Secret Project

Diary!

A long while back I completed a “secret project” I was working on. Nothing big. I learned how to rig up a 2D character in Adobe Character Animator. Anyone that’s followed me a while and seen my twitter or comics should recognize the button.

Nothing else to say about it really. It was heckin’ fun to make and I hope to play with the program some more.

Love Michael

My First Late Assignment

No Diary! Don’t look at me! I’m a monster!

No really. I’m the worst. See the title of this post? That doesn’t even begin to say how late I am. Today is December 20th (at roughly 1am) and my assignment was due on December 13th. A WEEK AGO! And it’s still not close to finished.

We had an auction last weekend. A very successful one at that. It’s been 10+ hour days for the last 10 days to prepare for, run, and finish the auction. Unfortunately we didn’t anticipate how successful it actually would be. We broke all our records for registered bidders both in-house and online. And 34% of the items sold online! That’s three times our normal (we usually dance around 9%). That’s a lot of money to chase down and a lot of items to ship.

I won’t get into all the gritty details of it (maybe I will on the auction blog though). The point is that I’ve been too busy for drawing. And I didn’t pick an easy creature to draw either. The premise: A giant anthropomorphized rabbit made of trees!

Here are the sketches from when I was creating the pose/form for him (before adding the wood details).
rabbitsketcheswipOriginally I had him being a ‘protector’ of sorts. There was going to be a sick girl inside his stomach that he’s keeping safe. But clearly that’s way to much work for me this week. At the last two stages you can see I scrapped it. But I still kept the hollow chest cavity. I thought maybe I’d put a fire or wisp or something. It’s a magic tree guy. Might as well have magic.

Now came the tricky part of adding wood. I specifically wanted a ‘Strangling tree’ effect. These are trees that fight for light in dense forests and will wrap around other trees or itself or buildings just to gain ground.

banyantreeI seriously picked the hardest tree texture in the world. Why do I hate myself so much?

I started trying to turn that basic rabbit form into a tree but I was very quickly losing the ‘volume’ of the character. Plus you couldn’t tell which parts were his limbs. I decided to go more constructive (Adrian should be proud).

rabbittreewireframeThis is a technique the school made us learn in the first term and honestly since that lesson I don’t think I’ve ever used the skill again. But today I used it and it really helped. It demonstrates where the character gets thicker or thinner and what the limbs center lines are. You can even sort of see how the inside is hollow. I’ll definitely be using this technique again.

rabbittreewipThere he is. Does it look like he’s made of strangling wood? I need to do something with the toes and fingers but I’m not sure what yet.

So why am I showing all this off now if it’s not even close to done? I still need to value, colour and texture this bad boy! The entire image should have been portfolio ready a week ago! But now I don’t know if this is the character I want to do. Adrian did the critique on Wednesday of the version I had finished that day. We explored a lot of neat ideas with him like making him more evil (the eyes suggest he’s bad). He could be a demon even. The cavity in his stomach could be a monster mouth or something. I quickly experimented with giving him mammoth tusks like this is a giant prehistoric rabbit. I just don’t know now.

I think I’ll finish the wood guy (despite not knowing what to put inside him) since I’m this far into it. I still have a whole cityscape to do too and I need SO MUCH PRACTICE WITH CITYSCAPES.

I should get back to work since I just spent 22 minutes typing this out. Finished version coming soon.

Michael

The Artless Week

Diary. I’m exhausted.

I’ve mentioned on here that I work full time for my families auction company and this past weekend everything went wrong. I won’t write the whole thing on here because really I should be writing it over at Auction House Blues (the company blog).

But basically I’ve had no time off to do any of my homework. In fact, the assignment I’m doing now (or not doing since I’m typing this nonsense) was due yesterday! And I’m barely started! But my teacher, thankfully, has pushed this class back 6 days so I can still get it done before the next critique.

I basically haven’t drawn in a week and it’s awful. I plan very much to do the #21days and master challenges but I’ll write about that later.

Anyway I’ll get back to work. Here’s all I’ve drawn this week:

twitterxmasbunnyv2 twitterxmasdolphin

Avatars for wife and friend. I’m an art-eest.

Love Michael