My first painting assignment is done! :D
I was to paint the same picture in four different variations.

1. Flat B&W
2. Shading B&W
3. Shading and Lighting B&W
4. Monochromatic

I've never painted with gouache and have very, very limited experience with painting in general so it's quite crap.

5'' by 7''. Winsor & Newton Designer Gouache on Arches 140lb cold-press watercolour paper.

I call it "Failure In Gouache Parts One Through Four".


Welp, I have the same attitude for all my assignments right now: I can only get better.
Hopefully by the end of the semester I'll have improved ten-fold.

Cheers,
-Max

I've finished my first animation assignment for class.
It's very simple- a rubber ball, a bowling ball, a balloon & a pendulum.

There's probably a million little mistakes (especially with timing), but it was due today so it had to get done.

OLD SCHOOL ANIMATION PAPER & PEGBARS & MAGIC.
Only digital was done in post to compile this for you.

Unfortunately it's a bit hard to see because Blogger re-sized it to be quite small. SQUINT.*

*If you do not wish to squint, it can be seen on Youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suGGAYyemzI

Music in clip is Creating "Governing Dynamics" from the soundtrack of 'A Beautiful Mind' by James Horner. Everything else is done by myself.

Next animation assignment is due in four weeks and it's an S & C curve.

Now I'm off to finish painting and do some layout. This week is breaking my new-found-pleasant disposition. :C

Loving school at the moment.
Hopefully I keep this positivity throughout the year. :)

I finished the Digital Tools slide. It wasn't for a grade, but it's not bad. If I had more time, there's some stuff I'd tweak.

I also finished my character rotation. It's due this Wednesday, which means I may still fiddle with the crap that's bugging me.


One of my next assignments is to do a series of four surreal-ish landscape paintings in gouache. It's almost Halloween, so I sketched a spooky pumpkin patch thumbnail. The design (for the final paintings) has been redone in some places, but it remains the same concept.


Last Friday was my life drawing class and we had the most FANTASTIC model. He was fun and actually into it. I find when the model's into the posing, I draw better. The week prior, our model sucked and I couldn't draw anything decent.

As usual, Conte on newsprint. I blurred the out the really rubbish faces I doodled. Trust me, they were that bad.

Most are 1 or 3 minutes. I know some of the proportions are off (*cough*the hand in the first one *cough*) and the hands are almost allll wrong, but I'm really trying to capture gestures at the moment. :D


That's all for now. Expect some actual ANIMATIONS next week!

Cheers
-Max

One of the main incentives of updating this blog is so I can share my school drawings with my parents. They're paying the ridiculous fees to send me to this fancy school, I might as well keep them up-to-date. Love them.

It's also easier because my mum can't seem to type in the direct URLS to the drawings. She at least bookmarked this page.

Animation!

I'm currently working with traditional animation tools to create my first assignment. Animation paper, how retro.

The first portion is a rubber ball, a bowling ball, and a balloon falling/floating through an environment. It's a study in TIMING (how many frames per second, relative to the subject. ie; more frames = slower, less =faster).

This is a quick PS mock-up of the background for that part of the assignment. The crate says "human organs", how morbid.

The second part is to animate a pendulum. Clocks seemed so cliche, so this is my attempt to find some level of originality (let's face it, 1000s of people have done this assignment before, they've probably done EVERYTHING).

In the final piece it'll be a spider hanging from Intra Mortis Thomas' eye socket. This is just a digital line test. I really HATE how wasteful traditional line tests are, but I still have to do them... :(


Remember that name slate for digital tools?
Well, it dawned on me today how RUBBISH it really is. So in a cloud of sadness, I decided to redo 90% of it.

F*ck simplicity. Seriously, I'm in a competitive program, I have the time. I'm going to do it nice and proper. Added Squelette D'Ombres Thomas and an Aetasatis Thomas. The bar in the background will probably be a Victorian speedpaint background.

And if I'm going to go completely mad, I might as well add some furry little critter somewhere:
Everyone else is drawing them on theirs, so I figured a cute little mouse by my feet wouldn't hurt. HEAVILY inspired by Don Bluth. That man = genius.

Well, I have to get back to this stupid name slate. It's due in a week and I'm ridiculously slow.

Cheers!
-Max

Life drawing is definitely not my forte, I'm actually quite rubbish at it. Even though it was a requirement to for your admission portfolio, I've honestly /never/ done it properly... You know, naked guy/girl lounging around.

Well, I didn't expect to get right into naked people on my first day of Life Drawing at Sheridan.

Here are my best seven sketches of the day- I did about forty or so. I'm hoping to get better by the end of the semester! :D

I don't remember at what order I did them, so here they just are-
ALL UNDER 3 mins, Conte on huge newsprint:

[re-uploaded to BLOGGER because Photobucket has a problem with crudely drawn nudes. Stupidest policy is enforced, so they DELETE my drawings and replace it with an ugly, large "VIOLATED OUR TERMS" banner. Eugh.]

MY FIRST PROPER LIFE DRAWINGS EVER. SO BAD.



Some aren't that bad with the gestures, but I still have quite a ways to go.
Expect life drawing photographs on Fridays :D

-Max

I've really been enjoying my first few classes here at Sheridan. The animation program seems brilliant so far and think I'd have to create a whole new language to properly describe the epicness of this school.

As for drawing, there hasn't been much- but expect loads of doodles from in class. The instructors understand how much we doodle, so they turn a blind eye to most of it.

Here's the mock-up of a project for my Digital Tools class. We're supposed to draw a 'name slate' to be used on all future projects. I chose to draw myself, it fits. :)

Today, whilst in my Visual Concepts class, my prof Chris Walsh mentioned something about how the entire lecture hall was probably doodling little caricatures of him as he spoke. Well, I wasn't beforehand....


He seems like a really cool guy- Can't wait for more of his classes.

Well I'm off to do some homework. I need to go to the art store down the street tomorrow so I can buy some animation paper, a peg bar and some other necessities.

-Max

Tomorrow I move to Sheridan.
I'd be lying if I said wasn't at all nervous.

Whilst packing, I found the time to finish 'Eam Culpae II'. It's my last drawing of the summer- my last drawing pre-art school.

My airbrush did not want to cooperate on this, so I broke out the 'heavy artillery'. My brand new Copic airbrush where the air goes through a mini adapter... Worked much better, but the nibs were too dry. Long story, lots of frustration, but I'm done. Not entirely content with the outcome, but it's finished.

It's now framed beside the 'Jekyll & Hyde' piece. My mum insists on keeping my artwork and creating a 'wall' to me. How bloody embarrassing.

Take care!
-Max

So I think it'd be fair to say the function and steadiness in hands has significantly deteriorated over the last few weeks.

My biological father had some condition where his hands would not be steady, so much so that he had to quit working. I cannot do traditional ink work at the moment, at least without a lot of breaks and grief.

I'm mad and frustrated- considering I gave up everything to pursue a career completely dependent on the steadiness of my hands. Fuck.

I've been feeling rather lazy towards art as of late, hence why the blog has been so inactive. The picture from my last post has been finished for quite a while, so I'll start by introducing it.

"Dangerous Game" - Title comes from a song in Jekyll & Hyde. When I was airbrushing the background box, the post-it notes didn't cover the area properly, resulting in DARK RED EVERYWHERE D8. I spent hours dissolving as much of the red as possible (with a colourless blender) until it was a light pink- light enough to cover it with other markers.

Also figured out how to make 'transparency' (sorta).


Now I'm working on a new drawing- a remake of an old picture from 2007:

Eam Culpae • 2007

It was called"Eam Culpae", featuring Emily from Skeletal Requiem.

Here is the digital rough of the remake:

I like it so much more. There's much more detail and feels more "Ophelia-esc", like how it is intended in the story.

Now, if I could only get the enthusiasm to ink and colour it. :c

-Max

I've been working on a picture of Thomas & Olivia (Thomas is the protagonist in my novel, Skeletal Requiem, and Olivia is his wife). together. This time last year I was working on something similar- I guess mid-July is my Thom & Olivia time.

Original 'sketch' was drawn in Photoshop CS3- about six hours of doodling.
It was printed out and traced with my lightbox, onto A4 cardstock.

I've started mapping out the shading (in the same manner as I normally do).

That's as far as I've attempted. Colour might commence tomorrow, I'd just really hate to balls it up- but c'est la vie with traditional work.

-Max