Thursday, February 11, 2010

QuadFecta



The first computer animation assignments of the year: a finger point, walk, head turn, and take. These were strictly animation exercises and the model and rig were provided to us. It's my first time animating a human character, or anything with arms really.... Needless to say I learned a ton on these and feel like I'm in a much better place when it comes to understanding animation. The take was the only one I had time to fully revise, and even though it was my favorite one when I did it it still looks worlds better. It's amazing how such slight changes, small relationships, and subtle emphasis make a world of difference in the visceral experience. Currently we're working on a modeling project in NURBS and then we're going to start SIT STAND, the big assignment of the semester. I'm pretty excited for this, and so is Carson.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

gold paint is fun

Here's some stuff from the past two portrait nights. I like finding a stylistic constraint/goal and working with that during those three hours. It's really nice to be able to explore these ideas over the course of multiples while at the same time being flexible and free by not being committed to a serious/legit concentration of work. For example the golden portraits were started with Scott's when I painted his beard in bronze gouache and I just kept on with it because I kept having left over paint and didn't want to waste it. I'd like to keep trying to explore different aesthetics, methods, colors, materials, and exaggerated drawing styles in particular. In the immediate future I'd like to do some stuff with soft pastels, mixed media/collage, and maybe even work with these as etchings... Gouache works pretty nicely in washes - keeps that color vibrancy up, and printmaking paper scraps are fantastic to work on, but not vellum, that stuff can not get wet; I still need to figure out what I can do with all my left over vellum.












Got some stuff from FEWS too. I'm trying to go to it just about every night for an hour as a break from work in the labs. I realized after last semester that I wasn't drawing nearly enough and was starting to lose touch with things. My observational and expressive skills have slowly shifted but I feel that my overall drawings have gotten a lot weaker as of late. I really need to pay close attention to things, get off the line again, and get back to being aware of mark making, the quality of which I've been severely neglecting...