Meh.

   Well, not much has happened lately. I found a newer scanner hidden in my house that is compatible with my computer, but I'm not too happy with it. The software isn't user friendly, especially for animation. I can't figure out how to save settings so it will apply the same changes to each image I scan. It's a real hassle and I miss my old scanner. At any rate, here are some recent drawings.

Wolves and a rat.

Doodles from the mall.

Gandalf and Gimli.

Gestures

I did a bit of gesture drawing today (using Pixelovely), and had a good time. Mostly 30sec to 1min drawings. I still can't get the exaggeration and caricature that I'm striving for, which frustrates me. Most of them turn out looking so plain. But I'm practicing.

Again, pardon the poor photography. 

I like the upper left pose here. The idea comes across with such simple lines.

Spent a little more time on this guy, about 4 minutes. I'm pretty happy with it.

And I'll throw a little animation test on here. Just practicing a jump, and overlap/follow-through with a nifty ponytail.

Sweatin' to the Oldies

  Happy New Year, everyone. I heard someone say that what you do on the first day of the new year is an example for what the rest of your year will be like. Luckily for me, I had work off, and spent most of the day drawing and reading my books on animation. So the year's lookin' pretty good so far!

  I've been reading through the Walt Stanchfield book "Drawn to Life" again, and man does that light a fire. It makes me crave drawing all the time, which is probably the best craving I could ask for!

  On a less enthusiastic note, I made a poor discovery today. My new, awesome, beautiful computer isn't compatible with my old, outdated scanner. Which means no more scanning drawings until I can afford a new one. Which also means no more animating on paper until I can afford a new one. Smell the depression in the air? I do. But hey, that just means more sketching, and more tiny animation tests in Flipbook. We'll make it through this.

  Anyway, how about some drawings? As per the aforementioned scanner situation, my trusty digital camera was asked to step up to the plate, so pardon the poor lighting, crooked composition, etc.

  I've been drawing a lot of old people lately.

In honor of my love for big, manly beards. And my reluctant lack thereof. Someday, oh hairy glory, I will have thee, someday...

Back on Track

  Hello, my many (zero) blog readers. I hope everyone had a great Christmahanukwanzikka. I had a great one. I gave many gifts and it felt good. For some reason, this year I was bombarded with GREAT gifts. I've never really cared for receiving gifts, and usually tell everyone not to worry about getting me anything. This year nobody listened.
   Anyway, on to what this blog is really about: Cord's pursuit of animation excellence. I have a very beautiful, and far too giving girlfriend, who for Christmas gave me a custom built, top-of-the-line, superfastawesomepretty computer. The thing is a beast. My old computer was a used hand-me-down with 512Mb of RAM that I got for free from a school. Needless to say it couldn't run ANY software without pooping it's pants and falling apart. Hell, it took ten seconds to open the start menu.
   Today I used my new machine to do several quick exercises in Flipbook, something I could never do with the old one. I normally prefer animating on paper, because trying to draw detail with a Tablet is like trying to draw detail with a ten foot crooked stick. But drawing right into Flipook is great for knocking out exercises while quickly making corrections and learning from mistakes, without worrying too much about how well it's drawn. I definitely feel like this new computer is going to help pull me from the animation dry spell I've been experiencing.

This is an exercise from a Jason Ryan webinar about timing and spacing that I watched today. This isn't from my brain, I copied all of his frames to help me feel out how he does it. I learned a lot from doing this.

The bat exercise made me want to try other fast movements, like smear frames.

In this one, the  character drawings are ugly and downright embarrassing. But I wanted to focus more on the movement of the ball (which I'm pretty happy with).

Buncha stuff

 Haven't done much worth posting in a while, but I figured I could upload a few sketches out of the new sketchbook I've been keeping. Exhilarating, eh?

I did a lot of doodling at the Expo. Ideas, feelings, caricatures, etc.

When your dad's a taxidermist, a little animal reference is never hard to find.

And some more random drivel.

And hey, why not a bouncing ball I did today?