Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Hello!

I draw a ton of weird stuff, but it’s been hard to figure out what to do with it all. Last summer I cut out a lot of these drawings and pasted them into a scroll that would act as a surrogate sketchbook, but I soon realized that that was a dumb idea - it damaged the works and did nothing more to them, although the mechanism I made for viewing the scroll was kinda cool. Then I discovered animation, and I realized that I could, instead of working out every detail of a drawing, elevating it to art by making it on fancy paper and finishing it to look all polished (and stilted) I could instead integrate these works into an animation by using them as character designs, poses, etc. In this animation, because no one taught me anything in that class, even though I supposedly go to the best art school in this fine country, I recorded my careful line drawings stop motion style with a lousy DV camera. It has no layers, no color (except on the cut-out parts), no computer effects, and yet I’m fairly pleased with it:



But now that I’ve discovered animation, I’ve discovered what’s been right in front of me for so many years, my computer. And so, I am now beginning to archive my drawings via my new scanner and edit them in Photoshop and Painter via my brand spanking new Wacom Cintiq 12WX which I don’t know what I did without. This summer I’m taking a digital compositing class that essentially teaches me After Effects, I’m deciding on whether to learn Flash or Toon Boom, and I’m making some stuff that’s fun to look at. And so this blog will be a sort of process journal and showcase of my work as I move into the twenty-first century with my 2D artwork. Enjoy!