One of the gaps in my AM training is that I never managed to squeeze any 4 legged critter animation into my assignments. Once again HighEnd3D came to my rescue with this quite nice and free horse rig. This is my first attempt at a quadruped walk, second spline pass. After I was halfway into it, another animator told me that in his opinion a realistic horse was absolutely the hardest 4 legged thing to animate. Good thing I started there then, ha ha!

A couple of months ago Project Rooftop announced a Wolverine re-design contest. I had never entered one of their contests and thought Wolvie would be a good place to start, so I sketched a bit but never came up with any stellar ideas before the deadline, just this little drawing which I have now colored in. The winners have just been announced; the grand and first prize entries are drawn in completely different styles yet both are very awesome. You can see them here. Congrats to the winners!

I graduated from Animation Mentor last weekend and it was great. I have no pictures or anything else to show for it yet though, because right after graduation I got trounced by a nasty flu (Christine Fournier apparently got it too- does that make Richard the disease vector, or was it those British blokes?) and I have yet to fully right myself. Instead, here’s the updated version of my reel to peruse, which includes a few shots from my still in progress short film.

Warning! I’ve still got a lot of work to do on the sound, so you may want to take your headphones off before playing this. The whistle sound effects are still quite shrill.

I can’t wait to get a job and get out there, but in the meantime I’ll keep plugging away at my short film and the other shots I have in progress.

I’ve had this image kicking around my desktop for over a year now. Benton Jew posted it on his blog with a request for people to color it in for him, and I just never got around to it. Well today was the day I did get around to it, and it gave me an opportunity to test out some things I have recently learned about Photoshop’s color dynamics brush feature. Since I had the benefit of seeing what everyone else had done, I decided to go a more noir-ish direction than anybody had tried.

As a way to warm up in the mornings before I start animating I’ve been doing these facial studies from the tv. I’ve been trying to keep it to 5 minutes a drawing, my goal being to get it down to 2 minutes each pretty soon here. All done in black colored pencil or china marker so I can’t cheat and erase.

It’s actually been quite an education on how shadows and the imperfections that give a person’s face it’s character can be exaggerated, downplayed, or completely obliterated depending on how lighting and make up are used in television and film.

Graduation is still several weeks away, but my last class is finished and I think it’s beginning to sink in.

I have lots more to learn. So, inspired by my fellow AMer Jamie whose been blogging her experiments, I’m going to be doing lots of little quick tests like this so I can practice timing & spacing, use non-AM rigs, and learn things we skipped at AM like these mysterious cycle thingies…