying my speakers. Interestingly enough, I started drawing whatever was popping into my mind as I listened to the music, letting it take complete influence over whatever I was envisioning. Not sure if I'm explaining it clearly enough, but it was almost as if I was letting each song take my drawings for a ride instead of just playing stuff just so that there's noise or something to fill the background. I might try this more often...
Trying to keep loose with this week's story game. Kinda feels like I keep switching on and off between loose and stiff drawing. As always, here's the image
I had limited time with the tablet so these came out pretty rough. I wanted to try more of a dynamic chase scene. I need to practice drawing water more too lol...
I was challenged to draw a sacrum with my left hand in class the other day (which is my non-dominant hand). Even though my pen control was pretty stiff, the results were pretty staggering since I was still able to project my knowledge of the sacrum down on paper and it came out to be one of my better drawings for the day. It's an incredible reinforcement that drawing isn't so much about hand-eye coordination, but it's about what you already know/intellectually understand about the subject and interpreting it.
I'm a little late with posting these, but losing that Wacom pen was pretty inconvenient. Anyhoot, I started boarding these last week and finished the last three today. I've been training myself to stay looser and I can really tell the difference... the first two boards are a bit on the rigid side. At least we got to keep the Halloween theme =u=
With Uncharted 3 coming out, I revisited the art book and cutscenes for the second game. I don't consider myself that much into shooter games, but I really got hooked by the awesome character-driven story mixed with the epic dynamics and set pieces of summer blockbuster/popcorn films (which are my favorite). I remembered that there was this one cutscene of the genocidal antagonist that really showed how damn intimidating he was. After watching that scene, I got hooked all over again and watched the game's next 50min+ worth of cutscenes.
What a good bad guy.
As I was watching, I thought back to some of the character sections in the art book and realized that what made them so engaging and fun to watch is that the creators really integrated this incredibly fleshed out history into all the characters - their backstories are hinted at, but are also very dictatived, through what they each say and how they react to certain situations. The artbook (along with an Eric Goldberg interview on supporting characters) also taught me how some characters essentially act like mirrors to bring out aspects and traits of other characters (more often than not the protagonist). All of this, combined with the spot on acting, delivered some great chemistry.
When the last cutscene ended... I'm not sure how to describe it, but you know that sweeping feeling you get after finishing an amazing book or an incredible movie? Whatever it was, I totally had it. It was just such a great reminder as to why I wanted to do animation and storytelling in the first place - to really take an audience on a ride through performance and give them that exact same feeling. What made everything in Uncharted so damn engaging is that the characters' history, design, and so forth, were researched and very thought through. I've been writing more in my sketch book lately and have been more contemplative into everything I draw (more than ever before), so I feel I'm on the right track to getting there one day...
Started experimenting with color in my sketches. Just bought some new color Copic markers but they're really saturated and I was aiming for more of a harmony between the browns and red.
Digital idealization(?) - the problem could be solved by either decreasing the shirt's saturation or increasing the saturation on her skin, but it looses that popping contrast
PS- I think I had to generalize a lot of these thoughts I wrote down here... I want to go into so much more detail (character design , specific lines of dialogue that really reflect the aforementioned history/personalities, reactions, etc) but I'm such a bad/slow writer that I don't think I can string it all together... I'm much more verbal. I suppose this will have to do for now.
For some very odd reason, I lost my wacom pen right after I did my last story game... I was just moving stuff back into my room from the living room and it randomly disappeared, so now I have to rent one out.
But that still doesn't stop me from doing another story game! I think we'll do a few more halloween-inspired boards. These took longer than I hoped, but they came out a bit nicer than I thought they would since I needed to go the extra mile to add more value/contrast to emphasize the nighttime and glow of the tv. I've also been trying to do a good chunk of pre-planning for these, thinking a bit more about character design, composition, and staging to get appealing images from simpler board drawings. The kid was originally supposed to be a lot chubbier too, but I that kind of got thrown out the window since I decided to have him hiding underneath a blanket at the last minute to help emphasize his fright. Here's the link to this weeks photo.
