Been a while since I posted again and it's been a really busy semester.  Here are two misc. from Drawing II and TA for the sake of progress with a few brief notes.

• Draw BROAD shapes, stop getting caught up in drawing line
• Focal point is most detailed, tightened area of of composition - pay particular attention there.  Everything surrounding and supporting the focal point can be looser and more suggestive
• Not enough personal attention given to rendering
• From the moment the pencil hits the paper, you're establishing the composition
• Focus on execution rather than getting too caught up in the idea
• Talk less, practice more

Dia de los Muertos sketches

Ecorche

Updated Figure Dump: January 2013

Reductive Pose

Now that freshman year is over halfway through, I've been considering the possibilities and my preferences for concentrations and it totally reminded me of one of my first animatics back when I started this blog a few years ago.  It wasn't until this past summer that I had actually went back and finished it;  I don't think I've shared it here yet + even though the drawings aren't the best, I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out.  I had a incredibly tough time making this because of my draftsmanship abilities back then, but with the new knowledge and skills gained from my studies here in Ringling, it'll be much more liberating and exciting to express future stories.

"Master the Bouncing Ball"

So we're almost at the third week of the new semester and so far I'm both enjoying and making much more progress than the fall's!  Still working in traditional mediums so I don't have much shot, but here's two misc. assignments I happen to have at the moment that I'll dump my thoughts on:

LOA:  Took the line of action from one of our figure drawings and reinvented new poses over it.  Learned how lines bounce off of one another.  To engage my interest even more, I took a pre-existing video game character (Nathan Drake) and redesigned him under Sean Galloway's drawing style.  For the poses themselves, I simply wanted to keep them more dynamic.

Ball bounce with Overlap/Follow Through:  A few years ago, I had the great pleasure of meeting animator Aaron Hartline.  He critiqued my demo reel at the time and told me that, before anything else, master the bouncing ball (for he could tell through my reel of walk cycles and lip syncs that I have not).  For our Traditional Animation class, I strictly want to keep things on principles and technique in order to master that ball.  It's a simple animation, but I feel it's within these simple practices do we reap the most learning.

Started to really reference artists I admire and channeling their influence and their approaches into my own cafe sketches.  Interesting how it's finally just now clicking that lines and rhythms are like these demi-elements to create strong, weighty shapes.  I've also started working in Maya again, which it will be very fun to finally see how these incorporated principles of drawing will translate over.

On a side note, I've been writing less and less lately since, just this past semester, I realized that I was too into art philosophy and not enough on technique itself.  As a result, I've been more productive and have been more doing than thinking (though I'm going to have to go back to it soon since I've been having a harder time expressing my thoughts clearly as of late).

On a side-side note, I visited my old high school and they put up a Ringling poster.  Neat!