There was a BLOG here, but it's gone now.

Okay, the first week is up and this is what I've been up to.

Life drawing sounds like its going to be pretty interesting this term. i normally suffer terribly doing lifedrawing, mainly because although Manga tutorials are an excellent starting point for proportions because (surprisingly)the body proportions are the same, getting out of the habit of drawing men as muscular and people with overly large eyes compared to their face doesn't happen easily.


The project is drawing figures, but replacing the head with that of an animal. We're being instructed to look at the work of J.J Grandville (apparantly he was also called Gerard, but I think J.J sounds more slick) a french satirical artist who created anthropomorphic representations of Parisian society as a strange mirror to show the more bestial aspects of a person. Here's a pic-

The point of the exercise is so we don't get hung up on drawing faces, which suits me fine because they're my worst part. It also opens up some research into anthropomorphic art,which I have tried (although with more animal bodies) but can certainly help me improve.

I do have some lief drawing of various animal skulls to post up, but that will have to wait until I use the scanner because my camera decided to die on me, bless its cotton socks. I rather like drawing skulls for some morbid reason, and found that because of the blankness of expression of the eye sockets and exposed teeth that drawing the skulls from different angles could give the skulls more emotion. I'll post more on this next blog when I hopefully have the images, but there was a particularly coy looking skeleton that was from a "Chevrotain", which is a mouse deer-

Cute, isn't it?

Animation wise, the group have had to animate a circle in 12 frames that shows it morphing into something, before morphing back to make a big ol' collection of shape-shifting circles. I went for something obvious from a circle shape, an egg, so I made it a little more complex by having it bounce upwards before it hatches (briefly).

I liked this one, but I decided I wanted something alittle more complex. There isn't much point in creating animations if I keep going for an easy option, so I had the idea of turning the circle into a doorknob and the real focus of the piece being whatever it was behind the door...here's the rough version before it was coloured.

I got the colouring idea from seeing the sketch work of Darrien Gibson (http://darriengibson.blogspot.com/), who uses big swathes of colours you wouldn't expect to go together to give a strange acrylic-like effect just using markers. This was made using mainly felt tips.

I like this one, but I decided it didn't really keep to the project brief of a circle morphing, being more a circle turning on it's side, so I handed in the egg instead. Still, this one continues my love-affair with japanese mythology (that's an onryo if you didn't know) and gave me some experimentation with colour.

Whil working on the ghost above, I had an idea I'm tentatively calling "Rejection Girl", a collection of simple line-art animations featuring some poor girl being turned down by every man going. I think if I can get several done, I'd put them together into one larger one. So far, the possible ideas I've thought of include her being turned down by the sun and a manga character for being a different art style. I'd like to do these with other people if I get the chance, so I'd better get stalking-er, looking for creative people.