Canadian Landscape

This weekend I was up in the beautiful cottage country around Parry Sound with my friends, at a lovely house that backed onto the water of Lake Manitouwabing. We were treated to beautiful weather as well. While up there, I worked on a quick watercolour painting of the view over the water from the dock behind the house.

Artistically, I can't say I worked really carefully on it. The process was more of a splish-splash of colour and trying to capture of the atmosphere of the lake around the setting sun, hence why some of the lighting and shadows might seem off... because they are! The painting part was quickly done over maybe a half hour to an hour, and given the right amount of extra time to work I could probably have planned the colour palette better and put in finer details. Oh well, at least I managed to fit a quick painting while out in the wilderness.


*note: I added the greyscale in photoshop just because it shows off the range of the palette, but it is not it's own painting*

I would like to know if you feel this piece is successful as it is, or what techniques I can try doing next time to enhance the atmosphere.

Otherwise, it was a very good weekend! :)

Busy, Busy, Busy!

So the August that I planned, as I previously stated, has so far not been and layout/painting heavy as it should be. I have done come concepts, but not sure how many will get to the painting stage. The reason for this is I have mainly spent my time actually finishing other projects, the priority being the rigging stage of the Alien character in Maya and finishing the Bear animation I had completed keys for last week.

On the plus side, after only two days animating and two afternoons for touch-ups, the bear sync has been completed. A record effort for me, I must say.



This leaves the next weekend to do a quick run and walk cycles before turning in the animation desk before school. Everything is falling together nicely!

I still have to push myself into layout over these last two weeks, so hopefully I'll get a couple nice paintings done before the term start-up.

And for your satisfaction, here is a still of my currently rigged character in a random pose to show off the mechanics. I still have a little tweaking with the weights and the limits to make this fully mobile, and hopefully before school I'll have time for an experiment in animating him.


Many more projects are on the go at this moment, so stay tuned for a final cap to the summer artwork.

Revision is the backbone of Success

Hey all, just a quick update. Yesterday I was redoing/revising the key's for the Bear muzzle sync (see previous post). I felt the action I had developed last month needed some work; it jumped around a lot and it was likely going to be difficult to fit the frantic actions within the frame constraints of the dialogue.

So here is the new result. I hope it reads better. Unfortunately, I was hoping to experiment with leg placements and staging, but better to do something realistic over something eccentric.



I have more of a drive to get this finished now. I'll do my best.

Summer Transition

So begins the month of August. Through most of July I have been working on the Dog Sequence I posted keys for on my last entry. The animation is done, and is my longest animation to date. The sequence is about 27 seconds, and not counting the holds involved, spans 240 drawings. WOAH! This one took a lot out of me. But honestly, while the result isn't bad, I can't help but feel it fell short of my expectations. Probably due to comparing it to my better chef sync. tho', to be fair, this was an experiment and I would be lying if I said I didn't learn anything to help improve in the future. Hope you enjoy!

*note* There was a problem with flipbook in making the background elements pan, so I decided to pop them in and out as needed. If I manage to correct this problem, I will re-post this


There are some minor corrections I might make in the future, such as the awkward jump, and the shuffle/drop, but for now I am taking a break from taking a break from animations during August, with the exception of my redo Muzzle Sync which I only plan to work on during spare time (that is, time not spend doing other work). I hope to have it done by September anyway, but for the time being, I just some work-in-progress keys for it.



As a bonus, I also have another muzzle sync I was working on with two characters interaction. Like the other muzzle, I only have some keys done. Considering time constraints, I likely won't be able to work on this over the rest of the summer. If I have time during the school year, I'll do my best to finish it.



To end off, I just have some other drawing from the earlier summer months, mainly to do with the films I'm working on: Character rotation for my 3D Alien, concept page for the chef sync, and some character poses and additional concepts from the film Waiting.


Now that August is here, my goal is to focus on other modes of art that i have before been struggling with, namely layout and digital painting. On top, I want to get into sketching (a practice I oddly enough had never gotten into beyond high school) and some traditional painting just for fun/colour exploration.

I'll update as I go. Look forward to it! :)