Little Hero Little Jump

Just Have Fun!

Sometimes you have to remember to just have fun!

Attitude, Design and Silhouette

Don Bluth's 3 key ingredients to making a good drawing.

Represent Something More Than Just a Cartoon!

Another great thought of the day from Don Bluth's Seminar this week. Make your drawings represent something, a feeling, an emotion, an idea, something more than just a cartoon!


(click to enlarge)

Preplanning vs Improv

Lately I've been debating at least in my own head about whether it's better to go with your first instinct and the power of the original idea or to sit down and calculate what you want you really want out of an image. With spontaneity you might miss out on a really great fleshed out idea. You could be spending hours on hours on an idea that just isn't as good as if you would have really worked out every detail before starting on the final version. However you can really loose a lot of inspiration, looseness, fun and carefree feeling to an image if you over work it. Alas, I do not have an answer yet myself. I'd love to know what your thoughts are. As of right now I have a couple projects that I'm working on that are pretty planned out and a bit more fully thought through, and a few that are just, here's an idea, here's some paper, let's go. I suppose it's finding some sort of happy medium.

Exaggerate and Make Them See It!

Great advice from Don Bluth today! Realism doesn't always work, and details sometimes pull you away from the focus.. so exaggerate and make them (the audience) see it!

Too Late Update!

Time seemed to really fly by today!

Here's a couple great videos to watch

A music video featuring the animation styles of Miyazaki!


and a great little student film I stumbled across today over at cartoonbrew.

'Manfred' an animated short by Arjen Klaverstijn from Arjen Klaverstijn on Vimeo.

Happy New Week!

Enjoy Every Moment!

Who knows the future. Enjoy every moment!

Working Slow...

Have you ever had those days wheneverything is going fine, and you're making progress like usual, but then you realize it's way later in the day than you thought. So much to do so little time. Gotta work on getting faster. Like the saying goes first you get good then you get fast then you get fast and good. Well the more I think about that phrase the more I need to work on all aspects of it.

Kittenbus!

Just like every venture to the Ghibli Blog. I came across something amazing, but this time it's even more amazing than usual!

Just watch! It's adorable!

Oh and a quick little tip to everyone out there in internet land to check out a couple fantastic illustrators that I rediscovered today.

Allison Hershey who did the lovely art in Halls of the Dead Faery Tale Adventures 2, and
Laurent Cluzel and Jacques Muller who produced the beautiful illustrations illustrations in Fable. Their sites are featured to the right ->
along with a few other new links if you haven't check that section out lately!

Extra Studies pt 2

Gilligan in Space!

Practicing a forward sneak animation. Still need to work on the feet slippage and keeping volumes consistent.

Less is Never More!

I recently got around to reading some of the great inspiration in the World of Warcraft the Art of the Trading Card Game. Samwise Didier gave a really interesting 4 point guide for Blizzard artists that I just loved.

1) Less is NEVER more.
2) Bigger is ALWAYS better.
3) All one-handed weapons should be (at least) as big as two-handed weapons.
4) If all else fails, add skulls and spikes and paint it red.

Good rules to draw by if I ever heard any.

Extra Studies

I thought I posted this here already, but I couldn't find it. So here's a little illustration I did for Derek Osborne. I went with a more Gummi Bears stylized ogre mixed with caricature of Oz.

Claude's Turtle feeling a bit depressed.




Claude and his turtle doing the obligatory myspace face.

Class 1 Roundup!

Little compilation of all some of the stuff I did at AnimationMentor for class 1.

Little Hero Theme Song

Been working on this for a little while now. It's not fully timed out just storyboarded with a little rough animation, but I figured why not share what I've got so far!
Hope you enjoy!

Light deadlines week!

This week is gonna be a little easier on deadlines. So hopefully I'll get some more time to get the basic intro animation for the little hero fleshed out.

The Final Balance!

(click to enlarge!)