Playing with Flash Bones

Don't know what happened with the tail...It turned completely black when I linked it...anyway, it's getting a little easier to animate with flash now, but there's still a few things that elude me like how to remove frames from the last part of an armature timeline...

Finished Sean's turning sequence.

Now to Ink&Paint and put it in...Next is pulling the string.

Tweaking scene 1 - sean turn

I'm retracing around 60 frames of sean turning around to mulder. I've added a few subtle movements which I hope will give a better illusion of life but I'm noticing that there's some dire need for follow through in the stops...Well..scratch it up to experience.

CoyoteVille - Flash #1 - Current progress

I've completed the second pass in scenes one and two and am now getting further into the meat of scene 3 with creating the different lip-sync mouth expressions. This is taking *way* longer than I originally planned but still hope to get this finished by next week.

Princess Melusine Updated Character Lineup

Animation Layout & Design: Characters & Background

I recently got Sherm Cohen's book on character design and decided to try a new look for this next assignment...

Princess Melusine




Pookie the morbidly obese dragon




Sneady the covetous evil knight




Snively - Sneady's goblin henchman.




Premise: In a magical fairytale world where almost all story possibilities have been exhausted, a princess must rescue a dragon from an evil knight.
BackStory: Princess Melusine is celebrating her 33rd birthday and is holding a party with all her human/animal [experiment] friend rejects she befriended/kept/stolen from the local wizard guild’s animal control shelter – her being still single, she began getting the nickname, “Crazy Creature Lady” by the local peasantry) including her beloved pet dragon, Pookie when all of a sudden, the evil knight, Sir Sneady the Covetous and his evil darkling henchmen picked up from the local Hold Depot crashes in and kidnaps Pookie and takes him to his timeshared dark castle in the forbidden forest/protected monster sanctuary. The game will involve her adventures throughout various landscapes and fighting various types of darkling creatures while rescuing her animal friends from the party on her way to rescue Pookie. She will also encounter NPC friends in the form of witches, goblins, and other fantastic creatures that will give her clues and special powers to defeat the enemy.

Character Model Sheet - Dirk the Daring

Dragon's Lair Drawing
Originally uploaded by Scott Weston

An excellent example of how to create a characters model sheet. If you want to know how to draw Dirk the Daring, then you can print this out and use this for reference. Now to find one for Singe the Dragon...

New Sean Odesse Walk Cycle! 30 frames - 24fps - on 1's.

The coyote lives!! HE LIVES!! MUAHAHAHAHA! While far from perfect, I'm feeling mighty proud of this latest experiment which took me almost all day to do and was based off of preston blairs double bounce walk cycle. I messed up in a few places because I lost my place and ended up mixing the front and back limbs in a few places. I tried to save it as best I could. Anyway, here it is...Enjoy. :)

Week 03 - assignment 02 - Anthropomorphic Moody Celebs - Johnny Depp

Still a ways to go in terms of drawing a decent likeness but I think it's ok for the assignment.

Walk Cycle v2

I took BoomStone's advice and lifted his head up on the pass and it did improve the cycle tremendously...AND THEN - I just had to keep going and try to get fancy before getting the basics down. Enjoy a 16 frame walk cycle done on 1's..I'll scratch it up to practice and try again later/tomorrow.

Walk Cycle Practice

Been following along in the animators survival kit and practicing various walk cycles in flash. I'm only on page 121 but need to be on page 171 by tomorrow. Good thing I already read this book once already! I have a feeling I'll be reading it many times more (not to mention checking out the vids which I'm almost halfway through)

Master Project part 3: the story so far...

Just postin the current progress. I was supposed to identify common gestures in everyday life. Since I currently don't have access to people, I figured I'd grab a few screenshots from random clips and base my gestures off those.

Week 02 - Assignment 01 - Part 1

This week, we're working on model sheets. I need to do the male character, female character, and one pet, which I'll design tomorrow. Here's what I have so far...

Dragons - Humans with elongated faces.

No...really...Most dragon designs are based off of human facial anatomy, the obvious difference is elongating the front like an american werewolf, adding pointy ears, and then giving the transformed human a lobotomy (there's that wolf thing again, lobo-tomy) by cutting off the top of his head and voila! Instant dragon! Of course, it's always better to use proper reference like reptiles and dinos to base your dragons off of, but if you want your audience (who happen to be human..well, most anyway..) to CONNECT with your dragon, you'de better be sure there's a human underneath that scaley exterior! Don't believe me? Look at Draco from dragonheart! I drew a quick example for a fellow student.

School Project - final pieces

For a speed run, I don't think they came out half-bad...Now to write quick bios...

Class project - antagonist

This is the evil version of the main protagonist. At least, that's my understanding of who the antagonist is supposed to be in the game...the lead character looks into a mirror and this guy will pop out.

Art Institute character project progress

This the male and female leads in a fictional game for character animation class. I still need to come up with the male antagonist which I think is supposed to be the evil version. The male character is going to be a geeky guy who happens to have a private investigation business/hobby on the side. The female is his lifelong friend who happens to be half-dragon. :D

Awesome Digital Storytelling tutorials by Acceptable.Tv!

These are great vids on how to create a story for acceptable.tv, but you can really use this advice for any project!

Part 1: How to structure your story


Part 2:How to write the script


More here!

Epitaph of an Unfortunate Artist

I'm re-reading Richard Williams essential reference "Animator's Survival Kit" for character and object animation class today and wanted to share this poem:

Epitaph of an Unfortunate Artist

He found a formula
for drawing
comic rabbits:

This formula for
drawing comic
rabbits paid,

So in the end he
could not
change the
tragic habits

This formula for
drawing comic
rabbits made.

-Robert Graves

I know for a fact I fell into this pattern when I drew the coyoteville comic strip which was heavily influenced by Warner Brothers and a bit of Disney as well as more than a pinch of Walter Kelly, which will probably take a bit of work to break out of.

New sketch - "The Chase"

Well, I figure if I practice and do something on a daily basis, I'll improve eventually.

Adalard the Darkling

Meet Adelard, he's a new gift for the darkling gift app I'm doing for fun. :3

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam

I keep getting email requests from lonely housewives saying that they want to hook up with me. I don't know about you, but I immediately wonder "Um...marriage counseling?" I mean seriously, you've got to be a pretty desperate housewife to randomly ask for sex by bulk mailing everyone on the internet. It doesn't work. Believe me. I've tried.

Gargoyle Descending

I've posted this everywhere, but in case you missed it, here's a drawing I made a while ago and spiced it up with a bit of photoshop...

I...Live........Again.....

While I wouldn't call it a fresh start, it's more of a fetid rotting corpse rising from the grave to feed upon the flesh of the living sort of new beginning, but regardless...it's a start...and that's what counts!