Semester 2 Week 3 Life Drawing Homework

Perspective Cube Task:

Since I messed up my homework last week, I've had to do last week's task this week, which was to draw a cube at two different angles, with the lighting in the same place. I found it simple enough, but I'm not sure if I've gotten the shadows right.

It's difficult to imagine where the light is actually coming from when I change positions, so I mapped it out on a diagram to try and figure out where the shadows would land. I think I picked bad lighting points, since they don't look all that interesting when I do the second image.

I hope this is more in line with what Mike wanted, and that I can keep up with the tasks.

Animated Character Rotation Task:

The actual homework for the week was the hand-animated rotation of one of our characters. I thought that Mike really didn't like my character from Semester 1, and, given some time, I don't like it much either. So, I tried to make a new character on my own this week. This meant that I had to go through the process of coming up with something before I could even do the task. 

I struggled to come up with a character for a while. I just didn't really know how to convey a personality through Character design. I tried making an angry character, like various ones I'd seen in Disney films, but I couldn't get any of the shapes working. I then just started messing around with basic shapes and head shapes I could use, and still didn't end up with anything. the one thing that helped was to loosen up my drawing, so I could get more expressive lines (as usual). I ended up with this character, who I'm at least somewhat happy with:

The character has a really circular head, so I hoped it would help me when it came to animation, since I really didn't feel ready for this task. I laid the animation out with the Lightbox in the Animation room, just drawing the basic shapes, and making sure they flowed smoothly. I think that turned out okay, so I'll put in the details and animate it next.

- 13 Feb.

Feb 14th:

I finished my animation, and I'm not happy with it, but I feel like I've learned from the attempt. The first thing is that I tried to use lined paper because I thought it would make it easier to get the drawings to match up. This didn't work. Apparently, lined paper is really inconsistent, and doesn't work very well for what I was trying to do.

Secondly, I don't think that I have the detail or the quality of other people's animations. I ended up with an animation that looks pretty basic, but still has choppiness to it. It doesn't really trick the mind into thinking an object is rotating. The drawings themselves are pretty stable - as far as I can tell - but the simplicity of my character is obvious, and doesn't really look like much.

Finally, I don't think I've really grasped the task. I think that I had a lot of trouble with last week's class work, where we drew the model from a bunch of different angles, and I didn't really improve this week. I tried to simplify the drawing, but that just made my animation more unconvincing.

So, at least I know now not to use lined paper, not to oversimplify, and to focus more on the motion (to make the animation smoother).

I need more help to do something like this. Maybe a model, or an object, would help me to figure it out.