TIMOTHY MERKS ART BLOG

Blaghhh!

2011-12-11T01:23:00.001+08:00

So this is how I'm feeling at the moment

hahaha mannnnn I've had a crazy hard week that is now going into the weekend. I'm still working on this videoclip which is taking longer than I would like.

(a quick colour test)

oh and this happend

My kitchen ceiling just gave way. My brother (that dude in the photo) and I were trying pretty hard to save it but it was a lost cause. I did manage to do a last minute dash to save a bowl of fruit but all my cereal (that everyone keeps telling me to put away) is pretty much written off. There's a thick layer of dust all through the house but we did manage to move all the ceiling pieces outside. We'll have to get someone in to fix it next week. Of course it being so close to christmas we shouldn't have a problem surely???

Sigh...

I did do some scribbly ipad paintings this week. They're ok, nothing that special but it was a nice waste of time to get my mind off things for a while

Speaking of some good time wasting I've been catching up on some comics. I really enjoyed the Marvel 'Fear Itself" crossover. A surprisingly great story that focused more on the characters and how they reacted to the disaster(s) than actually being about fighting the disaster. Some of the issues were even just the heads of the characters just talking about what happend, which I thought was pretty ballsy. I think one of the architects of this crossover was the guy behind Secret Wars and that is possibly my most favourite crossover (Doom rules ballz in that). Oh and the art in the 'Fear itself' series was really high across all the issues. I don't think there was an issue I didn't care for art wise. The few issues Chris Bachalo did were my highlights

I have been trying to read these new DC 52 comics but mannn they are not as fun. Some of the issues are ok in a pulpy comic sort of way but I don't know some of the writing is a bit iffy. The Green Arrow comic tries to stay relevant by adding in mentions to youtube and other pop culture sort of things but they do it in an awfully ham fisted way like they really don't get it. What was great about a couple of the Marvel comics was how they used twitter tweets in the story. It gave a feel of the public mood and it fit quite nicely into the comic narration box style format. I did find it funny instead of running for their lives they were tweeting what was going on although that's probably how it would play out. There were some things I liked in this new DC 52 like Greg Capallo's art on Batman. I used to love his work on Spawn when I was a kid. This work on Batman seems a lot cleaner/clearer and more focused. I also love the work on the controversial Catwomen comics. The dude drawing that draws great expressions it reminds me of Neal Adams stuff.

Ha that's enough comic nerding for now. I think it's time to call it a night and check what those crazy SAMCRO dudes are up to in Sons of Anarchy. Last time I saw them it wasn't looking good.

Loop de loop: Condoms

2011-12-04T12:44:00.001+08:00

I've been getting around to doing a quick post on my latest loopdeloop entry that I surprisingly won a shared runner up on. This loopdeloop theme was Condoms to coincide with world aids day.

You should definitely check out the winning entry by Daniel and Marta's one who also was a runner up. Oh and Dean's one of messed up madness haha

This be my film though

Here's my animation frames

I actually was using my cintiq as a light table for this one. I created a new folder and opened it up and expanded it so my screen was white. I have a couple light tables but they've got a bunch of stuff on them and I was feeling pretty lazy that day haha.

I can't say I was completely happy with how this one turned out as it wasn't exactly how it was in my head, which was a lowfi, interpretive dance, theatre play sort of like the one in The Big Lebowski. After the curtain closes there was going to be a shot of the actor up close super detailed smoking a cigarette. The stage hand comes up and asks the actor “are you ready to go again?” he replies “si”

Mannn that after effects created spotlight was terrible haha! It was done really late at night and I forgot to mask the stage lights so they're in shadows. Oh and that curtain opens with like 1 inbetween and I reused it for the close despite that they should be the complete opposite in how they move haha. I was so not into animating it at this point. There was also meant to be some large sperms on sticks that were meant to move up and down in the background when he was running and it would have made it clearer as to what was going on (I know a few people didn't get it)

Although when I put the music (made in garage band for the ipad) and sound effects together in it made me smile. I heard it go a big laugh so it's all good in the end.

I pretty much just allowed myself one day to get it done since I'm at the business end of trying to finish off this videoclip. Hopefully my next post will be about the clip

Break achieved!

2011-10-28T19:41:00.000+08:00

Woo Roseline and I finally had time to take a break.... actually no we didn't have time and now I'm working 3 times as hard to catch up... freelancing sucks.

Anywho I'm jumping the gun a bit. Before I left I hammered out this animation for loopdeloop in about 3 hours

Basically I had finished packing and I had a spare few hours and the deadline was that night so I came up with this short. The theme was 'spooky' and this is something that really bugs me(scares the crap out of me) when in a horror/suspense film a character walks backwards down a dark corridor.

"I KNOW SOMETHING IS GOING TO JUMP OUT JUST DO IT ALL READY!!"

I hand drew all the animation frames and background in separate layers on my scribble pad (10x15cm white pad). The wall was a google image search wall. I scanned and cleaned the drawings and set them up in photoshop and then brought them into toonboom animate. I also for the first time imported the images and vectorised them and I was very surprised by how clean toonboom handled that. Once I timed out the animation I added some after effects gloss to punch a little more mood into the animation. I then hit my 'Existence' sound folder for the sound track.

Next months loopdeloop theme is 'Condoms' to tie in with World Aids Day on December 1st. I'm wondering what to do with that one haha

The day after I made this loop Roseline and I were on a boat headed to the WA holiday island Rottnest. Named after these guys who inhabit the island which they thought to be rats ('Ratnest')

These bros aren't rats though. They are quokkas and they are so gentle and innocent. I've never met such a mellow wild animal before. They were very cool

Also what was cool was how beautiful the beaches were.

Our beaches in WA are really something special. It's only when I go away and visit say Hobart with it's dirt grey sand and ice waters or St Kilda in Melbourne with it's polluted smelly waters and beaches that I realise how lucky we are over here... although I should point out the first day we were there all the beaches were locked down due to a shark attack and we had shark hunting helicopters flying all over the island.. SO THERE'S THAT...haha

What was great was we hired bikes (as there are very few cars on the island) and rode around the whole island. I haven't been on a bike in years and boyyy it took some getting used to and awww man there were some hurt muscles that haven't been used in years. It was good to feel that pain again since the last few years I've been trapped trying to make this animation thing work. Roseline has done a better job at keeping her fitness up (she killed me on the bikes) and I only seem to get a good walk in every now and then. A lot of my friends do the gym thing but that isn't for me. I definitely have to work and keep up my fitness though. I've been having the worst kind of trouble with my back over the last few years and honestly once your back goes animation is the hardest thing in the world.

Well enough old man Merks gripes. While I was over there I found some time to get some drawings in. I posted a bunch of these on my twitter (facebook and g+ as well) via my xperia play smart phone which was a new fun experience. My younger self loves all this new technology. I'd love to travel back and show the super mario world game that awed me as a kid that I can now play on my portable phone I carry in my pocket. I did at one stage flirt with being a purist, antitech, prefer it all original person but seriously this stuff is amazing. Take a smart phone, how many minds, how much history, evolution and genius is behind the technology it floors me.

Enough with the words here's some of the pictures I drew

I wanted to do more studies of the environment but I was enjoying just being there. Roseline has done a whole bunch of great ones and a lot of the time I just loved watching her work

This was her late at night doing a water colour pass on a sketch she had done.

I wanted to loosen up my drawing arm and draw some full scenes. I only drew 2 pictures but I'm pretty pleased with them.

I drew that last mountain scene picture at the dome cafe on the last day we were there. 2 cups of coffee (you can see some coffee stains at the bottom) and a whole bunch of time to spend on it. I thought of it as a platform game and just started from the bottom left and worked up.

and one last scribble featuring the Bacon Bros

Well the rest was great and as soon as we returned home we had work phone calls and emails immediately to take care of. It's good to be a busy freelancer I guess but dang that Quokka life looks appealing.

Big Hair and Red Tie

2011-10-13T00:54:00.001+08:00

Whoa I haven't updated in awhile so here's a quick drawing I did tonight.

I've been really busy lately trying to do both animation on a short film and a video clip storyboard.

I also had a really bad neck sprain (or something) that put me out for a week and has made all my deadlines harder. I've haven't really recovered from it as my arm and neck still aches a bit which sucks a lot.

I really need a holiday and go get some decent exercise. I'm like an animation battery hen at the moment.

Oh another thing I'm doing is contributing cool stuff I find to the very fantastic Fruitless Pursuits blog. The blogs filled with funny and interesting nerd/art/culture stuff and it's updated quite frequently every day. So definitely check it out. You will enjoy wasting time there.

UPDATE: I totally forgot about these 2 quick photoshop paintings I did maybe last week (weeks and months are blurring together). They're not really for anything (like the top picture) but they're kinda cool

painting some craaazy hips haha

Zoo day 7: birds

2011-09-08T19:58:00.001+08:00

I spent the afternoon at Perth zoo drawing the birds that poop a lot with Roseline. We also checked on the Red Pandas and the Otters. Those guys are so cute

Just some lady

2011-09-08T02:05:00.001+08:00

Just a late night photoshop illustration. I really like the colours and the style. The head is probably too big though. I added a grain to get rid of the banding on the background gradient, but it gave a nice overall texture to the illustration.

Anyway I'm busy working on a few projects but I'm going to try and do a few more illustrations because it relaxes me.

Bacon Bros!

2011-08-26T12:32:00.004+08:00

They are the bros of Bacon, squats and the beach

Bacon Bros came about when I was out eating breakfast with Roseline.

They made me laugh so I made them my loopdeloop animation for this month. The loopdeloop theme was 'masks' and that cracked me up that they were these masked guys that eat bacon and do squats on the beach.

The animation was done once again with a toonboom photoshop combination. I used toonbooms textured brush for the linework to make it look like pencil work. This works pretty well (as an end result) but you sometimes have to go over a line to darken it and I also suffered losing real time playback (this also could have been due to the photoshop background and some effects that I had going on)

The first bacon bro looks a bit like the original (I just forced his proportions a bit) the second one I wanted to make a little bit stranger mostly because I didn't want to animate the same thing twice

I did choose the most conservative one out of the 3. Mostly because I liked the moustache.

The little bit of music was done once again using Garage band for the ipad but all the sound effects and voices were from my film 'Existence' sound library. Adrian Tolman (my go to sound guy) recorded a ridiculous amount of sound effects that I've been having fun misusing for all my stupid animations of late.

Well I hope you got your funk on and now want to eat bacon (there's vegetarian bacon I've been told), do some squats (there's vegetarian squats as well) and maybe even take a walk on the beach.

I wonder what I'll animate next month... and if it will also have nipples on the characters.

Zoo day 6: With a little colour

2011-08-14T23:37:00.001+08:00

Roseline and I went to the Zoo this afternoon. It was a nice day out as the rain stayed away.

I didn't draw all that much but I decided to add some quick splashes of photoshop colouring to make up for my lack of work.

YAHHHHH

2011-08-13T23:31:00.000+08:00

I was listening to a friends podcast and drew this just for the heck of it. Oh that raised pinky finger is inspired from how Scud: The disposable assassin holds his guns

Some 'for fun' illustrations

2011-08-12T00:25:00.000+08:00

Captain America and Lupin

Monster Dance Loop

2011-07-23T11:10:00.001+08:00

I made this yesterday for the website loopdeloop. Looopdeloop is a monthly challenge by word (this months word was 'monster') website to create an animation loop.

I made the silly tune and voice in Garageband for the iPad (I honestly just randomly pressed buttons). Then I drew the whole scene in photoshop with the exception of the squid girls hand and the dancing monster dude. The monster dude and the squid girl hand was animated in toonboom using a textured brush (looks quite nice). I added a few effects in toonboom like adding a tone to the monster and making his jelly body see through and glowing a little. I was able to add a little focal depth and parallax to the background that I might be over using but dam it looks good.

Once all the toonboom stuff was done I pulled it into after effects and pushed those lazers a bit and added a blur and a dark circle mask to the edges.

annnnnd tada! A day spent animating something stupid

animation in 48 hours?

2011-07-18T23:22:00.001+08:00

So last weekend was WAMBAM, a 48hour competition run by Wanimate to produce a short animated cartoon based on 3 words.

My team from last year was sick, busy and interstate. This was the film we made last year

So this year I decided to try and make a film by myself using toonboom.

I did have a story idea that Rose and I were kicking around for the operahouse Graphic competition and I thought what the hey, "2 birds one stone" and they even shared the same deadline. Both had theme words the Graphic comp had the words 'escape' and wambam had three words 'photograph, blue and love'.

So here's the film (it looks pretty great at 1080 over on youtube)

now here's how it all went down...

On friday night I was late to the event where the words were drawn (the event happened in Joondalup which is nearly an hour and a half drive from my house. As far north as our freeway goes). So I missed all the speeches and the organisation of groups. I could have joined a group which was an all female team but I kind of liked that they were an all female team and I wanted to see what they came up with. I was also thinking about this 'graphic comp' and since I was late I didn't want to try to take over another group and push them in that direction.

So I got my three words and I thought about the story Rose and I came up with and how the words could fit into it. The original idea was there were 2 soldiers in a 'terminator judgement day future'. One was a girl and one was a cat. They fight their way to a time machine and travel back into the past but they inhabit their past selves bodies. So the girl becomes herself as a baby (the baby was based on Roseline's niece 'Sophie') and the cat soldier as a devolved cat (based on a stray cat that we looked after in Hobart named 'Milky'). The idea is they still have the same memories just not the intelligence or the same motor controls as their future selves.

The graphic comp had a time limit of 30 seconds so the main story was they teleport back in time into their new bodies inside of a cot (which looks like a prison at first) but so does the nemesis that was chasing them who inhabits a teddy bear. They're trapped with the teddy-nemesis and they struggle to escape the cot (being the comedy).

Now since I had to work the three words into this story "Blue, photograph and love" it actually helped a lot in the shaping of the story. I'd use blue to stylise my colour pallet, photograph meant the girl became a war photographer (added some depth to her character) and love... This actually is what gave the idea heart. They're escaping a holocaust where everyone has been killed or is running for their lives so if the girl is transported back in time and she see a lost parent, that would be a pretty moving experience.

So on that friday I had got the ideas together and I started doing some scribble ideas of design, shots and backgrounds. here's a few

One good thing about working by myself and is that I didn't have to explain jokes like some of the other teams around me were doing (this was the ONLY positive thing) and could jump right into those designs. I really liked the cats gun, it was sort of a tetris block. I was able to use that city scribble as the final design.

So with all my basics done I decided to take the long trip home (yeah I'm going to go on and on about how far it is haha). When I got home I decided to give myself a head start and draw up my backgrounds in photoshop. I was working a bit too slow on these and only got 3 done.

As I was drawing them I thought what if I used toonboom to animate in. The computers at the event had the adobe suites so I could have used them and animated in flash but I thought this would give me a good chance to skill up and play a bit more with toonboom animate pro.

My computer case is a small black box that is quite portable (it's been great when I have been travelling across Australia working) my cintiq 21 is not. There were wacoms to use there so I thought just bring my computer case over plug in and BAM! I'm away and animating.....

and....

....for some reason I could not get toonboom (and just toonboom, photoshop and flash were ok) to recognise the wacom tablet, which meant no pen pressure. I wasted over an hour trying to reinstall the wacom drivers but I couldn't win. Eff it I've wasted too much time I have to start animating and of course my first shot got over worked (animators know what I'm talking about) and a lot of time was wasted. It was that satellite image of Perth exploding (my Akira and Perth tribute).

At this point it was evening and I jumped right into the next shot. This came together really well. Doing multiplane setups in toonboom animate pro is the best!! It looks hot and the focus effect blends the colours perfectly. The animation is a bit hard to see but I thought on a projector it would work really well. I did mean to add in flashing arrows above the characters but I forgot. I tried to render that scene but it looked like it was going to take awhile so I decided to head home earlier and continue working on scenes and try to make up for wasting time getting the wacom to work.

An hour and a half later I'm home (haha I can't let it go) and I'm digging under my table and reconnecting all the unplugged usb cords (I have no idea why there is so many), thankfully everything works fine. Toonboom likes my cintiq and pen pressure is back. At this point I decided that all the future scenes would be done in toonboom and the past scenes would be done in flash (how's that for a subtle opinion? haha) that meant I could do the toonboom stuff at home and then use the 'event computers' to do the last half of the story. I was able to finish one more shot (the landing behind the box and firing focus pull scene) and then decided to call it a night. I set my alarm for 8am the next day.

The next day, the final day for the competitions I was up working on the last shot that I would do in toonboom. It started out all right but then it fell apart. I couldn't get the timing or the movement to work right, I had somehow forgotten how to animate. It's a form of writers block, it's a bitch when it happens and you just have to power through it and rely on techniques. It does cost time though and time wasn't something I had. that shot took till about 2pm so I was pretty screwed at this point and I had to think about how I was going to wrap the story up with the minimal amount of animation.

The second part of the story I had some loose boards that Rose drew when we were planning to enter the graphic comp.

Rose had over the weekend cleaned up a few of the drawings so looking at what I had I decided to end the film as I did. It wasn't great but it was done

A few 11th hour computer problems (that's just a given) but animation is all done at 4:30pm and everything is in premiere with a very rushed sound mix... Now to get it out of premiere

I've used premiere enough to know all the work arounds and I don't hate on it as much as my friends do (with the exception of that cs one that had the flash file memory leak) but I just had all kinds of crazy problems with the exporting. It randomly changing the frame width and height being my main problem, but lots of messing around and all I ended up with was an HD mp4

It is now 5:45pm I'm not going to be able to have my film there in time for the 6pm WAMBAM deadline since Joondalup is....ok ok I'll let it go.

I wanted to at least make the screening and see what everyone else made (there were some great groups so I was pretty excited) so as I was leaving home I set the film uploading to youtube and drove over to Roseline's house to bring her along. It of course took too long to head out to Roseline's place (no luck today) and we quickly made our way off the Joondalup (sigh)... there was something nagging me...something I was meant to do. We reached Joondalup and there was roadworks and a detour. We then get lost into that black hole of a suburb.... DAM YOU JOONDALUP!

We finally work out where we are and reach the college that the event is at. This is one of those colleges that is environmentally conscious and doesn't waste electricity... IT WAS EFFIN DARK THERE!!! Rose and I walked around for awhile, but we were there very late and we were starting to see people look like they were leaving the screening so we gave up (also since Rose was recovering from a bad flu, I didn't want her getting too cold) and decided to go home.

Rose saw I was feeling a bit down so she said that we should go check out the latest Harry Potter movie. I thought that sounded like a good idea... I still couldn't shake the feeling I was forgetting something. We went to the Inaloo cinemas and grabbed something to eat at retro Bettys. While we were sitting there I remembered what I forgot. The dang Graphic competition! I tried with my new phone to work out how to submit my film (all I know what to do on my phone is play sims 3 and take photos and tweet them) but I was dammed if I could work it out. Well no big deal... after the movie I'll submit it at Roseline's place on her computer.

Harry Potter... that movie was crazy. The wizard war thing was mental. Giant spiders, stone statues come to life, giant ogre things, wizards doing the pew pew with their wands. I've always found it funny in Harry Potter everyone is amazed when they do magic or when they watch people who do magic. It never comes natural to anyone, it's always "Holy shit I can do magic!" "Whoa you totally did magic!". Also all the magic is pretty impractical, there's a scene at the end that sums up the entire Potter world (don't worry it's not a spoiler) with this guy trying to sweep up a giant amount of rubble with a normal broom. hah it will probably make more sense when you see the scene. It was enjoyable though and great to complete the Potter films.

After the movie we get back to Roseline's place and I decide to check the graphic comp andddddd I have missed the deadline. 11:58pm sydney time. DOHHHHHHH! So I killed myself all this weekend and missed both competitions.

hahaha goddamit oh well. I made something new and there's some ideas in there that Rose and I are thinking of developing. So not a complete loss but definitely not a win either. So no birds but something that looks like a stone.

Well that was my adventurous weekend of animation...
...
...
...
...and Joondalup.... we are not bros

IF: Stay

2011-07-12T23:41:00.001+08:00

This was a tiny scribble sitting on my desktop for over 2 weeks that I'm not sure why I didn't just bin (it was seriously just the cats head and hand) but I had to finish it.

It feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Which is hilarious considering how small and stupid the picture is haha

IF: Remedy

2011-07-08T17:27:00.000+08:00

I wouldn't drink that potion

Zoo day 5

2011-07-07T21:53:00.002+08:00

Roseline and I went to the zoo to do some drawings. So it is time for a much needed blog update

There were 9 spotted dog puppies running around today. Terribly cute and hard to work out how to draw. Most of my drawings look like rats haha

These Rhino's were a bit annoyed and were running around. I was struggling trying to work out how to draw them and capture the angry face and then they just dropped to the ground and went to sleep with their ass pointed at me... You win this round Rhino's!

Rose loves this little bird on the right. He's terribly cute and gets excited when people come and see him. Not many people go into the bird section since it's either being reworked or neglected. There's only 3 pretty awesome Macaws and a few other birds there so it looks a bit lonely for the little guy.

I decided to draw in the background for these two scribbles. The top one is a cheetah in the grass chewing on a steak. An amazing creature! The bottom one is another Macaw who comes right up to you. The colours are so bright and happy (that doesn't translate well using a felt tip pen)

Well sorry that this blog has been a bit neglected as I've been busy working and doing a webcomic over at http://merks-comics.blogspot.com/

The comic is mostly about the videogames I play but I change it up a bit every now and then.

I also have a lot of art on my newish facebook page. If you click the like button it should keep you up to date with my comics and any new stuff that I do.

Old Dogstar storyboard test

2011-06-19T12:48:00.000+08:00

I just found these. They were on an old msn blog that I had. On the first series of Dogstar(2005) I was offered an opportunity to try out to do boards and this was my submission. I was given a portion of the script, one background design, character designs and some blank storyboard paper.

I remember being so sick when I was doing this. My eyes were all puffy and I could barely see but there's a lot I like.

I think that last frame is the only one I might do differently (due to how everyone runs off and understanding the dogstar way of animating it would have been hard to do it that way).

I saw the real finished scene and my interpretation of what was written was completely different. It was a fun experience but it was probably best that I didn't get the job and worked as an animator as at that stage I still had so much to learn.

Drawing Day

2011-06-04T01:20:00.001+08:00

Today is international drawing day! I'll be posting pictures throughout the day

You can join in or follow here: http://www.drawingday.org

wooo SIMON! I forgot how much fun this guy is to draw.

I decided to challenge myself and draw something I hate(have trouble) drawing, "celebrities and women". I wont say who it is. Feel free to guess.

UWA life drawing

2011-05-23T23:30:00.001+08:00

Well Roseline was over and she made a compelling argument (we can get Jus burgers) that I should go to lifedrawing. Here's what I did from my warm up to my final drawing, I drew with a fat 6b pencil.

I finshed my last drawing early so I drew anrgy Fred Flinstone again. He cracks me up

Details:

University of Western Australia in the Hew Roberts Seminar Room (adjacent to the Hew Roberts Lecture Theatre) on the ALVA campus (Northwest corner of Stirling Hwy and Hampden Rd): $10 6-8:30 pm Monday. BYO materials, tables and chairs are available, as are basic supplies for purchase (it is still recommended that you bring your own).

Format for the sessions starts at short gestures, then moves up to two 10 minute poses, then three 30 minute poses.

http://lifedrawinginperth.wordpress.com/

TETSUOOOOOOOO!

2011-05-20T23:22:00.001+08:00

I've been drawing a lot of request pictures on my twitter account this week (see them here). So it was fun to do a request drawing for myself.

This was drawn all in photoshop and I quite like the expression. Because of that expression he hasn't been hit by the SOL yet. This is Tetsuo when he's making his way to the Olympic stadium

Flinstones

2011-05-17T21:06:00.000+08:00

I was challenged to draw the Flinstones. Now I don't remember much about the Flinstones except Fred was angry all the time and used to wail on Barney

Barney looks kinda on model, Fred is more like Captain Knuckles from the Misadventures of Flapjack haha. I love that cartoon

8 second Dash frames

2011-05-16T14:07:00.001+08:00

I liked my drawings on this. These are the 12 frames that make the run loop

Part of the design for Dash was adding in those O's to help with the movement. They help add the perspective and define the bend of the joints

8 second Dash

2011-05-15T15:06:00.002+08:00

I drew this

and thought, 'Hey I want to animate that!'

So...

8 second Dash from Timothy Merks on Vimeo.

Dash is a really fun character to push poses with. I actually find it easier to draw like this than to draw simply. I think it comes down to not thinking and letting my drawing take control. I like how his leg curls in the distance.

That spiral background is from the first Dash Dashing cartoon I made (you can see it here). How I made it is with my coloured pencils I shaded radial bands of colour and just did a few frames to create the loop. The image was then inverted in after effects and it turned out pretty nice. I didn't even have to adjust the colour.

There's a 4 colour gradient on Dash to make him match the background. In Toonboom (which I animated straight ahead in) the scarf was animated on a different layer. I pushed that layer back in z-space, tinted it and put a focus module on Dash so the scarf would blur.

Well this was just a bit of fun for the weekend.

My latest short and working in Toonboom

2011-05-08T18:04:00.000+08:00

I haven't really animated something of my own for ages. I've done some scribbly things using my iPad but nothing planned and executed. This short is part of an ongoing series that I want to do throughout this year but it is also part of my convoluted test film for a test film for a film.

Apart from the points listed, it is also to learn the software Toonboom. To understand how far I can push it, getting used to drawing and working fast in it and how to mix it with other programs. Also a big non software/technique point is to become a better filmmaker.

Oh one thing that I did before this film was to try and improve my drawing confidence. Surprisingly working in commercial animation I've found my drawing skills had dulled. I think that comes down to mostly working on symbol pushing flash shows where at most I'll draw a hand or an arm or adjust the eyebrows. Also staying on (very strict) model means I do the bare minimum most of the time and that doesn't push artistic growth. So to boost my skillzzz I invested my hard earned $1 into a scribble pad. I've tried to draw a little picture each day using no planning and work straight onto the pad with a felt pen. I really feel that this worked fantastically and I encourage everyone else if they want to improve their drawing skills the $1 investment is a good one. You can see my close to 100 drawings on my twitpic

Ok back to the above short. It has some obvious weaknesses (number 1 is it should be funnier) but I never regret a film or drawing that I've made. I figure at the time I made it that was the best that I could do. I learn from it and try to not make the same mistakes on the next ones. It was easier to learn from my earlier films as they would screen in festivals and you could sit amongst the crowd and listen to when you have them and when you lose them. Online films are harder to judge as a facebook like button doesn't tell you what was liked. From what little I could tell, things that worked were the scream, the expressions and the look. So that's something to build on for the next short.

Now I'm going to write a few things about working and using Toonboom Animate pro so that might be a bit boring to non animators or 'never going to use toonboom' animators (you were warned).

Drawing
Ok compared to flash, it's a dream to draw in. You can set the brush tapering (0.5 and 6 or 8) and the smoothing (I set this very low so low it doesnt really do anything) to pretty much emulate your natural drawing style and you can draw a hell of a lot of lines. So yeah, it's fun to draw and your lines don't look amateur when you use the brush tool.

At the start spend a lot of time setting and labeling your colours, probably the only chore. That said, once it is set it is quite powerful. It becomes really easy to tweek or even change the colours across the whole animation. My workflow with this is to do all the colours in photoshop then to eye drop and manually transfer the details into toonboom. I don't know if that is the best way though.

It also has one of my most favourite features the rotate canvas (you hold ctrl+ Alt, you can push shift x to reset the view). It's so hard to go back to not having this feature.

Every single line you draw is an object that you can click on and delete. this makes editing you lines really easy. It's good to flatten the lines once you're happy with it though as it saves memory.

When you draw you draw without anti-aliasing so it looks a bit rough. This probably allows the large amount of drawings. Also you also have to each drawing 4 layers to use. An ovelay layer (good for highlights) your line art layer, your colour art (I dont use this layer as it puts a weird lines around the colours... I should probably find the option to turn that off) and an underlay layer (where I do my colouring).

With the animation I just do the line animation first and once that is cool I do the colours. You can see with my lines I was able to add in some line details like shading hints. Something I can't do that in flash. Like at the moment I'm trying to do a loop animation in the same sort of style and I get that draw one line everything disappears thing and those little lines just morph into a blob ON MY SECOND FRAME!!!

I do my colouring under the line art in the underlay layer which is great because it means my lines dont have to be closed and can be quite rough. Also when you erase you don't affect the other layers (unless you turn that option on). When I was colouring I worked out that if I started with the little overlay things like highlights and shadows then (with the brush set to paint under) do the block colours. I think this is how old cels were painted. With this style I was able to add a white highlight as well as a shadow. I think it's a nice touch, better than using just gradients for shading.

It has some cool things with the shortcuts as well. Like to change to a tool you have to hold alt (ie alt + b switches to the brush) but if you just hold down the shortcut you can use it for a brief time till you let go of the short cut key (ie hold down 'i' for the eyedropper or' k' for the paint bucket for quick use while drawing). It also has some great options for selecting and fill bucket by drawing a lasso line over the areas you want to select or paint. That makes more sense when you use it, but dang it speeds things up. Oh and I had to dissable the 'z' shortcut key as that was doing timeline things (that I didnt want) as well as being the zoom shortcut (weirrrrd).

Each of your main layers (ie paleguy) is like a flash symbol and every new drawing is saved into it. You can cycle using '[' and ']' to go back and forward between the drawings. I didnt really use this much but it's pretty handy when doing lipsyncing.

Background and depth

My background (as I said in an earlier post) was done in photoshop.

Now if you want to do this and keep your layers (especially for doing camera move parallax stuff) each layer needs to be put into it's own folder. Those folders when they come into toonboom, become their own drawing layers. A cool thing is that all the layers in a folder when brought into toonboom become frames on the timeline. So if you wanted to add in an animated element, or a bunch of hands or mouths that's how you do it.

So yeah, a cool thing is the addition of z space. 'Depth'

Now once in toonboom you can bring up a side view and after pressing Alt-6 move each layer back to approximately the distance it would be from the main action without changing the scaling. A nice touch is it has a visual representation of each layer at the top that you can click on to select making it easier to chose the right layer.

Oh a cool thing was that I created a focus module and attached to the main action and depending on how far (on the z axis) the other layers were from the main action would affect how much they were in focus (blurred). Its a cute trick that could lend its self to some concepts.

You can also micro nudge layers back and forth on the z axis by clicking the layer and pressing Alt + Up arrow = go back in space Alt + down arrow = go closer to camera. This is great and fast for character interaction with props and other characters.

Exporting and After Effects
I've had problems exporting video out of toonboom like it crashes at 90% or something hair pulling like that. Doing frame sequences however are pretty good though. Since I was going to take this into after effects and I wanted some control over where the effects would be I wanted to export layers with alphas. Apparently any format with a 4 at the end means it has an alpha (4 meaning the amount of channels). The tga4 file didnt work but the old faithful png4 did. I really like png files, they are clean and they render fast in after effects. When I export out of After effects to go to premier I use Tga files as it seams to be the only stable file premier can handle

So this is a nice visual representation on what I did in after effects. I made it a lot warmer, changed the tree leaves. I had to create a specific mask to keep the glass looking like a glass and not lose that blueness. The grade was mostly about balance and tone. There was a version where there was a heat ripple on the scene. It looked great but didn't really suit the feel I was going for. I also moved the output view between my computer monitor and my cintiq to try and make sure it looked good on both screens (I should really properly calibrate these screens).

Bits and bobs
I did the sound mix in Audition and I used a lot of sounds that were recorded from my film 'Existence'. With the sound, it had to have a unique feel and it was great that my sound designer (Adrian Tolman) recorded all kinds of things for 'Existence' that I had a whole bunch of things to choose from. Real recorded sounds are 100 times better than sound cds and stuff you pull off the web. Oh I had a horror theme going when I first started the soundmix, but that was craaaazy. I did the voice acting because I was too lazy to get anyone else to do it. That scream was based on Raiden from Mortal Kombats flying headbutt yell (the most ridiculous yell in videogames haha)

I'm trying to get better at adding in effects into my animation, things like flares, speed lines and in this some water. My effects stuff moves a bit too quick so I need to add in more frames and think about exactly what is happening and do a simple pass first and then do a detail pass. I'd love to be a lot more stylised with my effects like this guy though.

I wrote in my notes 'varied frame rate'. If you're wondering it means working with different frame rates rather than doing everything on 1s or 2s. I think you can get away with this as long as the drawings are funny/over the top and sometimes it can add bit more weight to the movement. When working on some of these tv series I would find myself laughing at my blocking but not laughing at the finished animation. The extra frames were softening the impacts. I know a lot of my animators friends have a strongly different view to me on this and love their disney sleek but if I'm animating these films for myself I'm not going to kill myself drawing hundreds of frames to not find it funny anymore. Eff that haha

I took a lot of inspiration from the character styles, poses, expressions and animation style from the Lupin tv series that I've been watching. Those guys behind that are crazy and it's going to take a lot of hard work to get to their level.

Well that's the overall film breakdown. I'm going to try and get the storyboard done for the next film done soon but this month there's a whole bunch of work happening, which is good since I like to have money coming into my account sometimes.

iPad animated Dash

2011-04-25T20:55:00.001+08:00

Created between eating large meals and traveling long distance on my easter weekend

Background art

2011-04-10T22:50:00.000+08:00

I've been working on this on and off. It's a background for a film that is about 80% animated. I'm going to try and have the remaining 20% done by tomorrow night.

A bit of product placement in there but nothing new really for my films (there's always at least 2 or 3 references to previous films I'm made or am going to make). I've always liked adding in advertising, signs and graffiti into my backgrounds. I like how it give a splash of colour and texture and how it can break up a plain surface.

The imagery is mostly from my head I did mash the buildings designs together out of some Melbourne photos Rose and I took.

The composition is quite flat but that's the style I'm going for. Something that feels like a bunch of stage flats. I do use the background objects to flow the view to where I want it. You'll notice that fence is used to diffuse the building detail, the trees diffuse the detail a bit more. I have the leaves on a separate layer and I'm wondering if in after effects if I can add a shimmer or a slight move (this will be an experiment). I tried a few different things for a foreground elements but nothing seemed to fit.

There's a lighting grade that sits over this to pull all the colours together but that happens after the animation is added. This is a photoshop file that I was able to open in Toonboom Animate pro and keep all the layers separate. The background is made up of 7 layers and there's a tiny parallax at the start.

The animation itself is quite silly but it's the first of a series focusing on different acting styles and funny movement.

Oil painting artistic level up!

2011-04-05T20:17:00.000+08:00

Well Rose and I have been doing oil painting classes and it's been great! It was fun to learn how to paint with a real brush and use real paints and get dirty. I felt like a real artist walking around Fremantle with oil paint on my pants (real poser artist haha).

Ok here's the first painting I did, it was a follow what the teacher does and work from a photo sort to deal. When I started painting and following the instructions all my digital painting knowledge I was taught working at Ettamogah suddenly started making sense. I think the reason why I started understanding it more here was there was no undo shortcut. I think the undo option can make you more unsure of your work without it you just got to go with the flow.

Now the second painting I decided to try and jump in and paint up one of my characters. I chose my character Dash since he is so round and bubbly. I suffered a bit that my initial drawing could have been a bit better but I didn't really know that until I started filling the sketch in with the paints. It was interesting thinking of the whole shape and how the light would wrap around Dash. When I was doing this Roseline was painting up a still life of one of her blythe dolls and they have quite cartoony features so I was able to cheat and look over her shoulder and see what she was doing and then apply it to my painting.

So for our last painting I came up with an idea of us making a Cat and a Rabbit painting that we could hang in our house. Also to put a spin on it we would each do the initial sketch for the other person. So this painting is based on a Roseline drawing. I like his fuzzy fur and bright colours. Rose was really happy with what I painted, she said he feels like christmas (I felt that was a pretty high compliment)

Roseline's painting of my drawing looks fantastic as well. Check her blog to see if she has put it up. Roseline has been pretty busy putting together a red bubble store (http://www.redbubble.com/people/roseyland) and she is inspiring me to do something. So I'm adding that to my todo list

Nightmare

2011-04-03T09:46:00.000+08:00

I made this last night while I was waiting for a movie to download. In case you're wondering it took about 2 and a half hours to do, it was done in flash with a quick after effects pass. The blurry background is the exterior of Perth train station, although that has completely changed now.

It is an animation of one of my fears, 'the automated ticket gates'. I get super nervous every time I go through them that this might happen..... and it has happened. So that makes me more anxious.

I have another animation that I've been trying to finish but it depends if I can get all my work done this morning. It feels good to finish an animation, even if it is a silly one.

Super Week

2011-03-21T16:55:00.003+08:00

Ben Grimshaw threw down the super hero/villain challenge. Draw a childhood hero every day for a week. I'm super busy (haha pun) at the moment so we'll see how I go.

Here's my first picture, X-Men's 'Psylocke'

A little rushed but it turned out ok

My second, an X-Men villain 'Omega Red'

Sorry I haven't been keeping this updated here but here's day 3, Modesty Blaise

(I'm not a fan of that drawing)

Here's my day 4, Scud the disposable assassin battling Jeff

and finally my day 5 drawing, Wolverine and Cyber

Oh most of this went down over facebook. Roseline has done a few drawings and posted them on her blog (she absolutely schooled me with her Modesty Blaise)

I'll link here later if anyone posts there pictures on there blogs or whatever

Awww Notty

2011-03-11T00:37:00.000+08:00

Naughty Notty eats the cookies that Cat's sister brought from France

This is a picture for Roseline who will blame the eaten cookies on Notty her toy rabbit I'm sure.

Archangel speed(kinda) painting

2011-03-09T18:24:00.000+08:00

While I was waiting for some large files to move from my hard drive to my portable I did this picture in Photoshop of my favourite comic character as a kid Archangel!

This was one of the first comics I got, X- Factor issue 44. I think it was in a showbag

Archangel just looked so dam cool, those razor wings and that funky costume. The whole issue was amazing as well. The opening page is Cyclops about to be crushed by a giant robotic foot! The princess also bribes a guard with a whole heap of drugs so she can steal a baby. Seriously for the first X-whatever comic to read this one was a winner. I was done for after that.

I've been taking oil painting classes recently with Roseline and it has been quite interesting. I've been trying to apply certain photoshop painting techniques that I learnt to real painting (although ctrl z doesnt work). I really like using oils with how the colours mix and blend to the texture of the paint. I'm still very much the amateur but it's a great class and everyone is really nice and supportive.

If you haven't seen my blog in a while you'll notice that I've given it something of a makeover. It's a lot more brown and earthy... I dont know why. It is just what I felt like I guess. You'll also see there are tabs up there now with links to a page with my showreel and a page with a few of my storyboards. I'll update that a bit more when I have time, for now though there's a board for Porcelain and an animatic for Existence.

I've been using Twitter a lot and I post a heap of scribble doodles on there. You can see what I've drawn over on the left in the twitpic widget or just click on this link http://twitpic.com/photos/timmerks You can see the wip of my oil painting plus the crazy pictures I draw for Roseline aka @scratchrabbit

I know there's a reluctance to have a twitter account but once you get one and you start finding all the artists you like tweets (as they are called in the twitter business) of what projects they are working on, the little scribbles they do on napkins, links to cool videos and all other kinds of cool things it's super inspiring.

Also everything links in together quite seamlessly (blogs, youtube, facebook etc). So it's not about using all these different programs but using the right program for the right job and having them all linked in together.

So yeah get a twitter account

Astroboy Week

2011-02-25T18:30:00.006+08:00

I declare this week Astroboy week!

I will endeavour to add a new drawing of my childhood hero Astroboy to my blog every day this week.

Friday 25th February 2011

Well Astroboy week comes to a close. It's been a great inspiring week for drawing but also a sad week as an animal friend of Roseline and me 'Little B' flew away. So This last picture is dedicated to him. The funniest animal I have ever met.

Roseline has been doing a whole heap of blog posts that include videos and pictures that you must see. you can find them here: Little B "the funny Honeyeater"

A special big thanks to everyone who has drawn an Astroboy this week. It has been super inspiring and I love seeing everyones different take on Astroboy.

Woah! A couple of last minutes pictures turned up.

Astro - Bailey 2 by Richard Bailey

Astro - Patsarun by Air Patsarun

Astro - Grant by Steve Grant

I got this one a little late but I can't pass up having another butt gun illustration. haha

I've made a little thankyou animation for everyone that contributed to week

Well now I must go back to learning 3d and looking for work >:( (wish every week was Astroboy week hmmf!)

Thursday 24nd February 2011

and of course the best thing about this week, more Astroboy pictures by my friends

Astro - Anderson by Jamie Anderson

Astro - Buckley by Andrew Buckley

One more day left for Astroboy week, so the last day to send pictures to me. Thanks everyone who has sent pictures. You guys are the best!

Wednesday 23nd February 2011

Well Astroboy week is going great as there's even more pictures done by my friends

Astro - McKebery by Marcus Mckebery

Astro - Bailey by Richard Bailey

Astro - Burton 2: The Return Of Aaron Burton

Astro - Grimshaw by Ben Grimshaw

Lots of Astroboy love!

Tuesday 22nd February 2011

There's also some extra Astroboys for today thanks to my friends

Astro - Burton by Aaron Burton

"I'm too scared to draw his face... I can't draw anime! Will run for the hills before I draw his face off model!!!"

Astro - Clegg by Christien Clegg

haha I'm sure Astro had days like this

Astro - Davies by Aaron Davies

"It's my rendition of that inevitable moment in each episode when Astro would state "I'm running
out of energy." The personification of every battery operated childrens toy"

Astro - Stevens by Richard Stevens

(You're not getting the full effect of this image. Click the pic or Richards name and see Astro fly)

Astro boy week is going pretty great!

Monday 21st February 2011

Throwdown

2011-02-20T04:15:00.000+08:00

Dash Dashing can stand strong against all odds because he's got the backup of Rush Lovable, Black Mantis and Tank Macho

Come get some!

Working out the kinks

2011-02-19T00:45:00.002+08:00

Ok I made the video of this animation (under this post) loop so you can see it better.

The purpose of my blog is to capture my art growth so I try not to hide my lousy stuff. This runcycle wasn't a winner and has quite a few problems with it.

Here are the key frames and my analysis of them.

I think I could add in an extra drawing here to sell the antic. It's a weird move, as usually when you start running you begin by falling forward and let your legs catch up. I wanted the start in this to be like a slingshot

this is my favourite frame

This is the first loop frame.

That front arm moves a bit bad through this bit. The arms in this animation lack purpose I tried to have them sweep the air as an extra leg but it doesn't read

This frame feels weak

That front leg doesn't move back enough. This is a sticky frame on the animation

That front arm need to go back further.

This is the loop frame. You'll notice that the scarf is different. I want to treat the scarf as an effect to add after the main animation.

This animation was done as an experiment to do a run cycle with one foot always on the ground and I felt as though I learnt some things. I'm also getting use to both animating Dash and working in Toonboom. As far as a run cycle goes this isn't good enough but it is a good start and something to build on.

Dash Dashing animation run test

2011-02-18T17:44:00.003+08:00

based off a quote from Miyazaki, I challenged myself to make a run cycle where there is always a foot on the ground. The idea/theory is it gives more weight to the run.

I think I need to sell the leg push on the ground more. Have a cleaner head movement and stylise that scarf a lot more.

I do like the antic though

IF: Sweater

2011-02-16T20:19:00.002+08:00

Artificial Sweatener...

not a spelling mistake.

Crystallised sweat... tastey

Here's the original sketch.

here's the linework

The colouring was done in photoshop.

I quite like the character designs on this one. Oh I wont lie, I always mess up sweat and sweet.

Cat and Rabbit (A Tissue!): Sketches 01

2011-02-11T23:28:00.001+08:00

Here's some sketches for a book Roseline and I are making based on an old script that Rose wrote.

I'm trying to refine the drawing style and make it more 3d. Give the characters more volume and make them more I guess huggable. I think Rabbit is working out but Cat feels a little too controlled and not like a person yet. Oh that sour looking cat is another character called Milky. Rose has already written about him here

You can read a webcomic about Cat and Rabbit that I made a few years ago (and quite fond of) here

This book titled "A Tissue" will be drawn and layed out mostly by me with Roseline cleaning up (my work is pretty messy), adding details and finishing it with watercolours. You can see some of Roseline's water colours on her blog here

Rose will be doing the book between jobs painting charactered portraits of peoples pets which is her business. you can read more about that here

IF: Reverse

2011-02-09T23:40:00.000+08:00

Since my last 2 illustration friday drawings where not done in time (they exist under this post) I'm happy that this one was done relatively early

This was quite fun to draw. Pencil on paper with a quick photoshop colour. 'Lost in Space' wiggly arms crack me up.

IF: Surrendered

2011-02-08T23:11:00.000+08:00

Well I surrendered to do this on time and I surrendered on colouring this picture a few times but eventually I got it done and here it is.

Here's the pencil work as well

A big reason I was late getting this done was I've been playing with this add-on for twitter Twiflip. Where you can make flipbook animations. It's quite fun as there is a limited amount of lines you can draw.

These are my animations (I've only made 2)
http://www.twiflip.net/timmerks

My friend Ben Grimshaw made a VERY nice water splash (here)

Oh and check out this guys work (here)

Mannnnn that guy is good.

Oh in other news (for those who dont read my twitter) I've started learning oil painting. My grandfather was pretty good with oils (I'll try and find a picture he did). I've never really spent much time with paints but it is something I've always been talking about wanting to learn. Rose wants me to learn REAL painting so I can stop with all this digital crap! Haha I dont get good feedback from her about these pictures.

IF: Dust

2011-01-30T23:51:00.000+08:00

Update!

Here's the finished picture. I'm still having problems matching my cintiq to my other monitor (or the cintiq to everyone elses monitor) so this picture might seem a little lighter than intended.

Sometimes when I'm colouring I like to select a layer of colour and move the hue and saturation and try a different approach rather than my first choice from my colour pallet. The big robot was quite orange to begin with.

Those cords in his arm is stuff I really like doing and I love those colours. I'm a big fan of the animated film Akira and I really love the colour pallet they used. Rich purples, greens, reds, really bold and pulpy. Akira also gave me the love for drawing cities. My perfect job would be drawing cities all day (I may have said this all ready but I'm fishing for a job to draw cities). Oh that texture over the city worked super well! That was a mistake too haha!

I did mean to blend that photo sky a bit more but those clouds look fake like cotton balls and I thought that looked fun so I left it alone.

BAM! Illustration complete!

(old post)

I've have to pull out of getting this done by today. It is wayyy too hot and a warm cintiq is not effin helping.

There's more colours done than this but I figured I'll just have the urn coloured in. The urn contains the last human remains.

I'll finish this picture when I stop sweating

Scribbly scribble

2011-01-21T23:28:00.000+08:00

Here's some more scribbles. This first one I did yesterday but I delayed posting it since I posted the illustration Friday illustration instead.

I really like the old man in that drawing and that bird at the top. This was drawn at work and on the train going home.

This next one was drawn today. I've been wanting to draw some pirates for awhile so this was fun.

I like Spiderman at the top with his spider senses tingling. Derrrr Spiderman, they're Pirates

IF: CHICKEN

2011-01-20T23:44:00.000+08:00

Woo! Done just before the Friday

Originally I was going to draw a big dragon and a knight running away from it, but I've been quite busy this week so I just pulled a face in front of a mirror and drew a picture around it haha.

I'm actually pretty happy how this turned out. It was drawn traditional with felt pens and then coloured in photoshop.

and a few more scribbles

2011-01-19T21:43:00.001+08:00

Here's a scribble I did at work today of Roseline, Little B and me going on adventures (although I seem to be sleeping through them).

The other day before we saw "Tangled" we had a bunch of time to kill, (we did have to stand in line for 40 minutes though). After our Retro Betty burgers we did some scribbles in my sketchbook (those birds I posted yesterday) after those first few drawings I remembered the game going around twitter recently of drawing batman with your eyes closed (search #drawbatmanwithyoureyesclosed) so Rose and I did that. Because batman is quite boyish Rose changed it to draw Strawberry Short cake, I for the life of me could not remember what she looked like. A big hat, eyelashes and lips was all I remembered haha, when then tried Garfield. We laughed quite a lot doing this, I hope you can work out what is what haha

oh just so you know, Roseline's drawings are at the top.

Busy working but here's some scribbles

2011-01-19T00:38:00.000+08:00

Rose and I just got back from seeing Tangled again. This is the first film in a long time (Ponyo was the last film) that I've felt the need to go back and watch again, especially in expensive 3d (I'm poor I really cant afford to do this too much). This is probably the best 3d character animation I've ever scene..eff that it's real acting, such beautiful, funny acting (I love that horse).

While we were waiting for the movie we drew some crazy birds. We drew something else that made us laugh but I'll let Rose put that together.

I've also been busy working this week doing after effects stuff. I thought I'd get a lot more drawings in but I've been working nearly every minute of the day. A few drawings snuck in my notes though

Well hopefully I can fit in another illustration friday (maybe tomorrow)but for now enjoy a bird eating a pie and a whale playing videogames

Another post on work I shouldn't be doing

2011-01-16T22:08:00.000+08:00

Ok this is related to the last post. It may be a short animation and it most likely will be nonsense.

Here's the original sketch

What is this Tim?

2011-01-13T21:04:00.000+08:00

I really don't know, I mean who are these brats?

They don't look like they are up to any good. Also what is up with this 4wd, it's a pretty sick drawing for someone who hates drawing cars.

What am I up to? I should be doing 3d tutorials

IF: Deja-vu

2011-01-12T15:44:00.000+08:00

Inspired by the Rabbit Town Animator, I decided to do one of these Illustration Friday challenges. The topic was Deja-vu, a tough theme to start on!!!

I figure it's all in the expression. The colours are all about the parallel dimension you travel to when you have that deja-vu feeling (I learnt this from anime haha). I also really like just the plain pencil work.

Ok I better go back to my 3d tutorials.

Some old animation from the year 2000

2011-01-11T21:43:00.005+08:00

I was looking for some other embarrassing old work by me and I came across a folder titled "stupidassanimation" and that title is apt. Stupidity, violence and cheese.

This is my first go at embedding swf files into my blog. I think I'm succeeding. Sorry that this page wont work on your iPad... I doubt it will work in facebook either. This is good because it means less people will see my crap from 10 years ago. haha

(*updated* I switched the hosting to google sites, hopefully less white boxes)

(push the button)

(you need to right click these files and select play)

(despite it saying loading it may already be loaded, just right click and select play)

Here's one based on Doug TenNapel's "The Neverhood". He's drawing a pretty cool web comic at the moment you can read that here

and this is the most cringe worthy for me. It's sooo cheesy. This was a test for a world I was creating. I think I have a feature film for this world stored in one of my drawers. The whole world was inspired by Ted Mckeever, although my drawings are way too conservative. I really love Mckeevers work, I wish I had that brain to come up with the stuff he does. Ok enough delaying....

Well this is my punishment for not drawing anything new. haha

Swordsman

2011-01-09T20:27:00.000+08:00

Had myself an easy Sunday. I watched some silly movie about some guy in a jail cell who had a tunnel or something that he was able to get in and out of the jail to do things like blow up all the lawyers cars... that might have been the twist, I dunno. Anyway I drew this while I was watching it and I just finished colouring it in photoshop

I tried colouring it just using greys then adding colours to the greys but it made it look all washed out so I spent ages messing with adjustment layers and all kinds of things. Doing this brought back memories of my film 'Existence'(click the link to watch) Maybe this guy is a Dark Mountain.

Here's the original sketch

Oh and here's the sketches for the last few pictures I've put up.

Man that movie I watched was dumb. Turns out jail dude worked for the government as a tactician that's why he was so "smart". The end moral was also a bit questionable. The main lawyer dude realises he is no good at his job even though he has all the evidence at the end to put this guy away, he chooses to put the bomb the jail dude made under the jail dudes bed. Jail dude blows himself up and lawyer dude walks away from the explosion in slow motion. Then lawyer dude finally makes time for his daughter and sees her recital, because lawyer dude was a jerk to his family.

wooo Drawing!

2011-01-08T05:24:00.000+08:00

Drawing for the heck of it because I love doing it

I've got a whole heap of old dot matrix paper that loves 2b pencils. Really soft paper, great to draw on. The colours were done really quick in photoshop

Lots of Simons

2011-01-06T23:48:00.001+08:00

I've been working all day on a "Dash Dashing" run cycle that I hope to finish tomorrow. Taking a break from that I did a whole heap of Simon sketches that I coloured up fast in photoshop

I had to stop working on Simon due to me rethinking the story. I like my concept but I want to deliver it the best way possible and there are a few pieces that don't quite fit and there are a few pieces that are missing.

Anyway, with the 2011 priority shuffle (the dance of the year)Simon is my 'c' project. It needs to be done after everything else

swirly

2011-01-05T20:49:00.001+08:00

Another Dash illustration based on a loose pencil sketch.

and I finished another Dash. A closeup of his face

Dash with explosives

2011-01-04T19:12:00.002+08:00

I'm still getting used to drawing Dash again. Drawing the cheeks on that turtle last week gave me an idea on how the face works. More experiments are needed to be done.

Just so you know this was done straight in photoshop. Oh some good photoshop advice, dont do your inking on your sketch layer, it takes ages to clean up. Haha oh man that was dumb.

dash dashing warmups

2011-01-03T22:32:00.000+08:00

Just some warm up scribbles of Dash. I'm bouncing between doing stuff with Dash and trying to do a bit of 3d character animation this week. We'll see how that goes with all my 2011 new year gusto

Zoo day double feature (episodes 3 and 4)

2010-12-29T20:21:00.000+08:00

Well I'm overlapping my Zoo days and blog posts. So here's a double post!

These pictures are from Friday the 3rd of December and it was just Marcus, Rose (see here pics on her blog) and me. This was one of those days where I started off really well and then slowly started getting worse. I was also really tired that day from memory. At the end of the day we were in the Australian section which is possibly the best set up part of the Zoo. It's funny because that dam cultural cringe kicks in every time someone mentions the Australian section, "ohhh Australian stuff is boring" but it's actually really effin good. I was so tired at that point and I only drew the Tasmanian devil, a koala and a wallaby. I have to go back there again and just spend my day drawing those animals (I guess zoo day 5). Oh yeah the wallaby had a baby in its pouch, I've always wondered if you could stack these animals hopping mouse in a baby wallaby pouch which is in a wallaby pouch which is in a joey pouch which is in a kangaroo pouch. It would be like the clown car of the animal world!

I really liked my lions, that giraffe however... not so much

I really wanted to draw birds that day but when we got to the bird part there wasnt that many there (in the Australian section there were heaps but I was too tired by that point, Rose drew a bunch though). There were 2 Macaws but every time I drew them they looked evil.

Those Tasmanian devils are really funny. The zoo person threw in some fish blood into where they were to stimulate their senses. I could only put up with that smell for so long before I had to move on. That koala was funny to. It's just a ball of fur!

Ok these following pictures are todays pictures, Wednesday the 29th of December. Once again Marcus and Rose were there and we also had some special guests from Melbourne, the very talented Ann-Marie Denham and Adam Duncan. I was a little worried that it was going to be too hot today but it turned out to be ok, reasonable in the shade. I also have to get used to wearing flip-flops as I now have blisters on my feat.

I really like this drawing. I almost felt that I had completed what I wanted to do at the zoo after this first drawing and go home. haha

Lions again. I drew one a little wrong as I tried drawing both the profile and the 3/4 of the head (because the lion kept turning his head) on the same drawing. I then worked out if I did 2 drawings one profile one 3/4 I could just work on one and when he turns his head I could work on the other. Rose and I also saw the cheetah that just had it's head pooped up above the grass sleeping. Roseline drew some great ones of this (better than mine)

This turtle cracked me up, from their funny legs, to their cheeks, to their big eyes. I had to draw a cartoony one at the bottom

Aw man, these monkeys are so funny but they move so fast. You really have to be persistent and just wait them out and draw really fast. I really love how Roseline draws their eyes. It cracks me up, check out her blog later when she posts them up.

Well another zoo day complete!

A few stills from my christmas animation

2010-12-26T11:06:00.000+08:00

I really liked some of the designs I did for this, I also liked having fun with the noodle arms.

This guy was originally meant to be a writer for childrens television and I was going to have the cowboy give him a present box but when he opened the box he found the cowboys fist which then knocks him out. As a christmas animation I thought maybe that wasn't the best idea. In the last scene there was going to be a close up of the wanted sign saying something like "for crimes against children" but once again I lost the negative aspect out of the animation

I really love this horse. I've been drawing crappy horses (well Zebras) on my zoo trips so I was thinking about how I could avoid drawing a horse but he just couldn't be a cowboy if he wasn't on a horse. I also like the hole in the Cowboys hat, it's such a cartooning cliché that I had to put it in, that and the wilhelm scream.

This was my first mess around animation with my copy of toonboom so I'm still learning stuff. Making colours is a bit of a slow process but colouring in and changing colours is excellent. I'm also learning how to bring files across from photoshop into toonboom and it seems to handle the large images really well. I also need to learn the graphs as well, probably the reason why nothing has an ease on it. I used toonboom studio on the series 'Wakkaville' and that had an easy ease section where you could just type in a number, I cant find that option in animate. There's a few effects on this animation mostly glows and layer styles which work pretty good. I did originally create a 2 tone (highlight and shadow) on the characters but it didnt really suit the style I drew the characters with their heavy black (Koike/Mignola stlye) shadow.

Working with toonboom you use what is called the network. A spider web of lines that at the start is confusing but the more you use it, the more practical and linear it is. All you have to do is follow the lines and add things (glows/blurs etc) to the line paths, you also can attach (parent) objects together, so move one and you move the other exactly the same. It's actually a lot of fun to play with, you really work your problem solving brain.

This background was based on a lego Sheriff station. That one was bright pink, I thought about keeping the colours and making the film end with the colours from the Thai film "Tears of the black tiger". This is also from the worst camera move I have ever done! haha man it is terrible, you even see the holes in the background of areas I didn't paint. The animation from this scene and the one after I had to rush to finish before I went out for my christmas dinner. I really had fun doing the lipsyncing of the sheriff (even though premier unsynced everything and randomly removed frames) I really love this sheriff, he's like the worlds worst sheriff haha. There were a whole heap of different lines I recorded for the end "this is the true meaning of christmas" "I now believe in santa" but I chose the stupidest most confusing one "You will make a beautiful butterfly" haha.

I did grade and adjust the exported frame sequences (dont make movies out of toonboom, frame sequences are more reliable to render out) in after effects just to give it a bit more polish. After effects is probably my favourite piece of adobe software as it just adds that little bit extra to your film.

It's funny doing a write up for such a short rushed cartoon, but I really liked the design and using toonboom to make a quick animation was a good learning experience. It was a nice test film before I make 'Simon' oh and 'Simon' is a test film/series that I'm making before I make 'Dash dashing'. I'm trying a bit of forward planning with my animated films :P

Well I hope you all had a merry christmas

Merry Christmas

2010-12-25T17:03:00.000+08:00

Background for secret project

2010-12-22T20:51:00.000+08:00

It's super secret and I hope I finish it

24 hour comic is printed

2010-12-19T21:41:00.000+08:00

I made a video preview

Dang I flicked through that first part too quick, there's some great stuff there. Trust me the book is super great, it keeps distracting me and I keep re-reading it.

If you live in Perth, you can swing by Quality Comics on Hay St as they are selling them for $25. There will be a few more places to buy the comics soon and I'll let you know. You can read more details about the comic and buying the comic from Chris Markle here: http://24hcdperth.wordpress.com/

The other artists who drew 24 hour comics in this book are
Alex Manfrin, Calvin Lin, C. S. Markle, Jessica McLeod, Liam Lucas, Linda Foote, Lucas Travis, Luke Milton, Michael Lombardi, Paul Spencer, Robert ‘Grug’ Forest, Thomas Carter (2 comics!!)and Ushan Boyd

Those that tried the 24 hour challenge but didnt make it were given 4 pages to show off their stuff at the end. Those artists are:
Roseline Lau, Chris Gooch, Jane Chang, Justina Davis, Katie Zhang, Lisa Coffman, Ronnie Ryder and Yip (Sze-Yip) Ng

Printed comics are the best!

A get well drawing for CY

2010-12-18T22:39:00.000+08:00

A friend of mine was involved in an accident and a blog has been setup for the purposes to help put a smile on her face and inspire her to draw.

You can check out the blog here

http://picturesforcy.blogspot.com/

Woo Tron!

2010-12-18T17:07:00.001+08:00

I saw Tron on thursday and I really enjoyed it. Visually it was fantastic and the music by Daft Punk was top notch. The story was full of holes, there were some awkward lines and poses for the camera (it was a hit and miss affair) but the design heavy world and concept were strong enough to make it a super enjoyable movie (for me).

With my mind overflowing with Tron imagery I had to get a picture out of my head.

It was fun drawing this since it gave me a break from the Simon/Dash Dashing style of squished/compressed bodies and let me do super stretched. Her face doesn't look anything like the actress and more looks like 'The Major' from Ghost in the shell (I've been watching the 2nd gig series recently), so it's funny how another influence came into the drawing.

Their suits are really well designed in the movie, they all have subtle differences. I think what I like is that most of the film is in black and the little light strips on their suits are what give you their body shapes. That's pretty brave design and I dont think they could have made a tron movie without their being a tron movie already made.

Well now I've removed Tron from my head I can go back to making Simon

dino character design

2010-12-15T20:09:00.000+08:00

Here's my first go at one of the dinosaur designs. I goofed up a bit and gave him too many fingers as he should only have 3. The legs still aren't quite right (they are meant to be bending the other way..I'm not sure when I changed it). The weight and the volume is in where I like it and I like this arm style as it more fits in with the Simon design.

Simon iPad doodles

2010-12-13T15:50:00.000+08:00

Like the title says these are a couple of doodles I did on my ipad while travelling or watching tv

A friend of mine, Christien Clegg has entered a toonboom competition to win a copy of toonboom. You may remember that he was responsible for this awesome poster of Simon.

So if you could support him and get him into the top 10 to win his copy of toonboom. I'm sure he would be producing 100 great animations a year and you life will become better because of it.

vote his entry here http://contests.toonboom.com/

shenanigans

2010-12-13T11:21:00.000+08:00

Roseline and I just got back from our friend Clays wedding. Instead of giving everyone almonds they spent the money on a photo booth with costumes. It was a great idea and a lot of fun

mouths

2010-12-06T18:54:00.000+08:00

No new Simon stuff since I'm working on something I cant talk about. I can however share some mouth shapes I've made. Some of them I wont use but you never know it may fit.

ZOO day 2: The return to the ZOO

2010-11-30T13:13:00.000+08:00

Last Friday we (Roseline, Marcus, Andrew and Jesse) returned to the zoo for another drawing outing. We spent some time in the African Savannah section, moved on to the nocturnal exhibit (surprisingly you can see you pages pretty good in there), drew a few birds and then finished with the Oragnutans again. Not my best drawing day but it was a fun outing

We're going to be going to the zoo again this Friday. I'm hoping to draw more birds and hopefully find a bear

The Manly Drawing Challenge!

2010-11-29T21:58:00.003+08:00

Yes! the first Manly drawing

The picture was drawn by Air Patsarun. This man is so manly he doesn't just stink of man he is man stink!

WOO second picture! This time by Ben Grimshaw

So manly, he tames sharks and can smoke a cigar while in water. Super Manly!

Bam! two more entries this morning (26/11/2010) and these two are based off the Simon image.

The first one is by Andrew Buckley which is super cool

What's so cool about this is it was an image I've been meaning to draw for Simon, so now I dont have to draw it WOO (haha). I love the 'eye of sauron' eye at the top of the Dinosaur king and I love how the dinosaur drawings I've done are in the pile of dinosaurs that he's standing on.

Now this hilarious drawing is by Marta Tesoro

to quote Marta, "He bludgeons his enemies with a giant piece of meat and uses the blood as ketchup. The only time he takes a shower is in the tears of the fleet women he has left behind in his wake"

haha! Excellent, that is super manly! I love how he holds up the drumstick in a 'power of greyskull' way haha.

TIME FOR SOME MORE MANLINESS!! (27/11/2010)

This one brought to you from my old friend Robert Lee

to quote Rob "He is riding a space shark on a mission to PUNCH EVERYTHING IN THE FACE!!"

haha I love the idea of someone being hit by this guy, "WHATTHEHELLLWASTHAT!!"
and their lady friend would reply, "I...I don't know...but he was so.....MANLY" *swooooon*

TIME FOR SOME MORE MANLINESS!! (29/11/2010)

A new super manly man by Christien Clegg

How awesome is this! To quote Christien "Imagine if Chuck Norris and Tom Sellick somehow conceived a child. He is standing on the remains of his enemies and he also plays lead guitar in a metal band."

That mullet, the handler bar moustache, the super muscles, the electric guitar and the standing on a pile of bones...dang you cant get more manly than that

and now there's another manly man this time by Daniel Luke

Beer in one hand chainsaw in the other... super manly. The 'king gee' out fit and the mullet also adding some extra manly layers. Love it!

check out Daniels blog as there is a short animation where he has grown from.

I've been enjoying these pictures way too much so I did this quick drawing while I was waiting to see a movie.

I quickly coloured it in photoshop just for fun. I love how in this picture and the other manly picture I've drawn the arms so very wrong, but hey eff it. This is just for fun.

Here's the drawing challenge guide:

1. photoshop or whatever paint the pencil work I've done (you could even just copy and paste the head of simon onto..I dunno a horse to make it more manly)

2. Or just come up with your own super manly drawing, like what Air did.

When you are done, either put it on your blog and write in the comments that you've done it or email me the image at mrmerks AT hotmail.com

city background colours

2010-11-29T01:36:00.000+08:00

So I've been working on this on and off. I still need to add in a cue rope and tidy up the characters and work out what I'm going to do with the clouds

City background pencils

2010-11-24T22:14:00.000+08:00

Whoa this took ages, fun though. I always loved city drawings in comics like spiderman and films like Akira.

Well now I have to work out how I'm going to colour this. That drawing of everyone standing in a line needs to be composited in and that Simon poster as well.

Speaking of that Simon poster, that drawing challenge hasn't really worked at all haha. 0 entries, no one was man enough to take it on yet (although most people I know are swamped with work at the moment, so that's understandable). I'm going to give it until this coming monday before I call it officially dead.

Simon 'manly' poster

2010-11-21T23:24:00.000+08:00

I made a mock film poster for a re-imagined "Simon"

I tried to make it as manly as possible, since that makes me laugh. I probably could have pushed it even more, but I do like the super serious face.

Anyway here's the pencil sketch

I thought I might put this out there, but just for fun, if anyone wants to have a go of re-colouring or even re-imagining this poster of a manly man Simon, I'd love to see what you come up with. You can treat this as stupid or as serious as you want, since it is just for fun.

When you are done, you can either post it on your blog and hit me up with a link on the comments or email me the image at "mrmerks AT hotmail.com"

Looking forward to seeing if this works

Simon the meteorite

2010-11-21T01:29:00.001+08:00

The destroyer of dinosaurs!

waiting for the movie

2010-11-20T00:37:00.000+08:00

This is for the first shot of Simon. It will start in present time then go back in time to the dinosaur age.

This is just a crowd shot of people standing in line waiting for a movie. The drawings are blatantly stolen from a talented animator I worked with on 'Pixel Pinkie', Paul Newell.

Throughout the production he did these great caricatures of everyone on the production as well as some really funny comics. Roseline posted a few here

Some of these other people may be dinosaur food.

It was fun to try and draw in his style. It was something of a learning process as I tried to not directly copy but to understand the very clear simple shapes/structure, the rounded/soft line style and trying to add in my own specific personality and character into the drawings to make it feel natural.

This image will most likely be on screen for under a second and will be competing with the background and foreground elements. Heh, that's animation.

Simon fights the king

2010-11-14T19:31:00.000+08:00

This will not happen until the last episode, where Simon faces off against the king of Dinosaurs.

Z-Trip

2010-11-12T21:36:00.001+08:00

Took a trip to the perth zoo today with Roseline, Marcus, Andrew, Michael and Steve (that's right I'm linking to you Steve so you better upload those drawings haha) and we drew some of the animals.

I'm actually surprised at how much fun this was and it was a great beautiful day to do it as well.

I was glad we started with the reptiles as it gave me a good chance to gain some knowledge and ideas for 'Simon'. I had fun with the birds and loved the monkey's with their funny hairdos and expressions, my favourite were the orang-utans because they look like some laid back dudes

Simon's first promo image

2010-11-12T02:21:00.001+08:00

Here's a promo image for Simon that will go with my 24hour Robot comic, that I'm supplying last minute to the patient person who is putting it all together (sorry Chris).

It should be a pretty cool comic with everyone who took part in the events work all thrown together.

Interior Simons Home

2010-11-10T01:46:00.002+08:00

Ok here's a wip (work in progress) for Simon's home interior. This tree is actually quite big and the humans will be about as big as the pea sized smaller rocks. The tree is also damaged to fit a giant Dinosaur head

I'll update this as I go as well as the exterior shot in the post before this one. I'm actually having fun and remembering that making films is what I love to do (funny how easy it is to forget that)

*Update* 11th November

Ok here's the background in 2 states one where it's not broken and 2 where the dino has ripped open the tree.

I'm still working out ideas in how this film is going to be made and that is is halting me a bit on getting the animatic together

Simon's home WIP

2010-11-08T17:16:00.000+08:00

Ok here's my working progress of where Simon lives. The good thing about this background style is I can work straight with my pencils and not need to do inking (might try this for the character animation as well)and I'm working with a small amount of colours so colouring is quite fast

This is only the midground of the scene. There will be 4 more layers. One problem will be erasing out around the trees when I'm compositing. The multiply layers are too hard to work with when compositing especially if I need to do some depth of field effects

Simon

2010-11-07T22:45:00.000+08:00

Ok a lot of things have been happening but now this projects back in full swing and it will be my focus this month. The film will be made in parts and will be a narrated tale. I was calling this project "Jurassic foo" the last time but now it is called "Simon"

Here's the main character design of Simon for the first story

The colouring style will be scene specific but I'm going to move away from individual colours and just using minimal colours with attention to lights and darks.

I'm still playing around with the character drawing style, but my goal is to find a cross between Moebius, Tezuka and old mad magazine comics. The sketches at the moment are too restrained so I'm going to have to loosen up my drawing style

Ok this isn't all that much to look at for the moment but hopefully by the end of the week I'll have the whole first short deigned and an animatic completed.

You can view the other pictures by hitting the "simon" label or by clicking here

Robot Cover final?

2010-11-04T00:16:00.000+08:00

I'm pretty tired so I'm not sure, there might be some mistakes I need to fix but this is generally the final cover for my 24 hour comic.

I stole the layout idea from some Russian constructivist poster. I thought it would be fun to try and recreate my characters in plasticine (which it was). I wanted it to have an overall hand crafted feel to it. The down side is people may be disappointed the rest of the comic isn't in plasticine

Robot cover WIP

2010-11-04T00:04:00.001+08:00

Here's a photo for one of the parts for my cover of my 24 hour comic.

I'll post more about my cover as I do it.

update: 3rd of November

here's the second part. This is heaps of fun

update: 4th of november

and bam! here's the city. Clouds and all

My wonderful news

2010-10-29T12:29:00.000+08:00

So I've been holding onto this news for over a week now, it has to do with me and this girl called Roseline Lau

She has been a friend.

An inspiration and a motivation.

Caring and the sometimes sharing (haha).

My travelling companion to have adventures with,

and the best person to face troubles with.

We have seen a lot together and we have achieved a lot together.

So last week I proposed to my beautiful girlfriend of 6 years and she said "mmhmmm" and I said "sorry, what?" and she said "YES!!!".

So no longer is Roseline my girlfriend of 6 years, she is now my fiancée and I couldn't be happier

Masked Monster

2010-10-27T22:25:00.001+08:00

Here's my second monster who's not so cute and yes that is a decorated paper plate with the eyes cutout on his face. This is influenced by me playing the very fantastic Costume Quest game. Where the kids could turn their cardboard costume into a real version (eg a giant robot). It made me start thinking about those costumes we created as kids and how I could use it in my design. I suppose Naoki Urasawa's "20th century boys" did this pretty well.

monster children

2010-10-27T13:59:00.000+08:00

Ok here's that picture I've been working on finished. Well as far as I'm willing to go with it. Not overly happy with the end result but it was a fun exercise in spending time on an illustration

monsters

2010-10-23T17:21:00.001+08:00

I'm doing some images for Halloween. Here's a WIP

It doesn't give away much, only that I'm trying to get my silhouettes right before I start. The picture is quite cute in my sketch (not this this that's just the colour blocking) I'm going to try and not lose the image when I start cleaning up.

Ok here's an update. I worked from the photo first and sketched out what the monsters would be doing. With the digital inking I tried to add more fat to the monsters as I felt they were like cherubs.

Ok things I have left to do are:
finish colouring the other monsters
ground shadows
reflections
maybe raindrops

the birth of the ultimate monster

2010-10-10T15:43:00.000+08:00

This is just a little photoshop fun to kill some time. I imagine him being a pretty strange looking monster after he transforms

Dash, Dr Sketchy and a cowboy

2010-10-09T03:08:00.000+08:00

So last Wednesday Rose and I went to 'Dr Sketchy'. I've been meaning to go for ages but I kept piking at the last minute. Since I'm not working at the moment I used this as a good reason to get out of the house and do something productive.

I arrived at the city a little early and waited outside near the Perth art gallery. They've built an urban orchard of sorts there, it's quite nice. So while I was there waiting for Rose I drew this

Dash and his friends. There's even my first drawing of "Dog Dashing". He's going to go through some development as well as the other animals I haven't drawn yet (This is probably interesting to 3 people haha)

Anyway, after the 24 hour comic I've been trying to get back into drawing with pens. Just a felt and a brush pen. In a way I'm trying to trick myself into drawing confidently with bigger and less lines. With these first few 5 minute poses I was going ok

Then it got really scratchy. This one still feels ok but the others were bad

I put in some focus in with this drawing and tried to push the shapes more. I like this one

To break it up a bit, there were some games. The host (dressed like a mad scientist) was told by the audience to bite on a lamp that someone called a mushroom. I had fun with this drawing as I treated it as a throw away drawing.

That drawing did help as I started feeling little more comfortable

A funny thing about that night, I was drawing the model quite wide for some reason. My usual problem is I draw too long and stretched. Maybe it was because I was using an a4 sketchbook. I was quite happy with the faces this time around. That might have been from the practice drawings I did earlier in the week.

Well my first Dr Sketchy was a bit of fun. There was the problem of being the new guy and getting pulled up on stage to pose (clothes on thankfully) but I guess it's all part of making it a fun event.

This last picture I just finished drawing a few minutes ago. I was drawing it while watching Predators, I'd seen Jonah Hex earlier and was still thinking about how cool cowboys were.

They were even better than the icecream that I was craving

drawing girls

2010-10-05T02:05:00.005+08:00

My female characters are terrible and I need to get better. So this week I'm going to spend it drawing girls. I'll just keep updating this post as to not spread a whole heap of terrible all over my blog.

Here's my first picture (5th/october 2am). I drew this in photoshop and edited and edited it. What I couldn't is a lot of weight in the face. The cheeks felt round and there's real layers of sculpting in the face that didn't quite translate into this picture. Also once again the lips are terrible. I will crack how to draw lips by the end of this (I hope). I don't mind the hair though. That was fun to draw.

I'm not sure who this girl is. There was top model written in the background so maybe she had something to do with that show. Ok hopefully this is the worst drawing and everything else will look better. I'm going to mix it up a bit with styles, focusing on features and poses.

Ok here's a corrections layer, where I just traced off the original image. The nose (as Andrew pointed out in the comments) was too long and not as straight. The eyes sit better in the head, the shoulders are less manly and even though I traced the lips I still don't know how they work (grrr)

5th/october 3:38 pm

Based on Chris Bachalo drawings form 'The Witching Hour"

Instead of working from more photos I thought I might start studying how other comic/cartoon artists approach drawing women. My main focus at the moment is the face. I need to definitely work on poses and figures but one thing at the time.

My 2010 24 hour comic

2010-10-03T12:04:00.001+08:00

ROBOTS

(click to grow bigger)

and that's a comic done in 24 hours. Less actually, probably only shy of 20 hours.This was probably the first time I finished everything I wanted to do. I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out.

Well hopefully this works and I can finally get some sleep

*update* this was the initial seed by Roseline. By boxes I meant I had drawn borders on 27 blank pages procrastinating.

Influence Map

2010-10-01T23:14:00.002+08:00

Well there's a whole heap of artists doing these. It's just a collection of what influences you as an artist

This is only a small portion of my influences but definitely some of the important ones.

Richard Scary
When I think back to who inspired me as a kid, it has to be this guy. Even now looking at his stuff it still inspires me. I always loved the big pages of detail, but simple detail. I loved seeing what all the different animals were doing. Take this image for example, that x-ray view into the house, sooo good! The cats were my favourites.

Earthworm Jim, Doug Tennaple
This is what made me start drawing and love drawing. I used to read a lot of comics but this was what made me want to draw. It just looked so much fun to do. All of Doug's following works were just as good such as "The Neverhood" and "Gear". I may not subscribe to his world views, but I cannot deny this is the guy that started it all for me.

Akira
I dunno where to even begin with this film. To me it's just perfection that has never been topped for me. Craft at every level.

Chris Bachalo
Joe Mad may have been winning all the Wizard comic artists of the month, but Bachalo was where it was at. I have loved everything that this guy has drawn and for me, the Steampunk series was one of the best comics ever made. When that series was cancelled, I just stopped collecting comics for about 3 years. Nothing held my interest as much as that series. I find it hard to enjoy his work back at Marvel with him rarely doing a whole story arc. Still how he captures movement and action in a comic book, I dunno who compares.

Masaaki Yuasa, Cat Soup
I saw a few pictures of this film and I managed to track it down and was blown away by the imagination and the accessible surrealism. Since then I've tried to find everything that he has done and each new project I've heard he has been involved in just amazes me and makes me love animation. Here's a few things "Legend of the dog Warriors", "Mind Game", and "Kaiba"

Neon Genesis Evangelion
This series made me really think. Not only about the themes and characters being portrayed but also about how to make a movie. I know most of us laugh about how either the director went crazy or that they ran out of money at the end but what came out of that was something more satisfying and rewarding and like I said it made me think about it more.

Cowboy bebop
As soon as this series starts with the opening song "Tank" you know you're in for a hell of a ride. This series felt grownup, which was a breath of fresh air from all the other series and shows that were out there. It was both something new and something quite classic.

Wong Kar Wai
Back when I was studying film a friend was watching fallen angels on one a tiny little editing tv. Despite the tv being small the neon visuals attracted me like a moth to a ...well a neon light. "In the mood for Love" is probably my favourite film, but all of his films are pure magic. Fantastic characters, costumes, art direction and heart wrenching stories.

Casablanca
What I love about this film is how everything weaves so great together, how every character is important and could almost have a film of their own. The story and the setting, it's all just perfect. This to me is what I want to aim for as a film maker.

The Big Lebowski, Coen Brothers
Ok what really influences me are characters. I can watch terrible films (which isnt this) as long as there is one great character in it. This is probably the best collection of odd characters ever assembled in a film. The story is hilarious as well. All of the Coen Brothers films have great characters but this is probably my all time favourite.

Jim Mahfood
FUN DRAWING! There are other artist that fit this, Jamie Hewlett and Robert Valley and they should be on this map but I ran out of space. That Generation X underground comic he did made the characters seem fun and full of life, which was quite the achievement because these were Bachalo characters and to deliver more than Bachalo that's a heck of an achievement. One great thing about Mahfood was he really introduced music and pop culture in a friend giving you a mixtape sort of way. There's quite a bit of music that I was introduced to by this comic. One really important moment I had with a Mahfood comic was the comic he did in 9-11: Artists respond. In this comic he gave sense and reason to the events unfolding and I also found out his father was an Arab and that gave a voice to what was missing from the media. It's hard to explain that well but after reading that comic I felt less angry and more hopeful, that not everyone in the world is crazy.

90s Xmen comics
These are what I grew up reading, that and spiderman comics (expecially Romita Jr stuff. At this time there were many great artists drawing the comics with a real craft behind their work. There wasnt that much money in what they were doing and they all seemed to be doing it for the love. You had Joe Mad doing the Uncanny Xmen, Andy Kubert doing Xmen or Wolverine, Bachalo doing Generation X, Jeff Matsuda doing X-Factor and Adam Pollina doing X-force. With Joe Mad leading the pack (with fans) with his Japanese inspired style, the other artists started pushing their creative skills and trying new techniques. Looking back at the comics now, there was some great stuff going on then and it felt more creative than now which feels more writer driven than artist driven.

The Maxx
The art style just flaws me. It finds that nice balance of a cartoon stylised reality. It dealt with quite heavy and dark issues with a sympathy for the devil sort of way. The comic was really the perfect balancing act, it would make you laugh out loud when the Maxx talked out loud, it would scare you when characters were trapped and tortured and the visual would astound you when the dream world and the real world would cross. Sam Keith (the creator) put everything he had into this comic and it shows.

Scud: The Disposable Assassin
Mannnn when I first got a copy of this it blew my mind. Before Scud all I knew were superhero comics and Mad Magazine comics. This guy, Rob Schrab, knew what fun drawing was and he really took it to the next level. Super strong and funny poses, epic monster and villain designs and no holds bared, unforgiving violence pure pulp MAGIC! Still too this day there will always be some sort of scud reference and drawing in everything I do. After reading Scud who wouldn't hold a gun with their pinky finger extended. I assume that's how they teach the CIA to do it.

Nightmare before Christmas
The influence of this film was so strong that I had to fight not to be taken over by it. From the amazing visuals, characters and story to the technique of stop motion. All I wanted to do was make Nightmare before Christmas films for the rest of my life. The film is just so dam good!

Ninja Turtles
This is something I never want to go back and watch because I know its going to be awful. There's just a magic something about the whole concept. I swear the live action film I've memorised word for word even the music. All the turtles have strong individual personalities and individual fighting skills/styles. It's very clever yet dumb and funny as well.

Ok well that's my list with some really glaring omissions. I just ran out of space. Some of the missing ones are:
Chuck Jones
Jim Henson
Satatoshi Kon
Koji Morrimoto
Jamie Hewlett
Robert Valley
Peter Chung
Astroboy
Robotech
Star Blazers
Yoshitaka Amano
Akihiko Yoshida (Vagrant story)
Scott C
Graham Annable
Kate Beaton
Takeshi Koike
Hiroyuki Imaishi
Secret of Mana
Another World
Super Probotector

I could write even more but I should sleep for the 24 hour comic challenge tomorrow. I'm terrified of it but it should be a lot of fun.

You can find the template and make your own influence map here

Final Dash Dashing promo piece

2010-09-30T17:32:00.000+08:00

Well here's the last image I did for my application to tell and give some feeling on who the characters are. Originally I was going to do that with a character line up but I always feel they don't really sell your work

Still Rush bugs me. That is not a good drawing of her. Her face isn't pretty at all, her neck feels too long and overall it lacks charm. Ah well, at least everyone else looks great and the overall style I'm really happy with.

Down here is the character lineup made from all those earlier drawings. I'm pretty happy how well they all go together. They actually feel like friends which is nice.

This was included in the application of course. I like how the non costumed characters contrast to their superhero personas.

This weekend Roseline and I are participating in the 24hour comic challenge and it should be a lot of fun. you should be able to follow how that goes right here

http://24hcdperth.wordpress.com/

I'm looking forward to add to my comic tags over on there on the right

Tank Macho character design

2010-09-25T22:39:00.003+08:00

So here's the last character design of Tank Macho. Tank is loosely based off Guld Goa Bowman from Macross Plus. I always loved the idea of an alien living side by side without it ever being questioned.Tank and Bowman share the same skin and hair colour but motivation wise they are completely different. As Tank has no real motivation.

Tank is the strongest member of the group, the superman, but he really has no interest in being a superhero and would prefer just to bum around. He kind of reminds me a little of Mondo from generation x. His beach clothes are loosely based off Kazuma from Yakuza 3 and his hair curl is adapted from an early drawing that Christien (check his blog here)did of him

So you can see the development process from what it was to what it is. I have much love for Christien's drawings

Well that is the last main character. I might compose them all into a shot now

Rush Lovable design

2010-09-24T17:59:00.001+08:00

Here's Rush Loveable. A really difficult character to lock down. It's so easy to be lazy when designing girl characters and just doing stereotypical things. I've done something I didnt want to do and made Rush's super suit pink. Originally it was more green but it didnt really suit who Rush is. The more I tried other colours the more it didnt feel right so for now it is pink but it mayyyyy change again. The other design which might be a bit controversial is she is going to have short hair. There's 2 reasons for this, 1 is that her ability is to change costumes and take on their powers so I figure she'd be wearing a lot of wigs and 2 I wanted her to come across as European. It's not just the short hair but she'll wear a lot of scarfs, hats, sunglasses.... ok basically she's a lazy cliche of european women, so much so I based her on Jean Seberg in Breathless. haha but she was a great character, a very strong women (I swear everyone designing a female character has referenced breathless...so lazy).

The things I'm not entirely happy with are the super suit's colours, her mouth style and that beach costume pose could have been better. The things I like are the red knees and cheeks, the eyes are feeling right (they have to be right otherwise she'll look like a boy), the beach costume, the hair colour (seriously hair colour is so hard to get right) and hair style.

Tank Macho is next!

Black Mantis character design

2010-09-21T03:02:00.000+08:00

Here is the design for Black Mantis in "beach chillin" clothes and "super suit" (guess which is which)

When I'm designing I'm thinking about how the character is going to move, how I can use them in shots (how their silhouette works for example), their personality, little extras in their costumes that could be used for story points, ease to draw (cutting back detail where possible), their turn arounds (Mantis' head piece thing is a challenge), strength and weight and how they are going to match or complement the other characters. There's a few other things but those are some of the main ones.

This vampire one I did shows how I designed for a 48hr animation comp. It was designed that he would float (cuts animation down incredibly), simple to draw and that the model was loose (meaning it was ok to draw it quite differently depending on the shot). His face especially was designed for large expressions

With Dash Dashing a unique focus of my design is with the characters eyes. Each character will have their own eye style. This may more suit my own animation style which is pretty close (extreme close even) to camera that I'm putting a little more detail into the face. I am however trying to make sure that the characters aren't just detailed heads on stock bodies. Doing that life drawing has helped a lot to understand how the muscles and body parts work.

So yeah 2 more main character drawings to go. Oh one last tip when doing character design, flip your drawing constantly. You do this to combat your drawing lean and you'll end up with a more solid/grounded character

Dash and Mantis final

2010-09-17T01:38:00.000+08:00

So here is the final image. I decided to add in a spaceship to add a little bit more to the composition. It's both a little over worked and a little under worked in a lot of areas. This problem usually turns up when you don't know exactly what you are wanting to do with the image.

Just a mess around drawing

2010-09-14T23:52:00.000+08:00

Here's a quick drawing based on a facebook status update by a friend of mine Ben Grimshaw. I really tried to do this fast and fun. That said I spent ages trying to get Pooh looking right. It's the reason I copy and pasted piglet and just tweaked his expression.

Dash and Mantis WIP 2

2010-09-12T14:46:00.000+08:00

Ok so I'm still working away at this picture and as you can see I'm working with a background. There was obviously no real layout done so things might still need to move around. Once I'm a little bit happier with the layout I'll go into the detail more.

I had a reference location to work from. This is an inlet at Peacful bay. I wanted to make it a little bit more cartoony, this still feels a little too realistic. I might add in a few more things like what Dash is sitting on. What I really like about this, is it isn't a cliché beach scene. I think it helps to actually go to different places and explore rather than relying on reference books and google image search.

My Workstation

2010-09-09T19:24:00.015+08:00

Ok you may need to click to enlarge to see all the details but this is where I work these days since my contract on Dogstar series 2 has finished up.

I always found looking at other peoples working areas was interesting so that's why I photo-merged mine together. I wrote some notes over it to give a little more insight.

It's very clean and organised at the moment. Hopefully over the next few weeks it will look well used.

Dash without costume

2010-09-06T22:41:00.000+08:00

So here's my first go at Dash Dashing not in costume. I've got to do the other 3 characters as well. This is Dash's beach wear since they begin the story in Peaceful bay.

I'll have to design some other outfits (since they wont always be on the beach) plus their super suits have stages, an ultimate mode and a space mode.

The hardest thing though is I have to give them all real names as well.... naming characters is always a pain

Dash and Mantis WIP

2010-08-18T00:07:00.000+08:00

Just been working pretty hard so I haven't really got up to much. I decided to go back to these guys and get this "Dash Dashing" ball rolling again.

Just a sketch so far but I'll start adding to it throughout the week. I've been looking in to adding more 3dness to my drawings, trying to add a bit more volume and shape. I want to make the characters feel like they're solid and have real weight. Hmmm this sketch was based off a loose drawing I did in my notepad at work. The notepad sketch has a bit more character... I might have to rework this drawing a bit more and loosen it up a bit.

Well an old co-collaborator friend of mine, Mr Dean 'Mendoza' Swanton, has finally just started a blog. He even threw up some great Dash Dashing pics he did. You can check his blog right here

bed hair

2010-08-12T02:01:00.001+08:00

I woke up the other day with mad scientist bed hair. I took a photo of myself to send to Roseline but it was all blurry. So I thought I'd do another painting experiment.

I don't feel I captured the expression that well but this is my first go at doing a digital portrait and for my first go I'm pretty happy with it. Nice and crazy.

Roseline and I had a 'discussion' about what I wrote in my last post and I thought I should expand on that. If you're working on a style based show then you got to keep within the design guidelines, I think when you start out you should test the fences a bit and push the design but once you're in the thick of production you shouldn't make it hard on the people above you. It will be a waste of everyone's time if you have to redo stuff. It can be hard and not that clear to work out what those boundaries are. I usually try to work out where the show is drawing inspiration from and have some of those artbooks around as a guide but even that isn't always a great idea. At the end of the day you're part of the team and you don't want to be a stubborn jerk, as that wont inspire anything great and will just cause friction. Best to be positive and always put in that little bit extra effort.

Ok enough of that stuff. I'm trying to get my motivation up to start something a little bigger. I still need to produce one more film by the end of the year.

Fancy Adventure EPIC BATTLE!!!

2010-08-08T23:05:00.001+08:00

Well here's a fan picture of my friends comic "The Fancy Adventures of Jack Cannon"

The idea behind the picture is they are fighting each other for page time in Jamie's comic.

A quick background on Jamie was we worked together on the series "Pixel Pinkie" as character animators. Both of us really tried to push as much character as we could into our flash puppets. Pushing the models expressions and poses to the maximum of what we were allowed to do (mind you there was a hidden folder bigger than the entire series of what we weren't allowed to do). We did this partly to crack each other up but mostly because we believed that this was important to do for the show.

Working in animation is really hard with how technical and conservative it has become. It's less about the purpose, reason and feeling behind why something/someone moves and more doing it as simple and as cleanly as possible to make sure nothing is noticeable/that stands out, basically keeping it as normal and techincal as possible. I could write a whole book on my problems with this stuff but I'd like to keep working in animation.

Oh I shouldn't undersell the need to try and crack up the person next to you, a lot of people frown on this as it being an ego thing or not being professional but character animation is performance, you're performing for reactions. From my experience if you make people laugh it improves to moral of the entire studio and makes people actually like working in animation and try to make you laugh with their shots. I'm sure this leads to producing something greater.

Anyway it was a great experience working with Jamie, and my character animation imporved a hell of a lot with the feedback and ideas we'd throw back and forth at each other. You should check out Jamie's comic, he's been updating it for ages now. Every Monday and Friday without fail for the last 2(?) years. Great characters and quite the interesting story.

check the comic here