University: Week 3

Week 5 is over now and I had my first assesment piece due last Monday. It was an oral breaking down a trailer to try and find meaning by explaining camera effects and such. Mine was Where The Wild Things Are and I think I did okay, I was a little muddled in the oral. No matter! My next assessment in Digital Media is to make a video of pretty much anything. We gotta take into account camera angles and junk so this is either gonna be really easy or really hard.

Alright, so pressing onto drawing matters; naked people. Honestly, life drawing was not as bad as I thought it would be. It was uncomfortable for about 30 seconds, then you realise you can't really not look otherwise you won't get the drawings done since they were only minute long poses. We did about three thousand million gestural drawings of this one person but I won't upload them all, I'll just upload what went into my PowerPoint (which is what the tutors see).

Basically, what the above is was when the model opened up an umbrella and we were meant to draw it in a kind of 'frame-by-frame' way, then arrange it our top seven drawings into a .gif. At first, we were encouraged to use this creme pastel/charcoal/whatever-it-was on the brown paper, but I found it all to be too... annoying and switched to charcoal. It was quite messy but earned a better result in the end. Good thing I took photos before I rolled it up! I was going to upload my favourite gestural drawings from that week but it all... yeah, no. They don't make much sense.

For homework, we had to do two exercises; draw ten people losing their umbrellas on an A4 sheet and break down two of six objects (either a cat, a horse, a tricycle, grapes, a fan or... something else) in for frames. I chose a cat and a tricycle. The cat was okay but the tricycle was atrocious.

And because you guys are all so lovely, I'll upload some of my crazy sketches that I did this week. Most of these were done either on the train or in class or when there wasn't any good TV to watch (speaking of TV, the second season of the North American version of Being Human started last week on Eleven. It's on Monday at 9:30pm so I suggest everyone to watch it because it's the best show ever. Go watch the first episode of season two on their website. Go buy the first season as well so you understand what's going on).

(sorry about the blue tint, I took photos in my room (since my scanner is crap))

One last thing; for our Animation Methodologies class, we are required to make a 1 minute stop frame animation. I rubber band'd my phone to a tripod, downloaded AnimatorDV and bought the Mobiola Web Camera App for my phone and created the following. It took about 45 minutes for 9 seconds of animation and the focus option on the phone kept pulling the image in and out (and I think the iPhone kept moving down on the tripod). Plus, I got lazy on the last frames. But other than that, it turned out quite nicely!

And one last plug; I'll be seeing the Ignatians Musical Society's Sweeney Todd on Friday night and I suggest everyone to go book tickets and see it also. My good friend Sam will be in the show as well, checks out his blog, yo.

Today's song; I Heard Ramona Sing - Frank Black

University: Week 2

Of course, I just finished week 4 of University but I can be behind with my posts if I want to. d:

Week 2 was just a little bit different to week 1; we didn't do any 'actual' drawing at all. Instead we did this thing called "automatic drawing", which was simple putting pen to paper and randomly drawing. And we weren't drawing anything in particular either, it was just making lines. The exercise seemed a little (or a lot) stupid at first, but seriously, it really helps to relax out your arm and pretty much cures an art block or one of those 'my hand doesn't want me to draw' moments. I won't upload all ten automatic drawings I had to draw for homework, I don't want to break your bandwidth.

The first one on the left was one of the last ones I drew and one of my favourites. The one to the right was a .gif of all ten (I'm not sure why we had to put them in a .gif).

The next exercise was actually exceptionally hard; recreate rhythm, force and a sequence of harmony to discord in five panels. I'm not sure about you, but accurately representing something like rhythm or force, something you definitely cannot see (well, maybe force if you see someone pushing something and rhythm is you look at a bass drum but that's not my point). I struggled for like a million hours trying to get it but in the end I just scribbled something which I thought was force and rhythm.

Harmony to discord was easy though.

The last exercise we did was a homework one, and involved us to draw either water going down a plug or being interrupted by an object. I seriously looked at water for 20 seconds before returning to my room to draw these seven frames so I think I went pretty splendidly.

So, next week is more naked people. How exciting! We're doing life drawing for six weeks in a row apparently, so be thrilled to see some naked bodies. We haven't done any men since last week or today so it's been considerably less awkward than I thought it would be. I won't hold my breath for no males at all though.

And because you've all been do well behaved, here's a weird thing I did last night when I was supposed to be doing homework. You can figure out what it all means. Nick from my class says that he thinks it's a demon lesbian seducing and trying to persuade this girl to go to this island and the guy is the only sane one. And the dragon and the fox were gay too, I think. In actual fact, I'm pretty sure that this probably has something to do with a project I started ages ago called "Subject to Change", though me and my bud Sam never really did much with it except exchange a book back and forward for a few weeks. It was essentially a graphic novel in progress about a guy whose girlfriend falls into an eternal sleep and he has to save her by travelling to an underground Brisbane where demons live. And then when Nathan (that was his name) wakes her up, she dumps him for one of the demons and Nathan's caught in this confusion of where he belongs and junk.

It was weird, but I liked the idea.

Today's song; Watch the World - Box Car Racer

University: Week 1

So I started University on the 27th of last month and so far? It's awesome. I can't believe how great it's going; the classes, the people, the resources, the homework! Doing a Bachelor which majors in Animation, I figured that I'd be doing some drawing and boy, have I been! At the moment, all I've been doing is drawing from life and a 'symbolism' kind of feel from 'Drawing for Design' but everything just tells you to go nuts with creativity. I mean, sure, High School was the same, but you were always limited with how you shared with people, most of the people in my art class only there for the 'easy A'. But now, everyone in the class wants to be there and wants to talk to you. It's a little confusing for me, trying to fit homework in with my days off work (since I seem to be known for my laziness, online and offline) but so far, I've been keeping up.

For my first week of homework in Drawing for Design, we were tasked to 'draw from memory' and then to 'draw from observation'; our phones and a bike. Since I'm crap and any kind of realism, I did kinda bad, but it was better than I thought it would be.

 Then, our next task was to draw 7 hands then put it in an animated gif. I kinda forgot about halfway through that they had to be in sequences, so I just drew a few different positions and nine hands instead of seven.

All I can say is this is some of the best homework I've ever done. Though trying to compile these images neatly was fuck hard. Look forward to week 3; we're doing life drawing with nude models.

Anyways, I'm doing week 2's homework right now. My other classes are barely as exciting as this one; Digital Media (looking at videos and trying to break them down with symbolism and junk), Visual Communication (actually, this one is cool. We have to create a device and create marketing for it) and Animation Methodologies (which is just stop-frame at the moment, but it's getting better!). It's hard to keep up with homework, especially with the remake of Jak & Daxter out. I bought it, I love it and I can't get enough! Expect some kind of review of it in the near or distant future.

Also, I'm almost at 400 pageviews! Thank-you so much, guys!!

Today's song; Kaleidoscope - Blink-182