Cel Animation

Week 4: In this week we had an experienced animator come in to tell his story and teach traditional Cel Animation. We were to again draw from life and copy what we saw from children's toys before drawing our own character and doing little sketches of expressions and getting to know the character.



After that we were tasked to draw a series of images over a lightbox to then take photos of and string together into an animation, I animated the example of a walk cycle.

Week 5: I then went on and animated one of my older drawings, one which I had always wanted to animate.
I added a lot of new frames in to compensate as originally they were 4 serperate drawings so I had to draw more to fill in the gaps.

Character Design

After we had a practice with drawing upside down, we then moved on to creating our very own characters to then animating it to do a basic walk cycle.

My first design was scrapped as it may have been too much of a challenge and too time consuming to animate my character walking on a moving earth.

 My second character was a simple one that would be much easier to animate with basic limbs. It was also a good choice to cut the two legs in half so they could be animated quite realistically with proper leg movements.

Animation:

Upside Down Drawings

As part of our continued drawing sessions, Rob opened a series of images on his computer through the projector that the class then observed and tried to draw, except with a challenge. To draw upside down.
Here are the 3 that I did.

Burns was the first and most successful of the three, as it was a more detailed imageto begin with.

Elements of Design

A List of the elements of design and their definitions. These are some of the key things included in a design process.

Isometric

After perspective drawing I was introduced to Isometric drawing which I was already interested in doing as I had seen some work before and was excited to learn how to make it work.
Isometric art can be used in gaming and as an artform, both of which interest me. I designed a sort of Church/Tower building which could be a building for an isometric "Age of Empires" type game.

With Grid Lines

Without grid, cleaner look

Perspective

Another lesson brought something new to the table, this time drawing in Illustrator not on paper.
Perspective was the tool I was taught to use this lesson, including 1, 2 and 3 point perspective.
Here are a few examples.

Out of these practice drawings, I found that I particularly enjoy 1 and 2 point perspective more.

Drawing from life

In this lesson we began to draw while observing real objects, using our eyes more so than our memory of what we think we saw. I am happy with how most of these turned out and picked my top 3 to show.

Lawn Bowl Puppet

Our second task in this lesson was to use a pre-made puppet and animate it to mimic the action of bowling a ball. We were looking at getting basic positioning and movement for the puppet.