Illustration: Loretta

 

My nephew has an every growing number of dogs these days. I was at his farm for his wedding and sure enough, a new one! She was so cute! She was also really active and getting clear shots to work from was a little challenging. I think this has some life to it and movement. 

Animation: New ideas for my Nauti 2D character

 

I know a little more about designing a cartoon character and decided to redesign Nauti the character I experiments with 2D and hand drawn animation with a while back. This new character sheet could be helpful if I decide to use the more mainstream style of 2D using bones, puppet tools and computer assistant like MOHO which looks pretty enticing but I will need to somehow find about 500$ CAD or more. If I could get up to speed in Blender I could mix 2 and 3D as I have been doing here and there more efficiently and at no extra cost. Right now I am playing around with the idea of making the keyframes in Affinity Designer and hand drawing the inbetweens and see how that works. 

I was hoping Procreate Dreams would be further along in features to do this but I might need to stay with Toon Squid on the iPad. Krita has improved but not enough for what I need so far. Open Toons is s till a little frustrating to work with but might have the features I need. 

Below is the original design, it's very different in style. 

Illustration: Roy

 

My nephew's 4th dog! He bought a house with a lot of land so they have plenty of space to run around. Roy is a puppy and loves being outdoors with my nephew. Procreate and it took less time than I anticipated. 

Illustration: Lucy

 

This was less successful than the last doggie portrait for me, mostly because I have not met this pup for real yet. it is hard to get a likeness for something you have never really seen. At least for me. I am caught u with all my nephews dogs now! 

Illustration: Harley

 My nephew seems to be collecting dogs these days... this is his second of three! I did a portrait of the first so I will do them all. One more to go! 

portrait: Frankie pour Donna

My pal Donna just moved across country with her dog Frankie after spending a hellish last few years in Los Angelos. I have made portraits of her all her dogs since we met so the the tradition continues. 

Drawn with sketchbook pro on the iPad and refined a little with Sketchbook pro on desktop. 

Illustration: Ruby: pour richard

 

Ruby is my nephew's puppy. She is quite the handful and completely adorable. I started this in November but had not really done anything with it until this week when I had time and the motivation to get it done finally. Drawn in Sketchbook pro on the iPad and then details were checked on the desktop version. 

Illustration: Nomi (in 2007)

 

A friend's dog died recently and we exchanged some old photos,  one of which had him, his dog and my dog - Nomi in Provincetown. I had a better copy of the photo and sent it to my friend but immediately missed my dog who died in 2008 and I think of every day still. He was off to the side in the photo and partially obscured by my friend's arm and leg but his expressions as so wonderful I wanted to draw it. I didn't do enough drawings and photos of him ( never enough) partly because he was around before the digital photo era and taking photos was much more complicated and expensive. 

Drawn in Procreate over 10 days when I had time to focus on his little happy face. 

Illustration: Lucy Cape Cod

 

While I was out photographing the beached boat on Cape Cod, I ran into this older dog and snapped a few photos so I could draw her later. I guess it was later the last few days. Her name may not be Lucy was I sort of forgot the conversation I had with her owner. My focus was on the eyes so I put most of the detail in that area. Made in Procreate. 

Illustration: Nautilus septembre 21 2021

 

Krita gave me a nice surprise with the final update to version 5 coming out right at Christmas. I haven't been sleeping so I had more time than normal to try it out with a painting of my dog Nautilus. It is a different style than I am used to. My first idea was to block out the shapes and colours then go over them with brush strokes to detail the fur but I started tried some thicker strokes and I sort of liked the effect and went with it. I used black, white and dark blue/grey for the fur and did very little blending. Kind of a bold colour palette.  So one more done before the year ends.

petit ours (2e animation 2D)

My second attempt at 2D animation. I found some very helpful tutorials that moved me along with Open Toonz and I also looked into Adobe animate which I was fairly familiar with after doing tons of work in Flash back in the day... they are the same program, really. 

I wanted to go deeper and did, but I think I should try vector drawing over raster drawing next time. I did some animation in Apple's Motion app this time and also added the shows and smoke effect there. I played with adding motion blur to the characters but it looked too weird. The rally toy looked awesome but not the rest. I also tried a few tricks for the falling toy. I did a quick sketch animation by hand, then reproduced it in a 3D with some physics applied to see how it might look and need up using a combo of the 2. 

I kept getting disturbed while doing this one and had to redraw it 3 times at one point to get back into the feel of it again. The drawing tools in Open toonZ don't really help thought if I use it next time I'll try some of the new brushes they just added in a new update that also squashed some bugs I had last time out. 

These are just tests to see what I can do and what I have to learn and even if it's something I can get a good handle on. One thing I've noticed looking over the work of others on YouTube and TV is that the tools seem to be driving the styles of animation these days. What I mean that the current crop of animation software is focused less on drawing everything by hand and more geared towards making 2D puppets that sort of look like simple video game animations to me. For sure it's cheaper, faster and less of a headache to make things this way but It is a little disappointing as well. 

Nautilus @ 8 months

Been working on this on my iPad for a couple weeks. I started and restarted it a couple times and it's OK now, I think. I didn't want to use and shading tricks other than pencil and pen lines. Drawn in Sketchbook Pro. 

Nautilus first haircut at 5 months - illustration

This was not the funnest drawing. the subject kept finding ways to reach my Apple Pencil, no matter where it was and chew on it. this happened 4 times. the third time he seriously damaged the pen and I could use it but barely. the 4th time he just mangled it and I had to switch from the iPad and Procreate to the iMac and Sketchbook pro to finish it. 

The eyes and ears had to be redrawn a couple times to get something I liked and get an expression I thought looked natural. It is detailed but I sued a thicker pen size than normal and didn't use my typical technical pen setting but a more fluid pen nib. 

I thought this would be a nice compagnon piece to the the 4 month, pre-haircut portrait as he looks like a different dog now. 

Spot: drawing/dessin (Krita test)

Since we are all inside for the rest of our lives, I decided to test Krita, the free open source drawing program. I have had it for a while but never tried a real project on it and if  there ever was a time - this is it.

The subject is a toy from my childhood I managed to hold on to all these years. Spot. The dog toy I received because I couldn't have a real dog at the time. Even though he has been loved to death... there is almost no fur left on him, he still seems real enough to me. Oddly having him still has helped me get through the death of my first dog and more recently it's nice to see him on my desk now that my dog Watson has passed away as well.

Krita performed fairly well, a few bugs and a few weird conventions to get used to. It does animation as well and I might try that out too some day. The brushes are really good! I don't paint so much but the drawing and inking tools were better than Affinity Photo but not quite as good as Sketchbook Pro. I did take it into Affinity photo to add some noise  text because I was frankly too lazy to see if I could do it in Krita alone.

The software is one of the open source softwares that seems to be in high gear to get better these days. Here is a sample of the new brushes they are going to implement soon... pretty amazing.

Because this was a test and of a beloved toy, I put a ton of detail into the drawing. It was a challenge to try and show the areas the furs had been rubbed off from years of being held and petted. I am not sure I succeeded in that but the it wasn't because the app was lacking.

Dog and Weasel: Conquest from space! finished!

Another animation done, this time a much lighter one. I am fairly happy with it, it has a bunch of effects and is going in a direction I think could be fun for the future. I have another one of these planned and the voices recorded, so I hope to expand on this.

Dog and Weasel in production

My next little animated series is finally in production. I did a lot of pre-production work between other projects so I'm ahead on some of it. Thsi one will have quite a few challenges, the dog is one of the few times I have done a 4 legged creature and making him walk well will be something I have to learn. There is also some laser blasts going on. I did some tests and think I can make that work and look cool, but you never know until you try to put it in a real scene.

Mike Luce did the voice of the Jon Bellette, the weasel and also did the voice for a future "guest star" in the series, so I'm set up for at least 2 of these over the next few months! I am going a little more stylized/cartoon with this one.

Robot character for future project

This guy came together pretty quickly. He comes with a spaceship as well and will be featured in a feature project I am currently scripting out. If all goes well it will be another little series called "Dog & Weasel", both of whom I've recently made and shown here on the blog. This robot has some squash and stretch built in as does the spaceship so I am hoping for a more fluid style along than the "Filthy Sheep" shorts. The Robot has a ray gun coming out of his chest and his antenna is dynamic so it's fairly humorous moving about.

New 3D Character - dog

This dog I have been working on for a quite a while and finally got it to the stage it can be animated. It is loosely based on my dog Watson, so I might use that as it's name in a project. Rigging it was the big problem. the tongue was a nightmare to figure out, and the character object for quadrupeds in C4D is pretty wonky compared to the biped. As of today he also has a collar but I didn't feel like re-rendering the images to show it. Laziness I guess.

Monsieur Charlo - drawing on Ipad(2018) with Apple pencil

So I did this last night an hour using the Apple Pencil on my new iPad and the mobile version of Sketchbook. I did take into Affinity photo on my desktop to do some refining, but not much. I was surprised how easy it as to draw on the iPad with the Apple pencil. My brother has one so i knew it was a nice drawing tool but all I had done was test a few brushes on his iPad pro, this was full drawing 15 x 15 inches. Monsieur Charlo is my neighbour's new puppy, though he won't get much bigger than he is now (3 pounds). He likes to come over to my side of the deck and play with our Dog Watson, steal his food and chase him around. It's too cute for words.

Hutch - new drawing

I have not been inspired to draw much lately. It feels stale to me for some reason and unless I get some really interesting shots of acrobats this summer I might put that project to bed for awhile. I did draw to dogs from the neighbourhood this week that I have wanted to do for a while. Hutch, this one I think is the one I like more as a drawing. I put a tiny bit of colour in the small flap of extra tissue under his right eye as it's something that makes Hutch, Hutch.