Another pencil in sketchbook piece.
Not sure what the thing is on his head is – possibly a leech, or a hat with teeth.
Terrible scan though. Will have to try it again…
Submitted for Illustration Friday topic: Perennial.
The feel of lead dragging across good paper. Love it.
Another sketch that began with no real direction while sitting around. The location of the ears was helped along by my 3yo who found the pencil and sketch pad while i was out one evening, and drew one of them in. I had been thinking about placing them low, but i guess he helped finalise the decision….
Submitted for Illustration Friday topic Gesture.
Good Lord! Is it late March already? I haven’t put up anything since before Christmas…. after a very dark and long winter, filled with flu after flu being passed on between the 2 kids, the missus and myself (we all nearly drowned on the amount of snot pooling in the house), it would appear all is clear, the sun is back, and the finger has been pulled out.
So to ensure people that I haven’t died, I thought i’d put up a sketch i’m working on, more of a doodle really. It began yesterday when the Girl was asleep (finally) and i had a hankering for drawing, but couldn’t leave her alone in case she fell off the couch.
This is not digital, by the way.
It’s been quite some time since i used pencil for anything other than scratching out ideas for complete works - really rough sketches – so i took the time here to feel the lead on the surface of the page, and just see where it took me. I’m still not sure where it is taking me, other than i know i probably should have started this in a larger notebook… the spiral bind is going to stop me being able to finish the top of the head, and the chin may loose out too. ~sigh~
Let’s call this a work in progress; I’ll put up more as it progresses….
Well, maybe i should have found out about it sooner, but i just jumped straight in and began drawing… didn’t look at te size of the area i was working to, just pushed through to about 1500 frames (no, not every frame, just the animatic…).
So, then i try to export and it can’t handle a file over about 700px wide it would seem. Fine, i’ll render it at 600 wide. But now the animation is really small, and can hardly be seen.
Try camera layer, you say? Right! Oh, hang on now nothing renders, though i do get a folder with an image sequence of the entire thing….
I think this may not be for me.
In import into Flash proved difficult with 1500, 1000px wide jpg’s, and after a whole lot of crashing, went and batch resized the images for import in Photoshop. A million years later, importing a few humdred at a time seemed the best way.
Then came the deleteing of static frames – when pencil spat out the jpg sequence the were 12 frames or jpgs for every second that the picture stood still as well as for motion. This was expected but it did lead to a bit more arseing around than i was perhaps wanting.
Is there a lesson learned?
Yep.
Anyway, here’s where it’s up to now spat out by Flash… the timing is still pretty bad but it’s progress people, progress!
Submitted for Illustration Friday topic “Beneath”.
I had worked through a few idea for this one, intending to go with the main gist that something would be partly submerged, one thing on the top, and beneath it turns out to be something else, eg, an island that is actually the shell of a turtle, sort of thing….
I had a sketch of an ‘island’ and the water line, then moved down and it ended up looking a bit like a body floating backside up. Then it got tied up in ropes. The i added a weight to it. Then going back to the ‘island’, i drew a palm tree, coconuts and a monkey…. it all got a bit stupid - looked like the tree was sticking outta the date – so i pulled back to just the body completely submerged.
Decided to try a new ‘medium’ of Painter 11 that i haven’t used, the Airbrush. I quite like it , but it’ll take some getting used to! Might need to look at getting one of these if i want to keep using it….