Transit Doodles!

Lately I've been trying to loosen up my drawings, thus making them more fun to do! Ever since attending a drawing workshop with Louis Gonzales I feel like I've been pushing my drawings into a new, very fun direction. I'm trying not to get bogged down in what's actually in front of me. Instead, I'm trying to capture a feeling. 

~Chris

Ink And Watercolour Tones

Experimenting at home with my Pentel brush pen and a water brush, adding dimension to some sketches that I did while riding in transit.

~Chris

Sketching from the Television

I managed a page of heads while watching The Midsomer Murders (great show!). Green Col-Erase on paper.

~Chris

Just For Laughs: Gags

Don't Remember When I Drew These

Drawing The Festival

Some drawings I did while attending the presentations at SPARK Animation '09!

~Chris

GETTING CAUGHT UP

I've got lots of new drawings in my sketchbook to post so I'm slowly going to get caught up.

~Chris

OBSERVATION TIME: SEA WALL

Who recognizes this spot?

~Chris

Dog Walk All Finished

So that Dog walk is more or less finished. There are still some things that could be tightened up but since it was my project for last week I had to upload it in the state it was in. You can check it out here.

The camera angle is the reverse of what I had in the blocking but it shouldn't make a whole lot of difference.

~Chris

How my brain works for animation

I'm working on a canine walk cycle right now and a quadruped is something that I haven't animated much of for a while now. There was a dog character in each of the last two shows that I worked on but the shots that I got with the little fuzzballs were few and far between.

I've always been really attracted to quadruped locomotion because it just looks so cool. The perfect balance of movement in the front and hind quarters is so smooth and elegant. More so with some animals, less so with others.

Anyway, I cracked open my Muybridge books to study the phases of the walk and I noticed that if you can understand where the strides come into play and how the energy radiates down the spine from the hips to the head, it gets you a long way towards animating a successful walk. I've seen people animate these things in a really automated, computationally heavy way but that really doesn't work for me. I like to figure out what's happening on each extreme and really push and explore the possibilities in the pose before I start getting into the Graph Editor because it's a completely different part of the brain that goes into that initial building of the performance.

The Graph Editor, awesome though it may be, requires a large amount of resources from your Left Brain and if my Left Brain is working hard my Right Brain tends to not add much to the situation. That's why I have to work in a very systematic way. First this, then this. Okay, now that this is done, move on to this, and so on.

Anyway, I'm just rambling now. Check out the playblast of my blocking for the canine walk and draw your own conclusions.



I'll just finish by saying that this is the work flow that I follow about 99.9% of the time:

Heavy, in-depth blocking of Keys, Extremes, Breakdowns, and sometimes more detailed bits depending on the scenario. Then I switch gears to work in the Graph Editor, which is a pretty painless process due to the extensive blocking. Then I tackle the face with a similar approach and... BAM!... done.

I'll post more videos of this walk cycle as it becomes more complete. It's my project for this week so hopefully you should be able to see it fully animated by Friday or Saturday... schedules permitting.

~Chris

Japan #1

Well, I'm in Japan now.

Two aeroplanes and 15 hours of travel time puts me on the other side of the planet. It's funny that just two days ago I spent almost the same amount of time on a bus and managed to cross one province. I guess you had to be there.

In the Vancouver airport I sat and watched all kinds of people coming and going, I bought a new sketchbook for the trip (which is made out of recycled paper and the cover simply has a blank, brownish canvas) and found a great opportunity to draw an image for the cover. There was this one slightly awkward looking girl that walked past and the image of her kind of lasted. I drew her several minutes after she passed, so the sketch is drawing upon my memory for the most part. Pun absolutely intended.

I had quite a lot of time to kill so I just kept my eyes open for more sketching opportunities but I didn't really find anything until I sat down to wait for my boarding call. Looking out across the runway I saw a nice opportunity to practice a Landscape.

Now that I'm actually in Japan I'll be keeping my eyes open and looking for opportunities to commit some images to paper. Failing that, I'll see what I can do in the realm of photography. One more day in Kawagoe, my Fiance's city of birth, and then we head to Okinawa for four days.

Stay tuned!