Winry

This is more of the opening sequence I'm animating for that class. I'm getting closer to finishing it (thank goodness it's due wednesday)

Today's post is not nearly as pretty as yesterday, though. :P

hmmm... I could always make every character in this assignment look like 'Cessy. My teacher hasn't seen this cartoon, she'd never notice.

More FMA stuff

I gotta work faster on this assignment, so it's going to be taking up the blog for a while.

Luckily this projects mostly animation and timing and has little drawing, so I can get this done fast if I really focus.

Oh, and here's this.

Ada's dead.

Let's take a moment to remember Negative 8 ball girl... by looking at the process I took to kill her

We start by drawing it, along with the rest of the comic, in a bit of a messy splash page on a notebook in the middle of the college dining commons, Probably raising a few questions from people stealing a glance at it.

Using the sketch as a reference, but not a direct outline, I redrew it in photoshop

Backround is added next now. this doesn't help the picture, but it helps the overall comic a lot better to position everything and then color it. Really I wish I knew sooner, it's made the final steps a lot easier. The gradients a bit strong here, but the bulk of it is covered up, so I kept it.

Coloring is a bit desaturated for this panel to draw more attention to the bullet. I'm told to put them on a separate layer than the outline to make adding effects easier, but it's a bit clumsy for me, so I only do it when I really need to, like with the forehead there.

So here's the detail around the forehead. The bullet exit wounds are supposed to be pretty messy. I didn't use a reference (probably should have) but I think it's pretty clear how it looks

The bullet took a bit of work to get the perspective right. Of course the reader's going to know it's a bullet, and they're going to know what general direction it's going (away from the gaping hole in the head. But It's not exactly something you can phone in.

Added some spinning blood for flare. Kinda haphazard in hindsight, but it doesn't take it away too much.

Final touch is a noise effect that I blurred the heck out of. It's mostly to mute out the rest of the picture around the bullet, though.

I abuse the heck out of that noise effect recently. I guess it's because it's the one effect I was completeyl unable to reproduce when I drew the comic in flash.

myself

I've gotten a lot more comfortable drawing myself

I'm not sure if it's because I'm happier about my appearance, or I'm happier with what I can draw, but I used to have so many issues with every self sketch I made.

Then again, I'm cheating by removing the eyes here

relearning style

Starting today 1 sketch a day again

Anyway it's been over a year since the last update, but what I need to do even more so is cover what I've been summerize what I've been learning. especially over that bleak 2 years.

But what might be more interesting is what I've had to unlearn

The better I got at anatomy, the more expressive and experimental and expressive I got with it.

However, as much as I kept pushing my work further and further with what I wanted to occur as I sketched during lunch breaks and brainstormed on long walks home... my capabilities with the final product were harder and harder to meet.

The character artwork dictated the comic so much that dialogue became much harder to edit, and backgrounds were given less than bare minimum. and paneling was nigh impossible. The dialogue became convoluted, the locations became static at the worse possible time, and pages barely ended on a joke anymore. This was the worst the comic had ever been.

Flash was also having trouble keeping up and I switched to photoshop soon after. It was a rough transition, but as I busied myself learning this new program and overusing it's different effects,

The real problem though was how stiff everything was and I think the main reason for that was all the layered structure.

Tons of shapes making contorted figures that were traced directly over and crammed into tiny areas, which were made even smaller to due to word balloons.

The structure still exists, but I'm not using it as a crutch anymore. How I draw with a pencil is far different from how I draw on a tablet, so I'm trying more to re apply my older styles of characterized stroke-order-focused drawing. So while I still draw the structure and skeleton and function on paper, I only use it as a reference, creating a mental buffer that allows for more flexibility.