Timeplan review

I think that I worked very similar to what I have planned on my timeplan in the beginning.

I know that when I have first planned it out, I would have finished it all by now, but I am still on the animating stage as I write this. I think that is because part way through the painting process I was being too of a perfectionist and kept trying to perfect my painting too much which has stressed me out too much and made me lose my motivation. I tried to solve that problem by painting/ sketching a couple of my own, personal doodles to get my head around my demotivation (which has helped to regain my confidence). I was ready to give up my concept once again because of all that, but I am very happy that I managed to push through and get over all that stress and the doubts that I had in my mind at the time.

I feel like sometimes I am too hard on myself with my artworks and stress too much on the smallest of details and try to focus on making my art “perfect” and a lot of the time I forget about the emotions and feelings that I wanted my painting to give out. As well as making the whole process fun and enjoyable for myself.

I know now that in the future I should relax more and enjoy whatever I do since I do feel like I want to really do art as a full-time job.

Weeks update + notes

These 2 past weeks I have been effectively working from home on my fmp. I found it very useful and I managed to concentrate very well on the project and on the problems that needed solving.

I managed to finish the painting last week and started on the animating in After effects. Since I already have experimented with After Effects, I knew exactly what I needed to do to animate the painting the way I wanted to. In the beginning, the animation was only 9 seconds long, but I have decided to change it to 30 seconds instead, to make it more enjoyable to look at, as well to stop the choppy end and beginning (since I could not loop it properly because of the way I animated the beginning and end).

I had a couple issues with the way the puppet tool pins appeared on the timeline and was very puzzled why they linked the way they did, but I managed to overcome the problem by just trying to animate the pins without having had to undo any of them. It proved to be a little more difficult than I expected but I am very happy to have managed to overcome this small obstacle.

I have also found out that by double-clicking on a layer in After Effects, it brings that layer to a new window and it makes it a whole lot easier to animate because you don’t have all the background and other elements to get in the way/ distract you. It also makes the animation not as blurry when moving a pin (the program does this to cope with the CPU being used- it means it’s loading the movement).

Weeks update- working at home + problem solving

In these couple of weeks I have decided to work at home. I felt like this was a very good decision. In College I always feel distracted and a lot of the time I have issues installing drivers so I end up wasting a lot of the time. Where at home I have my art workspace all set-up and ready for me to crack on with my project.

I also felt really unwell and too weak to come in but that didn’t stop me from carrying on working on my fmp at home.

PROBLEM SOLVING: 

The problems I have with the project are luckily small. I’m struggling to get the right perspective on the character’s arms and her legs the right length and size for the low perspective. I knew that the low-perspective I chose to paint the character in, was not going to be an easy choice but I still decided to push my limits and overstep my skill level and try new things.

I’m slowly progressing and finding new reference photos for the perspective that I need so hopefully I will manage to find the right one and finish painting and start animating, which won’t take that long at all.

 

Notes

 

• –talk about how my idea changed from my very first idea
• which artist influenced me the most
• artist comparison

Technical problems and problem solving

In the middle of my project I have set myself a goal of finding a great program to 2.5D animate my artwork.

In the beginning, I felt quite confident about using a program called “Spine”, which I thought was amazing and the reviews were very positive about it. But unfortunately it was very much out of my budget and a 7 day trial is not efficient enough time for me to animate everything.

After some research, I managed to find other programs that were also designed for 2.5D animating, but didn’t really stand out to me.

My second program that I managed to get my hands on, was “Moho pro 12”, which is a very similar program to Spine. I really liked the rigging you can do on it and I even experimented a little with my old fmp from year 1 on it. I separated everything I wanted to animate onto layers and tried animating. I was sure that I wanted to use it for my fmp but again, I was not satisfied enough. I wanted to really push my fmp to it’s limits and make it seem really professional, fluent and amazing.

My last resort was After Effects. I can truly say that I am very pleased with the program and I feel that it gives me everything that I ever wanted for my FMP. It’s a professional program that I was looking for and I am very happy using it so far.

WEEKS UPDATE

I haven’t been able to post a lot of week updates since my house move and having no internet but here is a small update on what I have been up to.

In these couple of weeks I have been focusing a lot on the actual creation of my FMP (the sketch) and After Effects research. Since I have never had any live briefs or tutorials on how to use it, I had to really focus on finding my own tutorials for it through YouTube, as well as my own experimentation with the program. I feel that I have learnt quite a lot by just experimenting with it by myself but I am very glad that I was able to find some really good tutorials that were able to explain very well the things that I needed to create and experiment for my FMP.

PROJECT IDEA CHANGE + PROBLEM SOLVING

Somewhere along the line of painting my FMP, I have decided to change the concept from the girl sitting down with the foxes, to a woman with her companion jaguar in a jungle. I wanted to go with the second idea first, but I didn’t feel confident enough with the low angle perspective that I really wanted to use in it. Luckily, after a lot of reference photos and some YouTube videos, I managed to push through and sketch out a drawing that I felt quite proud of. The thing I had some troubles with, was the jaguar’s awkward position and it’s perspective. In the beginning, I painted the jaguar coming down a big log but the perspective didn’t match to the girl so I had to scratch that idea. Later on, my friend suggested for me to try and draw the big cat laying down in her legs, that idea luckily has worked out quite well. I also had some troubles with the jaguar’s head position since I never painted an animal like him before. But it was nothing that some reference photos couldn’t help with.

TO-DO LIST

1. Formative Assessment
2. Update project proposal and evaluation
3. Harvard referencing
4. Research panther reference photos for FMP
5. Post concept sketches
6. Write about project change + screenshots
7. Artist research (LOL artist)
8. Experiment with rigging on After Effects
9. Post screenshots for FMP + process

Sketches

Here are some concept sketches that I did for my FMP character design. I wanted my character to look like she’s in a forest in winter so I wanted to give her some nice clothes to fit the theme but also make the painting really stand out. I tried to also do some sketches of lanterns because I am thinking of making the wolf hold one.