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Snowman walk

Posted on December 17, 2011 
Filed Under Animation, Drawings | 9 Comments

Several persons wanted to see this guy animated so here it is. Believe it or not this was animated in Maya. I placed the walk cycle on a nurbs plane and animated the UV :-) I have been told I could have just used Photoshop. I will give it a try next time or maybe use Plastic Animation Paper since it is free.

and while I am at it, here is a little teaser I made with my new camera using some footage I shot during my last Animation Collaborative character design class with Albert Lozano and Chris Sasaki.

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Bobby Chiu new free painting tutorial

Posted on November 2, 2011 
Filed Under Character design, Drawings, Education, Painting | Leave a Comment

Bobby Chiu is a very good artist, a very good businessman and still a very generous guy.

I hadn’t followed him for a year or two and while looking for Photoshop painting tutorials for a friend I found that “new” video he posted well … last year.

Unlike his old painting videos, in that 190 minutes long tutorial (9 parts video) he explains his whole painting process from the original scanned sketch to fully rendered. This is probably similar to the paid videos you can get when attending his online art school Schoolism.com.

YouTube Preview Image

Since this is a free video, I am also posting my notes, feel free to add comments to these.

Water creature fishing

1. Bring the scanned sketch onto a layer in multiply mode, Bobby work at 33% of the final res
2. Open a second window not the navigator in a corner at about 12% to get an overview
3. Create a backgrond layer in dark grey
4. Add a new layer inbetween sketch and background and work on the tonal values of the character, we establish the base tone.
5. We create a new layer for the cast shadows
6. We create a new layer for the Colors in Color mode

Part 4 Lets bring the lights in:
1. We have been roughing out until now but it is time to zoom in, to add more detail in normal mode
2. Upmost layer in Normal mode we add the light so the sketch disappears

Part 7 Adding a secondary rim light

Part 8 Make an overal Levels change to make the painting much lighter. I would actually do the exact opposite so the dark area would have more details rather than creating flat dark areas… strange workflow

Ah and while I was getting ready to post this….. I just received a notification that Bobby Chiu posted an other AWESOME video interview with Pixar story artist Alex Woo. Alex was Tom Gately’s substitute teacher at AnimC last week and the class had a really fun time with him. Alex is a gesture drawing teacher in San Francisco and his class is usually sold out month in advance, he also holds a very popular class at Bobby Chiu’s Schoolism

As a side note, using the 75qs0 promo code when registering on the Schoolism website, you should get a nice discount and it will also help to fund my Philz coffee addiction ;-)

Related posts:
Dice Tsutsumi interview
Bobby Chiu interview

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Moonshine

Posted on September 26, 2011 
Filed Under Drawings | 2 Comments

DreamWorks first personal art publication, Moonshine, was conceived as an opportunity to highlight the breath of artistic development talent at Dreamworks.

This short documentary gives you a sneak peek into the personal works from the artists.

via Paperwalker

While we are at it, here are few of my latest sketches a,d a picture of my AnimC classmates.



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Asus ep121 artist demo

Posted on September 7, 2011 
Filed Under Animation, Drawings, Tablet PC | 1 Comment

Matthew Tardiff just sent me a link to a video he made demonstrating the Asus ep121 TabletPC in use with Sketchbook pro, Maya and my old beloved TV Paint. Check it out he paired it with a fancy tiny portable keyboard.

YouTube Preview Image

via Lopsided circle

Related posts:
TabletPC category

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Sketching with Jason Seiler

Posted on September 25, 2010 
Filed Under Animation, Character design, Drawings, Painting | Leave a Comment

The jury is still out there on the importance of being good at drawing for CG animation but to me, being able to quickly convey my ideas through rough sketches or a series of thumbnails is one more tool to a CG animator toolset therefore acquiring drawing skills should be one of our goals. It is also a great party trick! ;-)

I lived in West Africa for a while and there were many circumstances where I couldn’t pull out my camera but no one minded when I fired up my pens and pencils. My skills weren’t that amazing at that time but once I have a bit more experience with watercolours or maybe gouache, I am hoping to travel again for a month and fill up an entire sketchbook.

This brings me to great video I just found on Schoolism.com:
“Sketching with Jason Seiler”.

There are thousands of free sketching videos on Youtube but they are always too short or not exactly what I am looking for so $25 for looking over Jason’s shoulder and listening to his process is a bargain. It is also a great introduction to the great training Schoolism is offering.

The video is a bit less that 2 hours long and you see him sketching in the street and at his desk, demonstrating the importance of breaking down the subject into simpler forms and shapes, thumbnailling, crosshatching, digitally painting on a TabletPC, ballpoint sketching and applying watercolours.

On a minor note, each artist has their own style and I prefer cleaner lines to the more fiddly Jason uses when sketching, in the watercolours section he didn’t really explain his thought process and how he selected his colours however, I would still highly recommend watching those videos if you are trying to develop your sketching abilities.

You will probably need to register to access the website but don’t worry it is really quick.

Related posts:
My drawing category

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Edinburgh Fringe festival

Posted on August 19, 2010 
Filed Under Drawings, Portfolio | Leave a Comment

For my coworker and environment artist extraordinaire John’s birthday, we went to the Edinburgh Fringe festival this week end. The town is soo pretty that I will have to come back and do more architectural drawing.

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Back from California

Posted on August 9, 2010 
Filed Under Drawings, Portfolio | Leave a Comment

With my hero Mike

I just came back from California and I am completely jet-lagged ;-)

This is the second time I visit San Francisco and Los Angeles but having been invited to visit some of my favourite animation studios made the trip much more special.

I had decided to focus mainly on my sketching skills this time and try to apply what I learnt during the past seven month. My knowledge in anatomy and proportion combined to 7  month of intense life drawing practice helped me to make the most of those very long journey on bus and subway. The Santa Monica/Downtown LA journey was probably the most fruitful since people tend to quickly fall asleep and not pay attention to that one guy with dark glasses and hat screwed on his head, frenetically moving a pen on a tiny notepad, in a corner, at the back of the bus ;-)

If I lived in LA, I think I would take the bus everyday, the passenger always presented amazing features to capture and every ethnicity and age range was on display.

Here are some drawings and pictures from my trip. I had brought some watercolours but eventually decided against using them. I didn’t want to ruin the sketches with poorly chosen colours. I need more experience with those however….. the reason why some of the sketches don’t have any shading,  is because  I still intend to colour them at some stage :-) I just found a great video tutorial with Jason Seiler that could prove useful. Jason Seiler/Schoolism

Forgive the poor line work, I was using a cheap Bic cristal and those don’t allow much thick and thinness. I had in mind to buy Glen Villpu’s favourite Namiki Falcon fountain pen but at $180 a pop at Flax, I eventually decided against it. It is only $120 online. Still very expensive for a fountain pen but the nib is really really flexible.

Here we go, that’s it. Enjoy

[ps] if you don’t know Matt Jones, check out his work, he has some really nice sketches on his blog
http://mattjonezanimation.blogspot.com/

Related post:
Sketchcrawl material

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Life drawing obscurantism

Posted on June 12, 2010 
Filed Under Drawings, Portfolio | 2 Comments

Some time ago, my friend Annes sent me a link to a different Life Drawing class that I would possibly enjoy more than the one I am currently attending and everything finally made sense.

In life drawing, there seem to be a predominant “school of thought” that believes in learning by pure academic observation. That “London Atelier of Representational Art” (LARA) in Clapham Junction, even goes to the extreme of forcing you to draw using a “Sight-size method”. As they describe it, here is how it works:

“the artist first sets a vantage point where the subject and the drawing surface appear to be the same size. Then, using a variety of measuring tools – which can include strings, sticks, mirrors, levels, and plumb-bobs – the artist draws the subject so that, when viewed from the set vantage point, the drawing and the subject have exactly the same dimensions.”

I think “academic observation” is very valuable when drawing from the model but as Glenn Villpu implies it in his theory and instructional material. This is just, one tool!

How long is it going to take you to finally be able to work as an animator, illustrator, storyboard artist and draw from imagination then? Years and years and years and years!

Why not instead, add more tools to your toolset. Why no try to understand the underlying structure of the figure? What about learning proportions and the different parts of the skeleton but also the few muscles that shape the surface of the skin? How to represent the figure in simple geometric shapes?

What about learning … the Structure!

The big problem with the “Academic observation” approach is that you only discover the elements of the structure through experiencing them, this can take a very long time. It is what I would call “brute force life drawing” teaching. But there is a smarter way!

K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer published a great paper a while ago, about “the Role of deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”. The paper is a bit dry so you would be forgiven to skip to something a bit more approachable and that great article from CNN called “The secret of greatness”.

What those articles try to demonstrate is the importance of having a plan when learning and focus your practice on specific areas. This is what they call “Deliberate practice“. “Brute force” learning is great but it is definitely not the deliberate practice sort of approach.

Where can we learn about structure? well Glenn Villpu is the obvious start, then all the AWESOME blogs, Dreamworks storyboard artist and life drawing teacher, Rad Sechrist, is part of!

Rad How To
Analytical figure drawing
Advance figure drawing
The Art Center

Reading those blogs and learning what is on display should help you improve tenfolds!

I would also recommend Andrew Loomis pdfs as a start actually and this great 1890 book by french Dr Paul Richer
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k205846w.planchecontact.r=richer.f145.langEN where he shows the relationship of the head height to the rest of the body.

To finish this post, here are my two last drawings from my thursday class:
Contains nudity
[...] Read more

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Life drawing, second term just started

Posted on April 24, 2010 
Filed Under Drawings, Portfolio | 1 Comment

This term I have gone a bit mad and enrolled for 3 classes a week for a total of 7h. I can already see a lot of progress compared to last term. Better composition, better line work, better shading, better proportions, speed. Good thing I didn’t walk out or gave up like other students.

Here is a 2 hours pose. My Thursday tutor keeps telling me that I would be a great forger. That’s not a good thing for him. As artists, we shouldn’t try to copy the model like a camera would.

I don’t care much for the moment, being a camera is still a good thing for me until I have mastered anatomy and proportions.

This term is very exciting, I am sharing two classes with a lot of very talented concept artists and artists from the Video game industry. That is a lot of competition but at least that pushes us to get better.

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“can you draw the nose without the nostrils?”

Posted on March 31, 2010 
Filed Under Drawings | Leave a Comment

Beata

Tonight was my last drawing class for this term and once again my teacher decided to give me a hard time.

I have had two teachers this term. One that would pat us on the back congratulating us on our work: “you are doing fine”, then would disappear for the rest of the hour to probably smoke a whole pack of cigarettes or hang out at the school’s café while, I, would share the teaching of Andrew Loomis and Glen Vilppu.

The second teacher has been trained at a tough russian fine art school and would instead draw with us and try her hardest to teach us life drawing but there is one big problem, she is a very good artist but she completely forgot what it means to begin in life drawing. Very often she would come to our easel making completely useless comments. “The proportions are off, imagine you saw that person in a restaurant, wouldn’t you be scared? can you see why is wrong now?”. Of course not! If I could i would correct it! Man this drove me nuts. Luckily once in a while, the ramblings would be followed by some amazing tips….

This week, she noticed I was really struggling drawing the subtle changes of shadow of the nose and asked me: “can you draw the nose without the nostrils?”…. well of course not and why would I? When you have two big black marks right in the middle of the face, why wouldn’t use them as landmarks?

After nearly 20 minutes of rambling and argument she eventually drew a simplified representation of the nose using shaded planes…. man THAT was useful! I had seen similar drawings in the Loomis books but completely forgot about it. If you can break down the face and probably the body in term of planes, things are so much simpler and you might not even need a model anymore.

Here we go, as Glen Vilppu would say, I have now got one more tool in my life drawing toolset alongside my knowledge of anatomy, proportions, volume and “academic observation”.

I just found a great link to most of the books you need for life drawing. Check out Alberto Ruiz’s amazing blog:

http://processjunkie.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

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Tom Fluharty Chiustream

Posted on March 23, 2010 
Filed Under Animation, Drawings | Leave a Comment

man one more amazing Chiustream interview with Oil Painter Tom Fluharty.

I never expected to hear about Rembrandt, cad reds and ultramarine on the Chiustream but yeah, they did!!!

I had never head about Tom Fluharty previously but Tom is once again a crazy inspiring artists.

“You make want to break out the oil paints and start painting right now” says Bobby. I definitely agree!

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5570014

Interesting is also seem to be suffering from RSI like “Cheeks”.

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The Art Center

Posted on March 21, 2010 
Filed Under Character design, Drawings | Leave a Comment

Rhino crit

If you like the Radhowto blog you will love the Art Center. A blog sharing ideas and tips from Artists to Artists. The contributors are no less than some of the best artists in the industry: Florian Satzinger, Rad Sechrist, David Colman, Louie Del Carmen….

http://theartcenter.blogspot.com/

Thanks Annes for the link!

Read more
Drawing reverse engineering
“Paperwalker” Florian Satzinger

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Life drawing week 03

Posted on February 2, 2010 
Filed Under Drawings, Portfolio | Leave a Comment

Here are my latest drawings. Two long poses.

I tried to think about the composition a bit more this time. The thumbnails on the top left corner are the base for my composition.

I wasn’t too happy the way things were going for the first one and restarted from scratch, which didn’t leave me with enough time to finish the pose. I had in mind to incorporate the little platform the model was standing on originally but realised that it didn’t present much interest so I decided to go for something tighter, with the feet fading away.

The second one is pretty good, but the model is way to high on the page. The foot is better than my last attempt but the hands, especially the right one would have needed more work. The quality of the line is still very poor but I am working on that.

Things are getting better and better I feel and there is definitely some improvements compared my first drawings. My skills in drawing from imagination have also dramatically improved and I can now draw different body parts without reference.

Those two drawing will probably be my last pencil shaded piece as I feel it is now time to move to Oil painting. I have been told that moving to paint would help me to improve my drawing skills and Painting is also something I always wanted to try but never found a good teacher/course until now.

Marc

Robert

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Life drawing session 03

Posted on January 26, 2010 
Filed Under Drawings, Portfolio | Leave a Comment

Here is the pose we worked on yesterday with Marc again. 1h40 pose. Longer poses are great as they allow for corrections and trying different techniques. I got stuck with the feet so moved on to do some shading in order to define the belly a bit better and try to create some volume.

Contains nudity

session 03

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Life drawing session 01

Posted on January 21, 2010 
Filed Under Drawings, Portfolio | 1 Comment

Working in Guildford is just as good as London as I found an Art center offering evening life drawing classes. I enrolled to two life drawing classes and 1 watercolour painting class. It has only been a week but this is looking really promising. The teachers in both classes are really good artists … which doesn’t mean they are good teachers but I have some of Glen Vilppu tapes and the Force: Dynamic Life drawing for animators book which are really helpful.

I regularly sketch from memory while commuting on the train but the first drawing proved really overwhelming. I didn’t know where to start!

Hit the link for my drawings. Obviously this post contains nudity

Here are my first drawings for this week, mainly 20 minutes poses. I was trying to get the proportions right but also experimenting with different styles and type of shading and I am learning a lot!

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Angouleme International Comics festival 2010

Posted on January 10, 2010 
Filed Under Drawings | 2 Comments

Angouleme festival

Angouleme festival

Well, well, well…. It looks like I might be able to make it to the Angouleme International Comics Festival this year. It is running from the 28th to the 31st of January in the gorgeous town of Angouleme.

http://www.bdangouleme.com/

Just for a reminder, as well as some NLP and Reframing tips, here is what Bobby Chiu had to say about the festival after visiting it last year:

YouTube Preview Image

Bill Presing also posted some pictures on his blog last year:

http://billpresing.blogspot.com/2008/02/destination-france-final-chapter.html

Is anyone else interested in going? I have no clue what kind of accommodation I will organize but I am sure it will be fine.

[...] Read more

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Bobby Chiu Video interview

Posted on September 6, 2009 
Filed Under Character design, Drawings | 2 Comments

Bobby Chiu

Bobby Chiu

CG talk just released a short video interview with Bobby Chiu during ComicCon2009. Check it out.

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Back from Angouleme

Posted on September 3, 2009 
Filed Under Animation, Drawings | 4 Comments

Cobbled street of Angouleme

As some of you might know, during the Annecy animation festival I got myself a great gig at animation studio “2 minutes” in the capital of “Bande dessinées”: Angoulême.

Angoulême is a gorgeous historic town, ideally located between Paris and the basque country, not too far from the seaside resort of also gorgeous La Rochelle and Royan. Angoulême is a fortified town with cobbled street located on top of the “Plateau”, a huge hill overlooking the Charente river.

All the houses are made of white stone which gives it that historic middle-age feeling.

[...] Read more

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The importance of the tools when drawing

Posted on June 23, 2009 
Filed Under Drawings | Leave a Comment

Just to balance things up a bit with my previous post here is a funny video from Sheldon Arts Academy on Youtube regarding the importance of the tools when drawing ;-)

YouTube Preview Image
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Sketchcrawl material

Posted on June 23, 2009 
Filed Under Drawings | Leave a Comment

Here is a summary of recommendations given by different artists for sketching or sketchcrawling.

Glenn Vilppu uses a Namiki Falcon fountain pen filled with a range of Sepia, brillian brown and black non waterproof Pelikan ink but also Polychromos Faber-Castell pencils. The Namiki Falcon nib is solid gold hence the price but doesn’t corrode like cheaper models. Glenn also recommends the $15 “Pen and ink sketching fountain pen” which comes in extra-fine, fine or broad size. expensive but the pigments are much stronger.

Enrico Casarosa uses the Fabriano Artist journal which alternates white and brown pages. He also carries a Water brush pen like most Sketchcrawlers and a set of Windsor& Newton Artist watercolours and does most of his drawings using a pencil.[...] Read more

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