Hello dear friends!
I can't believe it's almost the end of July. While that means there is only one more month left of summer, I'm super excited to be able to go back to school! (Although I'm not sure that I can maintain the same positive attitude about school 4 months from now...)
Anyways, these past two weeks have been super productive in terms of finalizing Noemi's character design (her size, etc) and really starting to get a feel for what the overall style should be. I realized that I probably should have started concept art/style design earlier buttttttt since it's my first time doing an animated short I didn't know very much to begin with.
Lately I've been fooling around with color a lot. A friend at Dreamworks introduced this super wicked artist: Pascal Campion to me and I've been obsessed with his work! The more I try to learn from him, the more I am in awe of his pure colors and simplistic shapes that still communicate SO much emotion. For example:
What. It's incredible to me how you can almost literally feel the warmth of the sunlight, the coolness of an early evening, or the buzz of a city with just a couple of colors. My friend told me he was a genius and I believed him, but I never really understood what that meant until I tried using limited color palettes myself.
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| Drawing of a dream I had a few weeks back of two old friends |
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| Concept art for Noemi's gloomy town? |
Didn't quite nail it, and I sort went off and did my own thing/went a little "new brushes" crazy on the concept art haha. Oops? I can always come back to fix that later.
What I did have a ton of fun with, and am quite pleased with, was my color study of a shot in Hugo. It's a beautiful movie with a magical story, so I wanted to do my own version of it and practice digital painting some more with some new techniques I learned on You freaking Tube. (Thanks Kelsy!) Seriously the internet can be such a life/money saver! If anyone is looking for a really good/free digital painting mini class you should check out that link I posted above ^
It started out from a basic tone/undertone layout:
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To this!
I'm probably tooting my horn a little bit, but I worked really hard and loved painting it so I'm pretty proud of myself :) Most importantly, I had a ton of fun doing it and learned SO much, even though this took me 7+ hours. The outcome was worth it and the educational experience even more so. I now have way more respect for digital painters and visual development artists. They just pretend to make everything look easy.
I'm also coming close to the point where I can lock my story! If anyone wants to read it and give me some feedback feel free to message me- I would love some constructive criticism :) This also means that I need to finalize Milo's designs so I can have it ready to be modeled and rigged by school, and that I need to figure out what I want my town/townspeople to look like. I have this game that I made up since I was little to try and find people in different shapes:
The first three are kind of boring, but the weirder my shapes get, the more interesting the characters are, at least IMO. My favorite is the girl holding a cat and the old lady doing some kind of weird dance. Or maybe she's stretching her back-who knows? I don't know if this is actually a good exercise that works with character designing, but at least it keeps me entertained :)
And lastly, here is a test of Noemi to demonstrate her size comparison with Milo. It just occurred to me that she has a pretty big head, but maybe that just means she's extra smart. :3
Cheers and love from a happy and caffeinated me!
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