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October 2, 2010#

Pencil 2D Animation Software

I’ve down load the free 2D animation software, Pencil. So far it’s actually pretty impressive, and i appologise to the guy geeking away in his room for no money to make it, but i wasn’t expecting much. But i’m kinda into it now….

Issues i’ve come across to date:
- Adding length to timeline doesn’t always work. Toggling scrub size, and actually resetting the number in the timeline length field seemed to trigger it to work properly. eg i’ve upped it to 1000 frames one time, then dropped it back to 900 another.
- Re-opening the file causes the timeline to revert back some default length eg, my animation is currently about 600 frames, but i cannot scrub past about 280…
- Marquee tool to copy doesn’t disappear automatically. To make it work select object to copy -> ctrl-c -> click another part of the screen to deselect before trying anything else… like pasting whatever it was you wanted wherever it was you wanted it.
-Adding a new key frame adds a blank keyframe. This requires one to redraw the whole frame again (unless you want to go copy the previous)…. would rather it set a key frame with what is in the previous, allowing you to erase the parts that need to be altered, eg: hand or foot or face. Maybe i should be putting all this on separate layers, but sure….

Anyway, these issues aside it’s great fun so far. Zero crashes, software freezes etc.

Keep you posted.

Until then, here’s what i’ve been doing. It’s a kinda detailed animatic (work in progress….) for a future attempt at animating the Acrobat image i did recently…

Blogger has compressed it , so it doesn’t show up too well at the moment, but when it’s actually inked in, it’ll be much more visible.

October 1, 2010#

Process Diary: Cowen

Starting off some of the process diary stuff. This is a work in progress of the leader of Ireland, Brian Cowen. I’ve done a quick one of him before, but wasn’t completely happy with the likeness, so i’m having another stab at it.

Getting the jowls right is more of a challenge than i’d thought possible, in particular getting the to hang properly off those mammoth lips, but at the same time kinda prop them up…

Well see how this develops over time. Hope to keep going with it, but have to juggle a couple of other jobs at the moment too. Maybe it’ll be ready for Halloween…

September 30, 2010#

Paddy’s Evening Out

A small picture book with no text by John S. Goodall, it has to be one of the first books that i ever owned. The hard cover is now separated from the pages at the spine from over use back in the day.

Paddy, a pig, goes on a date to a show with dancing girls, magicians, acrobats and a live orchestra – i suppose a kind of variety show… He and his partner are given balcony seats in a BOOTH up on one side the stage. While waving her fan, his partner looses it over the edge of the balcony, and in reaching to catch it, Paddy goes over the edge. The book is him running around trying to hide and not make an arse of him self in public – and failing.

The book has half page flaps that drive the story by allowing smaller incremental changes for each page, which i though was brilliant as a kid, and still do, as it turns out.

September 29, 2010#

Inspiration and Documentation

Been clearing out the office a bit in the hopes of child-proofing it somewhat. Maybe it’s just a fantasy, but the aim is to be able to do a little work periodically with the little ‘uns up here…. may only be able to check and send an email, or something less involved than actually painting, but i thought it’d be worth preparing the space.

In doing this all my old kids books and art reference books have been rediscovered, so i thought i’d periodically have a flick through some and write a post on why they survived every book cull over the past 34 years or so…

I’ve also been thinking about perhaps documenting my process a little more – trying to use the screen capture stuff – mostly for my own amusement, but it’s possible some other out there might get a kick out of it! Will probably go into how i’m using Painter as well, to keep track of the softwares many many many options. Like, i’ve just discovered Dirty Mode in the Artists Oils…. it’s a little check box – been sitting there for the past year and a half – did i ever click t to see what it did? No….

Feel free to let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see.

Stay tuned!