James Annandale MSc Animation

  Above is an updated version of the Briar turnaround, after getting more good feedback from Kieran about the state of my portfolio he suggested I turn my attention to the face work in the turnaround - which was quite loose and suggestive at that point. It now looks a lot better and I'm happier with the result,  I'm now going to see if I can improve the illustration I did of Briar by looking at the lighting and possibly add some directional light, incorporating some of what I learned from my life studies earlier this semester. 

  Above is the finished illustration of Maddox in her battle outfit, it was a challenge and I still have a lot to learn about anatomy and rendering flesh and skin tones (and hair) but I feel this has come together nicely and is one of the final pieces to include in my portfolio. The sketch I started with can be viewed below...

 I then went back to the Briar turnaround and added colour. As stated in a previous post I'll be improving the faces of the front and three-quarter pose. I'm very happy with this otherwise.

 Here, it was time to explore what colour palette I should use to finish Maddox's design. Eve had told me she wanted her to have blonde hair and a dark top and bottoms underneath the dress. The refence she gave me showed a dark, velvety, blue/purple material so I stuck to these as well as trying green. In the end I went with the purple.

 This was a very enjoyable day, I worked on turnaround sheets for characters Briar, Katherine and Maddox (again at this point I hadn't decided Katherine was going to be removed). These were all quite challenging and I'll be returning to Briar's to work on her face, but very rewarding and I feel a success.

 Below is a sheet exploring outfit changes for Katherine, just like in the last post about the exclusion of the Mafioso muffin man I also decided to remove Katherine from the portfolio as the design was quite as dynamic as the rest.   I did however decide to keep Maddox in, below are costume changes for her character based on reference material Eve provided me with.

 I didn't end up including this character in my portfolio after advice from Kieran, however I had already played around with adding colour before this decision was made. Out of the two sheets, my preference would have been for either the bottom left or the bottom right colour palette on the sheet below.

 After working on Baron Samedi I turned my attention to Briar and using the same colour palette, alternated the colour of her clothes and travel bag. I kept it to one tone per colour for simplicity and was pleased with the result.

 Below I decided to explore some different coloured suits along with snake, even though I knew I prefered the top outfit this was a good exercise.

Having spotted several gaps in my work I decided to turn my attention back to Baron Samedi, creating facial expressions, poses and a turnaround sheet. The sheet below was quite challenging as he is wearing round sunglasses. It's not until you try to express a character's emotions through their facial expressions that you realise how important the eyes are in this process. I think the fact I gave him a large and quite expressive mouth helped make up for this. Below are two of several poses I wanted to play around with. Here the Baron is taking a good glug of rum and then sucking on a Cuban cigar, two past times he's notorious for.

At this point I felt it would be a good idea as well as a good leveller to gather together the art I had and mock-up a portfolio so that I could see a) how the work I had was sitting next to each other and b) where the gaps were. I split the portfolio in to sections and created title pages for each one, they can be seen below.   

 So, turning my attention back to Maddox and Katherine, characters from Eve's fantasy novel, I started working more closely on there facial features. Below you can see slight changes in Maddox's face and also a sheet of Katherine as well.

 At this point I was trying to flesh out the content of my portfolio by getting as many rough designs together as possible... this led to imagining of Doreen Lamb, gangster Gran! Based loosely in looks on my own Gran Maureen Lang, I drew the images below. I really liked this concept however when researching ideas I found out there was already a series of books and a film written by David Walliams called 'Gangster Granny' so I decided to concentrate on other ideas instead.

 Next I went on to design rough, loose drawings for another two of Eve's characters, Katherine and Maddox shown below. Eve had specifically asked me to keep it rough at this stage and to just concentrate on getting a feel for the characters. 

  Having designed facial expressions and lip sync sheets for Briar, Eve wasn't completely happy with them so I tried again. She liked the bottom left sketch, which I'll be developing at a later stage.

 The next character I came up with I decided to name Big Al Forno, an Italian/American mobster who is vegetarian and loves to bake which explains his nickname - the Mafioso muffin man! Above I started iterating on facial features based on the real life mob boss Paul Castellano, shown below... I wanted him to have a large physique and be quite scary looking but also a bit of a bumbling idiot.  Once I'd got a body shape I was happy with I started experimenting with different outfits, the one top left was similar to the photo of Paul Castellano but my drawing seemed to communicate shop keeper more than mobster, so I opted for the classic pin-stripe suit bottom left. I then went on to play around with his facial expressions. I already had in mind some poses I wanted to draw so this gave me a starting point for different emotions I wanted to try and convey. Below is a collection of poses, top right he's scared (I forgot to mention he has an irrational fear of pink flamingos!) to the

 Above I made some quick studies of the trapezious looking at the shape and how is sits around the shoulder blades, this was going to be useful for the design of a male character I didn't get chance to work on. I intend to keep expanding my knowledge of the different muscle groups and bones from this point on. 

 It's been around 19 days since my last post, in that time I've worked on four new characters as well as bolstering the artwork I had for the Robo Samurai, Briar and Baron Samedi.  I've also collated the best of this work and put together a new portfolio which I'm delighted with however before I show that I'm going to chart my progress though the last three weeks in retrospect to get things up to date...

  Having spent the day yesterday working on black and white renderings and making a couple of images using a nine-part gray scale... I decided to try simplifying the process and just using five values from the scale instead of all nine... This worked quite well but I wanted to keep going so I tried another pose with just three values... This was very basic and closer to what I was doing with the black and white studies though simpler. Here I had to use the same value for the shade on the clothes and the skin and I found in the last two studies that there was a little confusion between using the same mid-tone for the skin and the clothes, so baring this in mind I tried again but this time with the addition of the white value. I also mainly used the half-tone for the clothes to create a distinction.... Although still very basic and loose (all these studies took less than half an hour each) I felt this was heading in the right direction. I'm going to continue practicing my life drawin

As well as practicing my knowledge of value through using a value scale while life drawing, Kieran suggested I try making some life studies in just black and white again to work on my use/placement of lights and darks.  Once again I used the New Masters Academy YouTube channel for reference to produce the following digital charcoal drawings... Both of the above images were drawn in an hour, thirty minutes each. I spent forty-five minutes on each of the three below. I feel I'm starting to really benefit from these exercises and improving in small ways with each new drawing. Just for fun here are some 'arty' shots of the above images created in Procreate...

 Once I'd finished the line studies, I created a value scale and went on to select my favourite pose and draw the following image using the willow charcoal brush... I started with a toned background but removed it later as I thought it looked better without. Still this wasn't quite the look I was going for so I changed to the script brush and created the following... I liked this finish far more , it was more graphic and edgy. I'd also tried the airbrush as shown below but decided to use the script brush once more to go back and add basic values to all the original line studies. Here are the three tone life studies... I'm happy with these and already feel like I've started to improve. I now plan to concentrate for the rest of the day dividing my time between drawing more line drawings (especially male bodies as the female drawings above are stronger) and then making more value studies. Tomorrow I will look into anatomy studies.