Knight Beetle Concept Sketches

Another beetle design, this time, a Hercules Beetle! This is the knight that Squire Adrian works under. I'm most happy with the designs on the middle-left.

He's a little complicated so I might try to simplify him a little. The one dilemma I'm having is about the stripe between his eyes. Hercules beetles have this really cute yellow stripe there, and I like how it looks a lot, but I also want him to have that knight helmet...face-plate...thingy there on his head too. But it covers up the stripe and thus the stripe just clutters the face. I really like the helmet though! But the yellow stripe was going to match his back/wings (which were to be yellow, too). Maybe I'll make the helmet gold, and wings gold too? Decisions.

As for personality, I don't have much right now, except he's a very nice guy, unlike his squire. He will occasionally give Adrian a "Now, now, no need to look down on [X person]" scolding once in a while.

Rotoscope Project with Kuiper

Youtube description (please read!): A rotoscope project I did for my into to animation class. It's my character, Kuiper the frog, drawn over frames from a stock video of a player hitting a baseball. It looks wobbly because the camera on the video was wobbly too. His proportions are also a little off because I matched up his joints to the human ones. But overall I'm happy with it, for working in a short time-frame.

also I think a frame at around 8 to 9 seconds was doubled by accident, oh well.

We had to add the title and ending disclaimer as part of the project. I forgot to edit one part of the "template" disclaimer at the end, so it says my teacher's name in there instead of my own at one part, woops.

Storyboard Project 1

The first storyboarding project for my animation class. The prompt was that your character walks into their "office" and finds someone there that they didn't expect.

In my case, Nicolai walks into his supplies closet to find Mr. Dentson looming above. Making each layout look good was tricky but fun.

Adrian concept sketches

Hey what's this! A character concept page that isn't something old! Doodled these in my notebook at school today, after thinking of a new character.

His name is Squire Adrian, he's a Giant Fijian Longhorn Beetle. He is also, of course, a squire, which are something like a lnight's assistant. He's veeery proud of being a Squire, so much so that he's generally very snooty and up-tight about it.

I was thinking he'd be a great "Rival" for Nicolai, like an antagonist. For one, even upon meeting Nicolai, he is always scoffing at the fact that Nic is a "lowly" butler, and gloating about how his job is so much more important. He insists that he does WAY more for his knight than Nicolai will ever do for the Queen.

Also, of course, being a beetle, he has 4 arms, and is thus even more on a competitive level with Nicolai on who can multi-task the best.

I'm pretty proud of the design so far, I think. His final design for now is the one on the lower right, I am liking the square-tipped antenna for some reason. I still need a design for the knight, who will probably be a Hercules Beetle or something just as cool and tough. Also a good back story for why the Queen has decided to hire a knight. I'm thinking probably some trivial reason. I'm very pleased to have at least one insect character now, though!

Links I used:
-A real life image of a Giant Fijian Longhorn Beetle: http://www.zin.ru/animalia/coleoptera/images/sources/xixherfm.jpg
-A summary on the life and duties of a squire: http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/squires.htm

Plunky Vector Drawing

For a class assignment, I made a Plunky vector drawing in Flash. He's made up of a lot of movable parts, so it was tricky to get all the lines to match up. I'm still learning Flash but I think I did ok, following the process the teacher taught!

I'm not the most keen on animating in Flash with tweens and such, that future assignments will entail, but it'll be good practice for using the program. I'd like to be able to do nice frame-by-frame animation in it some day! If only Flash's vector tools weren't so annoying. We need a program like Flash with all the onion skin and cool time-line features, but with raster drawing tools instead. You either have to annoyingly Pen Tool everything, or bog down the program with way too many paintbrush strokes. I wonder if Toon Boom is any better for that, we'll be using that in class too sometime.

Site Update: Fixed Gallery

http://www.awgosh.com/gallery.html

Fixed up the gallery page, so the thumbnails wouldn't get pushed around or make you scroll down when you load a big image. Much better on the left, I think! All I need now is a back button (lazy) and an image to replace the little white square above "Choose an image on the left".

Sketches: Zooomm

Drawn in class, not so good really, Nic's head is a bit too tall. I think Nic only does the rabbit-like hop when running SUPER fast.

Next posts should be more substantial!