Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Animation Day 2; inking, animating, etc

Yesterday was mostly side tracked with "how best to ink drawings" in Illustrator so that I can import them in to Toon Boom Studio (TBS).

Well, the time crunch is a factor here and I realize I'm not the most experienced artist, or have a very steady hand/arm to do this stuff... so I think I'm going to fall back to consistent line width and using the pen tool to ink everything.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for using a tablet and going that way, but for this project, I don't have enough time to get really good enough to make it "good" looking.

The obvious issue here is that I can't really do good line art in TBS itself without getting TB Harmony or something crazy... or using the eraser tool and getting all obsessive over how my lines aren't lining up, being overshot, can't zoom in far enough to round things out good enough, etc... hence why we're starting out with Illustrator in the first place.

I have the power to line up my vector art accurately and consistently.  I can mess with strokes and utilize all of the tools Illustrator gives me.  This in and of itself was a challenge to learn and get used to, but at the end of the day, I decided to use strokes (instead of fills with the blob tool) to ink everything.

On the note of coloring, this will likely be an after thought, but I've done some small pet projects to see how it works so I don't accidentally shoot myself in the foot if I can go down this road some day.  After some experimenting, the "easy" coloring option was to use Live Paint, but this was its own issue when importing to TBS (it left weird lines around the edges of the painted areas)... so Live Paint was out.  I ended up resorting to making a layer under the line art, using big blob tool to paint in areas, then cleaning up the overflows with some pathfinder magic and using copies of line art to "clip" away the excess.

This definitely isn't the only way to do it and I'm sure there is a better way out there, but again, more time and ambition will lead to me finding these options.

It is today's hope that I will finish up the first 4 or 5 storyboard cards for my animation project in TBS.  With that said, Animate day 2, begin!

I don't know yet if I'll be posting my work as I get it done on the blog or not.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Inking Characters in Illustrator, en route to Toon Boom

From my previous post, I took my paper inked drawings, scanned them in, then inked them in Illustrator.

I'm now realizing that this is much more difficult than I had originally thought.

Just looking at John K's inking tag on one of his blogs, really makes me see I have long way to go!

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/inking

Anyways, here is the rasterized version of the vectored character from the previous post.





I was trying different techniques with inking each of those poses above hence why they look a bit different from each other.

Looks like the rest of today is going to be dedicated to practicing this more instead of working on animation!

Character Model Design (drawing)

As a fair warning, I'm a fairly novice art person.  We are doing a very short animation and as such, we designed a story and some characters.

Below is one of the main characters.  First, I did about 6 sketches, which resulted in throwing out the first 5 simply because they didn't look... acceptable.

Anyways, I scanned in the original pencil sketch, but as expected, it was really difficult to see anything, so we went ahead and inked them on paper, then put them up here.

This is, more or less, the design for this character model.




We'll be sending these over to Illustrator next and drawing this young lady in a whole lotta frames and getting her ready for animation in Toon Boom Studio.  If I have time, I'll do a color skit and try out various colors, but due to time constraints on this project, that will be one of the last things I do.

Naturally, she'll start looking more refined (in the cartoony way of course) as I get better at drawing this over and over again.