25 Year later - progress

Almost done with the set pieces now, two more left. On top you see the Montreal interior shot which is almost 100% my actual home studio space. Pretty easy to make since for ideas I just had to look up from my desk. Even the bike is in the same place my bike is in right now.

Below is the Montreal exterior which is about 60% my street and home exterior. So much so my spouse immediately asked.. "Hey is that our house?".  This shot had a problem of being well over 3 minutes a frame to render, even without the character or any animation in it. I decided to use techniques I normally reserve for inserting animation into a live action video. I render the scene with none of the things that will animated in it as a single his res image and use that on a background object. I delete everything except objects that will need to have shadows or reflections on them, in this case it was just the street and project the same background image onto that. This eliminates all the rendering that needs to be done for 95% of the shot as pretty much only an image is being rendered with a few other items. It's down to 3 seconds an image now. The tree has moving leaves and to save even more render time I might render that out separately and add it in After effects later.

I added another step, something I really wanted to try for a LONG time. I painted in some elements like flowers and a flower pot. Since the shot has no movement this allows even more detail without have to render even more complex objects . I think it works and I'm encouraged to keep doing things in this direction.

Drawing: another acrobat

So I finally did a colour drawing using the new Huion tablet and Affinity Photo. The last couple of colour drawings I have done were underwhelming and I have been questioning  whether I still had it in me to make stuff that comes out the way I imagined. So I went back to my old techniques and spent much more time sketching things out and experimenting with problem areas ahead of time and drew something I am happy with in the end. I draw in greyscale first, using the dodge and burn tools to create shadows and highlights, then colourize the section and add any needed additional colour or details on top. Getting sharp defined areas is hard to do this way and takes time, something I think I wasn't putting enough of in some previous efforts. I make a blue pencil sketch of the entire composition first, which is a throwback to when we would draw with blue pencil on paper and then ink it later as the blue was not visible on copy machines at the time.

I think I got the hair almost right with this one. Past attempts have not been very good. or at least not what I wanted them to be. Part of the improvement is the new tablet and improved pressure sensibility in Affinity photo, I think. I was surprised how close it was to sketchbook pro in terms the natural stroke when drawing.

Icon project: Babylon 5

Yes. another. Babylon 5 is one one of my favourite science fiction shows. I re-watched the entire thing...  all 5 years, the movies, the spin-offs and the 3 short films that came out more recently on iTunes. The original show and movies really hold hold up which is amazing considering I think it was the first show to use 3D graphics for the effects work. All done on an Amiga originally, my old favourite computer system. The Vorlon was a challenge as I haven't done robes in vector before that I can remember.

I tried some different techniques and learned more stuff about creating in Affinity Designer. I also cheated when making the station itself. It is a really detailed object and I wanted to see how rendering the 3D model I have of it lying about in a folder would look rendered as a 2D image then traced to vectors. I did not want to go overboard with the details and I was able to tweak it in designer with some additional shading. The symbol on top is the Minbari counsel symbol... I think. The background  Shadow ships are super simple, I loved them in the show.

Doctor Who Icons illustration

I was at it again, this time I added to my "icons" series which started with landmarks of places I had visited and morphed into TV and movies that I like in the same style. This one was more complicated in some ways as the older ones were a flat look and this one adds shading and things are turned angles giving it a much more 3 dimensional look.  I might have put a little too much detail fro the final product but I drew each element separately so maybe I'll use them somewhere else later on. I have done this sort of thing for Star Trek, Star Wars and a few other things, not sure why Dr. Who took so long to get on the list!

I did the work with Affinity Designer and it's something I might not have tried in Illustrator even though Illustrator is more than capable to do this, it's just not fun to work in. I was surprised how quickly it went. Vector drawing has been mostly for logos and some simpler drawing work for me, even though I do like the clean look of it. maybe I'll do more now that this went well enough.

Welcome to Night Vale quote project

This quote hit me right and I thought it would be interesting to make a poster of sorts out of it. Since much of my design is dictated by my client's look and feel I don't often get to try new things. I did try and keep it in keeping with the Welcome to Night vale flavour and spent a little time making sure the logo was close enough.

drawing: barn in Vermont

Still working out the Huion tablet pluses and minuses. Overall it is a great tool and I think this is one of my best drawings in awhile. There is a bug where I have to adjust the parameters at the start of the day of the pen gets stuck in the upper left corner of the screen, which is annoying. Still have to do some colour work and see how that goes.

This was the family barn of a really nice guy, Wade, who gave me a ride to my destination when my Garmin GPS took me hours off course on a really hot day. I took a bunch of reference photos and never got around to doing a drawing until now. I wanted to do the clouds with line work as well, but that looked terrible so back to the old grey scale techniques. To get the natural look I wanted, I went trough my extensive collection of cloud photos and made a little composite to get something that worked with the ink drawing.

HUION H610 Pro V2 Drawing Tablet

I got a great deal at Amazon.ca and replaced my broken drawing tablets with this one for 80$. Considering my Wacom was about 500$ and had a fraction of the sensitivity and about the same active drawing area, it seemed like a deal too good to pass up. The pen is battery less, something I look for in all things, and it came with extra nibs not just in the pen holder, but also in little bag as well.

*The photo above is the model I bought, I screwed up on the picture search and am too lazy to change it now. It's close enough. 

How does it hold up next to my former tablets? So far, really well. I did a quick (for me - 5 hours) drawing a Canadian Goose I saw on my bike ride last week as a test of how it works with pen work. I am very happy with the results. The only things I am not loving are that the surface of the tablet is a little slippery and the pen nib seems off, but these are likely just getting use to a new device problems.

New project: 25 Years Later

I have been working on this project in various forms for quite a few years now. It was going to be a documentary, then a live action fictional film and now - an animation. The idea to do it in animation was not mine but from Michael Z Keamy who has been encouraging me to animate something  personal instead of adapting a story or making something funny and cartoonish.

Summary: A man takes on a multi-day ride from Montreal, 25 years after he took care of a sick friend to Boston, where the friend and he lived at the time.

Simple story and I have been able to limit the characters on screen to two making animating it more manageable. The actual script is only a page long but here's the rub... there is something like 15 locations as the cyclist travels to Boston and reminisces about the past. I have made about ½ of those locations so far, but have not started the character design yet. That will be another challenge as they have to age and one needs to get very sick but still be recognizable. Making and rigging characters is my weakest skillset and these need to be better than what I've done before. They won't be life-like depictions, I don't feel that's even a goal when making animations, but they need to feel like real people.

To be honest, this is already one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do in film. The story is based on my personal experiences, mostly with one person but not exclusively as I actually tried to help out a few people who were sick in the 90s when I lived in Boston. So while the 2 characters might be, in effect, much like me and my friend, they are more representatives of people like us mixed with others. This was important for the story to make it flow right but also it's just really emotionally hard to go back to this period and literally recreate it in such detail. Not being "about me" gives it some distance. I had planned to actually do this ride for real 15 yers ago, then 10 years ago but it didn't pan out for various reasons out of my control. Just affording places to stay during the trip is an issue and getting me and the bike back to Montreal is logistically difficult. I am planning to get there this summer, the actual 25th anniversary which gives this short film extra urgency and makes it a bit more distressing to produce. Art is exposing pain sometimes and it should be cathartic. At least I hope it is in the end.

Not sure what I'll do with this animation when it's done, and I wish I had a budget to help me dedicate time exclusively to it.

Exterior shots:

(click to see more detail)

Interior shots:

(click to see more detail)

dessin/drawing : oiseau - Zoo Berlin

Yet another drawing on Procreate. I have very little idea what type of bird this is but I liked how it looked and thought it might make a nice drawing. It was taking seemingly forever to draw but suddenly - I was almost done. Funny how that happens.

This was an ink only, no shades of grey or colour project. Feels more like drawing on paper to me with those limits.

Sitges - drawing/dessin Procreate

This post is little different as I don't usually do more than show the drawings. This time I am including the layers in Procreate. Despite loving the Apple Pencil/Ipad/Procreate combo, I had planned to do this on the iMac with my tablet becuase it's easier to see and work with details. That was not be. I accidentally threw out the pen for the Wacom tablet after having it about 10 years, but not to fear! I have a back up tablet... that won't work with the new iMac it turns out. No new drivers since 2011. Buying a new Wacom pen is about 120$ CAD, buying a new Hurion (SP?) tablet is 105$ - a deal! Deal or not, I have no money for such things since the old iMac exploded and the dishwasher did too for good measure. So - to the iPad Batman!

As you can see I divided this into several layers. A pen and ink layer, which was going to be the final product until I decided to do a grayscale layer and add some textures. The textures were on another layer but not too visible on their own so I merged them into the tone layer for the blog. Like most drawings I am not sure if I love or hate this one. I went from dark foreground to light background to dive more a sense of depth. I ended up ignoring a lot of the lighting from the actual reference photo and changed/deleted some details I thought were distracting. I worked on this the last 3 weeks when I could, no rush.