2 bar Oswald Animation Finally Complete

Here's the Final Clip for this two bar Oswald Dance. It took ages to do, but looks great. :) I was so relieved when it was finally complete:



The ear's, body and mouth are all on different layers. For the ears and mouth I just copied straight ahead. For the body, I did the keys and breakdowns and worked out the inbetweens myself (which some corrections and changes against the original later on).

Here's a comparision with the original:

Oswald Progress

Just finished the body layer for the first 4 bars. Here it is:



Here's a comparision:
 



I like it, I only wish it was a tad tidier. Anyway, mouth and ears next, copied frame by frame (I have no idea how to lip sync yet).

Most of it is on ones some is on twos. I tried to match the orginal framerate.

(Edit 30/11/09):I also forgot to post up the Ex sheets I used before (that I started with). I also had a horizontal ex sheet in my software. Here they are:

Smiley head turnaround*

This exercise was about working out how lines move on a sphere when rotated. The sphere is the easiest curved shape to work with, as it's contour doesn't change when rotated. I did the following pictures while looking at how lines change on a kneadable eraser.

I came up with some good rules as to how this works (see image below). Basically a line curving the opposite way to a contour will become straight and then bend towards the contour when turned towards it. A line bending the same way as the contour will be stretched out but will not come to form around the contour as it's turned towards it. I hope that makes sense.

Most of these pics below I just did via judgement and logic. Some don't look right, but it was a fun learning exercise. Hopefully I will be able to do some of Preston's eggs from any angle in mind soon.

I've started Oswald

I've Started John's 2nd 30's rhythmic animating lesson: Oswald's lucky rabbit dance.Very early days.

I copied the keys and a couple of the breakdowns but I tried to do the inbetweens logically without looking at the originals. I did check a couple of times, but I toggled off the originals when drawing. The hands were definately the hardest bit.

Here's the roughs for the first two bars:



And here's a comparision:




Now I've gotta go back and correct the roughs against the original and do an inking layer. I might even put in a mouth and lip sync for good measure.

Applied exercises*

Ok, I am going to start adding applied exercises to this blog also. In a sense, I think this is what all the lessons are pointing towards. John wants us to get to the stage where we can "apply the same principles to your own drawings at will".

I don't think only copying will get me there though. Whenever I attempt a drawing without copying I'm still at a similar stage to what I was before. I think you also need to practice applying.

Here are some of the tools I have been learning that I will be attempting to apply:

1) Construction (the most important)
2) lines of action
3) visualising drawings in 3D, maintaining volumes.
4) protruding/ intruding construction (lesson 6)
5) checking spaces (negative and positive)
6) exaggeration and contrast

I'm sure there are plenty more (silhouettes is one). I'll add these as I go.

Here are examples of the types of applied exercises I'll be attempting:

    •    drawings from memory
    •    new poses
    •    inbetweening via logical construction (not copying)
    •    making new characters
    •    short animations

I'll still be doing plenty of the regular lessons too (with overlay checks). You need both. ;)

All my lesson 6 stuff

Thank you Katie Rice for making such a great post on Drawing Lips. :)

For this post, I've decided just to post my worksheets up. I haven't done any overlays with them yet or  chopped into individual pics. This first sheet was done in TVPaint. Mine in blue:

These two were done on paper:

And finally, some more TVPaint:

I had some real fun copying these. Katie's drawing have a nice fun style and I can definitely see the construction technique influence.

final lesson 5 for the moment

Ok, got some Disney and Clampett done. First Disney:

I checked the boy with an overlay a couple of times while doing it, so that's why it's a bit more accurate that some of my other stuff.

Here's the Clampett attempt:

20 minute attempts

All the following were limited to twenty minutes each (more or less).

In this one above, the line of action isn't extreme enough to begin with.

I think I'll try a couple of the other examples of John K's blog and then go on to the next lesson (I know these aren't super accurate).

Some quick pencil attempts

I attempted these fairly freely without checking accuracy as I went. It was a lot more fun and quick to do it this way, and some were close to as accurate as I'd get anyway.

I think I'll work more like this. I think it is better to have many attempts at accuracy rather than spending a very long time checking and correcting ust one attempt. It should help make the drawings look more loose and clean as well.

This last one was just completely out of scale. Note to self: measure head ratios.

A Start

Here's three drawings I've done for the line of action exercise. Attempting to be so accurate is tiring and slow (for me).

This one looked pretty good, but it turns out that the body and head were out of alignment

 Here's what it looked like when I aligned the body and head seperately:

The last one I've done so far of Jerry, the lone construction head was traced from the drawing:

Bosko's Clap Dance

I finished this one last night, it came out pretty good:



I did it more or less straight ahead via copying. I did the feet and legs first and then the rest (all roughly). After that I did a clean up and colour layer. This one was probably the hardest due to the changing head angles. I used a construction circle from the first frame to check most of the other frames.

Also, here's the rough pre clean-up:

Bosko's Chicken Dance

Ok, Here's dance loop number 2, the Chicken Dance:



Here's how I did it. First the analysis. I noted that the last 12 frames were just the first 12 in reverse. Here's proof, the one on the right is in reverse (24 frames looped at half speed):



Secondly I noticed that all the keys and breakdowns (ie, the highest and lowest points) were held for 2 frames. This cut the total number of unique frames down to 9! After that I copied all the keys and breakdowns first, followed by the inbetweens. I was thinking about doing some of the inbetweeens without copying, but I decided not to this time.

One to go.

Full Bosko 1

Here is the Bosko I did yesterday with a head, colour and  bit cleaner. I like it. For the head, I made one orginal image which I placed on another layer and traced for each frame. I think it look a bit more organic than using the same pic (I think I got that tip from one of Tony White's books). The lines are still a bit jittery (even after a fair bit of cleaning). I'll have to focus on making smoother lines for the next one. I think I'll try one of the other dance cycles (from the original clip) today.





I like the approach Pedro took to this exercise (ie, doing the keys, then breakdowns and then the inbetweens). I'll have to try that for the next one. With this one I pretty my copied every frame.

Bosko Dance Cycle 1

I took a break from the Preston Blair stuff today and worked on some actual animation. Here's my first attempt at a bosko dance cycle: 




Here's the process I took. First I wrote notes next to it indicating what was moving when:



Then I traced all the frames of bosko and then finally attempted to draw it. Here's a screenshot of my workspace in TVPaint.

I'll have to go in and make this look more like bosko, but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out so far.

Final lesson 4 post for now

Ok, I've attempted every lesson 4 drawing once. That'll do for now.

Onto Lesson 5.

Woodpecker

Here's my woodpecker attempt before bed. The biggest problem I seem to have is correctly lining up the body and head. I'll pay more attention to that.

More

Some more full body construction. I occasionally check my construcion and accuracy as I go (via comparing to scale side by side and overlays). Hope that's a good idea. This first one was done on paper. Shame the head angle was so far off.

This next one was done really quick and without a lot of checking. I was burnt out with too much checking previously. I'm quite pleased with how accurate it was concidering.

This one's pretty good. I didn't put construction around the head or body or use a line of action. I just forgot to for some reason.

Bugs using a head height grid. I did put the construction in this time and you can see how I used other lines to check the hight of other parts.

Here's bugs's construction. Naturally, it was all the vertical parts that were off (concidering how much horizontal checking there was).

One Rabbit done

A bit tired now. Might comment on this later, but here it is:

Changes to the line of action

I've started to attempt the full model bunny and noticed something. The line of action Preston starts with gets reworked as he builds up the model. I started with a line of action based on step one (which I checked with an overlay for accuracy) and couldn't get it to fit right in step three.

 Although the negative space between the line and the left side looked about right (on mine in red), the line seemed to poke out more. Also the horizontal distance between the shoulder and bum was practically zero on my model but it was out a fair bit on Preston's step 3.

I guess the lesson in this is no to be set in stone by the first rough line of action. You rework it based on what looks right as you go. I'll base my future copied LOA's on the built up models.

Squishy Dog Overlays

I'm really keen to do some different drawings now. Here are my squishy dog overlays.

This first one was pretty accurate to begin with. On the reattempt it seems that I just swapped the inaacuricies I had previously for some different ones.

 On this next one there was a lot to correct from my lesson one pencil drawing. However, my reattempted construction was quite inaccurate in length. I readjusted the main drawing to compensate, as I didn't realize until half way through it (when things started to look quite off). It came out good in the end though.

On this next one, the reattempted construction came out poor again, so I traced out the construction from the original drawing and copied that insted. It made it much easier and helped out my understanding too. I was able to do the final drawing so quickly and accurately once I was confident that the construction was exact (even less doubts than copying from PB's construction) .

I attempted construction in this one first, before doing the tracing construction trick and correcting my errors. I came out pretty good, Teeth, eyes ears and collar (ie bits with no construction basis) seem to be my biggest weakness with these side angles.

Final drawing, whew. I was surprized how accurate the original pencil drawing I did for this was. I did't do a construction trace and copy for the redo this time, but I did use some relative angle and proportion measurements. I'm glad the angle of the teeth was correct (even it they were too low). :)

Pre Squishy Dog

Ok I've done 5 more of these and now I'm up to the squash and stretch page (expect it soon). I'm getting more accurate, but it still takes a long time (like a half hour or hour for an accurate pic). I definately notice myself getting more efficient as I go though.

This first one I used the drawing I did from lesson one to critique and overlay. Man there were tons of inacurracies. However my redo attempt was a lot better. . It's great to see improvement already. :)

The forehead on my first attemp at this was huge. Still a few small inaccuricies the second time, but much better.

I found this fox really tricky to get right. I put a couple of extra lines on the original to judge the form better for my 3rd attempt construction. Maybe I shoulda tried something similar for the left side as it was still a tad big. I can't beleive I didn't notice how big the 2nd attempts nose was until the overlay. The 3rd attempt at this was done after the goat.

 Pretty good :)

I marked my previous two pencil drawings before attempting another one on the cintiq.I did a final correction based on (but not usind) the overlay. I suppose that's worth doing sometimes. It's a lot easier than trying to be accurate from scratch.

Squishy dogs coming soon, and then on to lesson 4.