Oliver Castle - BA(Hons) Computer Animation Arts

We worked on the orthographic views for our monster designs today.

Today was spent contiuning on from last week, finishing up the pen tool designs of our monsters. We moved on to adding colour, using the live paint tool and set out to quickly create a bunch of colour variations. After that we used layer styles to add shadows and highlights to our original designs.

Friday afternoon was spent continuing work on our monstrous 80s designs (mine being the archetypal 'Princess') except this time we used it as a way to explore Adobe Illustrator, and more specifically the Pen Tool. While I've never really used the program before I'll certainly be using it in the future, I found the pen tool is a much easier and nicer looking way of 'tracing' a scanned in image, which I do quite a lot, over something like simply following the lines with a Photoshop brush. Anyway here is the scanned in character from last week re-done with the Illustrator Pen tool. And also a coloured version because I got bored and started exploring the other tools.

Today we didn't actually touch the computers at all (we'll not strictly true but I'll get on to that), instead we had a session on Character Design. We started with looking at 80s movies (specifically teen movies, like the Breakfast Club and Stand by Me) and the particular character archetypes they often used. After pseudo randomly deciding the amount of arms, legs and eyes are characters would have we were given a 'Character Class' or Archetype from the 80s. I ended up with 'The Princess', obviously referring to 80s archetype, not the Disney-esc one. We were then told to draw up 8 simple designs that fitted our given archetypes in about 10 minutes, which meant we had to work fast and employ good use of simple, geometric shapes. Once we were done we toured the room, looking at everyone elses work and giving our opinions on which three were our most interesting designs. After narrowing it down we then did larger, slightly more detailed drawings o...

Friday was the day for our 'Animation and Character' lesson, though like much this week it was basically just going through the basics. Learning Adobe Animate (A.K.A. Flash) was interesting since I haven't touched it in about 8 years so it was nice seeing how much easier I found using it. I'd probably chalk it up to skills from other programs and techniques crossing over. It did help actually having someone competant teaching us though. We went through the session learning how to make frame by frame transitions between a sketch of our own faces to our favourite food then to our favourite animal, then looping back around. It was a nice little task that took up the whole session, and though I feel I probably could have put a little more effort into it (still not great at drawing on a tablet, or in general) I'm happy with the result.