Weekly Update September 1, 2015 — Still Trying to Make it All Work

Posted on September 1, 2015 by SusanG

Vacations are a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is pretty apparent for most of us. Time of from work, and chance to sleep in, catch up on projects, go visit some place new. The downsides of vacation are not always so obvious, but they are there some what disguised. Ok. Yes there are the obvious downsides when you return to work. I’m
talking about the ones during vacation. Where you stay up too late and then sleep in and get your whole schedule cock-eyed so that it then becomes difficult to get motivated to get things done. That can be very frustrating when you were planning on getting several things done.

As you can tell my vacation from my day job has not started out with quite the bang I had hoped. With some luck and a little discipline on my part, I have time to turn it
around. I last week I was so excited about vacation I was almost giddy. I felt a little silly about it. I’m not going any place. I’m staying home. But I have only 3 things I’m really hoping to accomplish instead of trying to do everything and that might be why I was so excited. Of course being so excited might be why I didn’t get done some of the stuff I wanted to last week. It was Tuesday before the weekly post went out. Though I did have it written the night before. And then it took me a couple of days to get the pictures together and the article written for the Sticks post. Those did take up most of my week. I tend to not register how much time it can really take to write the article and then get it posted. So when I get done getting a post up, I usually have run out of day.

I have been reading “Creating Characters with Personality” by Tom Bancroft and trying to experiment with what I learn. Sometimes it works out pretty good and others, not quite as I expect. It has helped a little with my understanding and it even seems to be stretching my skills some. Of course I’m not putting near the practice time in that I could. Still the concepts seep in and they start to have some influence over what comes out on the paper. The book certainly had some influence on a couple of the sketchbook pieces last week. I even had a bonus piece or two. Though the week was a little slow to get started.

I guess, when you can’t think of anything else to draw a good ol’ clay style pot will do. So that’s what we get for the first entry.

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An attempt to use one of the techniques I had been reading about. I had intended it to look like a person with a bit of a pear shaped head on top of a pear-shaped body. That
so didn’t happen. Instead I have sort of odd-looking penguin? I think?

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This is working a little better. It’s closer to what I was thinking. I kind of like the way it came out. It’s a little different from what I usually do and that’s ok.

 

 

 

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This was definitely influenced by the idea of breaking things down into primitive shapes and also using tilt and angles for posing. I was a little surprised it worked out as well as it did. And no, I’m not sure if it’s an Elf or a Vulcan. You can choose.

 

 

 

 

For this one I started with the glasses. I was going to just drawn sunglasses but it turned out there was a face behind them. So I did the face as well. I am particularly
fond of the way the lips and the nose turned out. Drawing noses and mouths or lips tend to give me tremendous angst. So for both to turn out so well for the same piece,
that’s just an awesome feeling.

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I did have some extra stuff this week. I was at work and about to go to lunch when this gem insisted on being committed to paper. Anyone know her? She looks like she might be
trying to get into some trouble.

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And after reading far enough in the Tom Bancroft book I had an urge to draw one or more of the characters from Big Hero 6. So I got out the book I have on the art of the movie and found a nice sketch of GoGo to work from. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. Though I did have some trouble with a couple of hair sections at first and right hand didn’t quite work. Still I’m very pleased with the results. Oh and the copy notice on the picture is obviously only for my rendition of the character. Disney and Marvel Studios own the copy right on the character and her design.

 

 

That was the sketchbook. I did get that promised article about Sticks posted, in case you missed it. I made a trip to the art supply store to try to find an option for the frame for the guitar piece. That was a bust. Though, I did get some good information and a better understanding of what’s available. So I will probably go with something stock and just let it be cropped to 11 inches by 14 inches.

I also got started on the finishing touches for the guitar piece. I’ve got some detailing that I’m working on and then I’ll see what areas might need an additional layer of
dots. That’s one of the small set of things I’m working on for the vacation week.

Aside from getting some chores done and making it to a third class of Taekwondo this week and going out to see a band play, the rest of the weekend was a bit of a bust. Perhaps next weekend will be more interesting or productive or successful or whatever this one wasn’t. Check back to find out.

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Prepping Sticks for Animating

Posted on August 28, 2015 by SusanG

A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to Sticks the new mascot for SusanG Productions. I had him modeled and ready to set up for animating, then I made some adjustments

thinking they would facilitate animating him. They might have, or not, but they also took away some of the character of Sticks.

When I got ready to start the process of rigging Sticks I thought all his pieces needed to be connected so he was one smooth object and not a bunch of pieces. So I attached all his parts and then went about deleting faces and welding points so that he was one object with the one element and not one object with several elements.

Then I set about starting the rigging process. For those who don’t know, rigging for animation is the process of creating bones and controls to make the animating easier. It helps, when rigging a character, to have them in a T-pose, standing straight with arms straight out to the side.

I hadn’t posed Sticks in the T-pose before I connected his parts so I had to do it after. With all his pieces and parts connected I could only get him in more of an A shaped pose without some serious pinching. This is where I could have stopped and re-evaluated but I pressed on only to discover why a T-pose for rigging and not an A-pose.
So why a T-pose and not an A-pose? It turns out to be pretty simple. With a T-pose it’s easier to see the side of the body and easier to figure out where the joints should be. With an A-pose the hands and arms block that view from the side and so make it more difficult to add the bones. Yes, you can do it from the front or back but there are some parts that are just better or more easily done from the side.

Still I persisted and got started adding bones and controls. Here I have the xray feature turned on and you can see how hard it is to see the bones through the hand and arm.

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I continued along to where I had both legs and their basic controls setup. Here’s what it looks like with Sticks in xray mode.

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Here’s what the bones and controls look like with Sticks hidden. It’s kind of interesting, and will get much more cluttered looking.

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Fortunately, I stepped away from the computer for a while. That gave me the opportunity to reconsider my approach. I didn’t like the way things were going to look and deform with everything connected. It wasn’t going to be the Sticks I designed. And I decided I need to make a small adjustment to the design.

I made my design change first. It would be easier than doing it later. In the original design Sticks had no ankles. However, I have one sketch of him where I was working out the 3D idea, and in that, I gave him ankles. When I started rigging I wondereind if maybe he should have ankles and now he does. Adding them was fairly easy. I had the foresight to save the original design of Sticks as a separate file before I connected his parts so I just went back to that file and added the ankles. I saved that and then saved it as a new file so I could adjust his pose and start rigging.

I still needed all the parts attached so he’s one object and so the skinning will work right. And that’s what I did. I just attached everything but I didn’t connect any of it. This way I have one object with several elements. I can select the individual elements and change them without deforming other parts. That’s the beauty of Sticks.

Here he is now in all his current T-pose glory ready to be rigged.

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It maybe that I’m wrong and this idea won’t work either but it’s worth a try and it should maintain the design and personality of Sticks. We’ll see how it goes.

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Weekly Update August 25, 2015 — Learning Things

Posted on August 25, 2015 by SusanG

No, I’m not late or early. I am right on time.

I have been posting the weekly update on the weekends which is ok but not optimal. When I try to have a post up on the weekend it means that any stuff I get done during that
weekend waits until the next weekend before you get to read about it. That’s not fun. I also don’t want you to miss out on the post. I figure you are a bit like me and don’t get to follow up on article notices that come in on the weekend. I do that follow up during the week when I need a break. So my plan is to change the regular posting day to Monday or Tuesday. That way I get to include any weekend fun and you can have it for a weekday break.

On to the fun stuff, working on the guitar stippling piece.

I really focused on the guitar piece this week because I an on vacation from the day job next week. I wanted to get the rest of the basics inked in and the background
completed so I could let it sit for several days while I decide how much additional stippling it needs. I think letting it sit during the week before vacation is ideal because then I have all vacation I can work on it.

While I was working on the guitar piece I noticed something really interesting. As I was painting the background using the acrylic inks I made some mistakes and went a bit
into the guitar body. Needless to say I was quite annoyed. But I waited until I finished the background to fix it. This is where the interesting bit comes in. I had one spot where I had just lightly crossed the line and one spot where the ink went on much thicker. The lighter one was harder to cover to correct it than the heavy one. I suspect this is because the heavier inked area acts as a gesso for the paper so the corrective dots sit on top and don’t get absorbed by the paper. It never occurred to me to gesso or prime the paper. Now, I’m thinking it might be worth a try. Or at least an interesting experiment.

Here’s a photo of it so far.

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I’ve been struggling a bit with the photos I take of the sketchbook pieces. Sometimes I take them with the phone and sometimes with a regular camera. Both the phone and the camera take good pictures in general but for some reason the camera ones seem to wash out the pencil where the phone ones don’t. So I have been using the phone for the
sketchbook pictures. There are a few reasons that I don’t find this the best way to handle this, only one of those reasons being the upload process. Time to figure something out. I checked with my friend Shan in Austin and she uses a DSLR and Photoshop, if needed. As I thought about why hers might work out better, aside from the obvious differences between her art and mine, I found one other big difference. The angle. The nature of her art pieces is such that her photos are taken with the piece upright like it would appear on a wall. I have been taking my photos with the sketchbook flat on a table and shooting straight down on them. I fight shadows quite a bit this way, and, it seems like I have been fighting glare from light bouncing off the graphite. This week, when I started to take the sketchbook photos I got out the table top easel I inherited from my Grandmother and used that. So far, it looks like it may solve my problem.

Though I focused mostly on the guitar piece this week, I did get to work on rigging Sticks some. It turned out to be a good thing that I only got a day or two to work on it as I’ve had to make some changes. The explanation of the changes and progress are a bit long for this post so I will be posting something about it, with pictures, soon. So for those of you interested in the digital 3D art and animation stuff, don’t fret, I have not abandoned it or forgotten you.

And now here are the sketchbook entries for the week. This was a slow starting week and I really didn’t find much inner inspiration to work from. My favorites are the little bird and the person in the Taekwondo uniform. I think the squirrel will be getting some attention in the future. I have plans for it.

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That’s the week that was. I will be on holiday from the day job next week and I’m not traveling so there will still be posts and hopefully lots of project progress.

Remember to check back for that update on Sticks.

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Weekly Update August 16, 2015 — Productivity out the window

Posted on August 16, 2015 by SusanG

Being ill stinks. It takes so long to recover and while you are recovering you don’t feel like doing anything and can’t really concentrate. Which can kill a good work groove and it seems like motivation and productivity take a running jump right out the window. I am still trying to round them up again. They are not cooperating very well.

What that means is that as much as I wanted to work on rigging Sticks, I didn’t even get started on it. I haven’t gotten back to Bernice either. The only thing I managed one evening was a little time working on the guitar piece. It’s still got a ways to go. And a little more on that in a moment.

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I did manage to get something in the sketchbook each day which made me happy. First up is a little guy that may not be so little and I think might be a bit of a mischief maker. I actually woke up from a nap on Sunday with this image in my head, in color even. It was still hanging around on Monday so I decided it wanted out. I really like it and think it might be another one of those fun to develop type of things.

 

Next up is this lovely Lady Bug, or Lady Bird as some call it.

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I forgot what I started out thinking I was going to draw here. Whatever it was, I ended up with an earbud. It’s not exactly like the ones I have. Still I was keeping those a in mind as I was drawing this one. Personally, I love my earbuds.

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I decided I would make another attempt at drawing a tree from imagination with no reference. I feel like this came out better than the last one. As you might guess, this is a climbing tree. We had one of these in a couple of places that we lived when I was a kid, though we didn’t nail a wood ladder to it.

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20150815_101703_sm_crop_wmFor this one, I was thinking of the bat version of Dracula in Hotel Transylvania and tried to create a creature a little like that. It didn’t go quite as I had hoped. I got the snout wrong for it to be bat like and so it came out a little disturbing. Guess that makes bats another creature I need to practice drawing.

And that was the sketching. I thought I might get a rare Saturday sketch in but I got busy doing chores before I could put pencil to paper.

Among those chores were errands. One of which was to find frames, and mattes, for the pumpkin piece, which is already complete, and the guitar piece I’m still working on. I was partially successful in this venture. I found a great frame and a matte for the pumpkin piece. I’ve already put them together and it looks awesome. 20150816_090700_sm_crop_wmI ran into trouble with finding the right size for the guitar piece and I don’t understand why. The pumpkin piece was fairly easy at 11 inches by 14 inches. The guitar piece is 14 inches by 17 inches. I couldn’t find anything with a aperture of that size. Not even close. I guess I will have to make a trek to the art supply store and hope they have what I need. If not I have an option of cropping it down to a 11 inche by 14 inche size though I will lose some of the work behind the matte. To do it I will have to trim the board down. I’m not sure I like that part, though I kind of like the idea of basically cropping it to the smaller size. I think it will make a bigger impact than trying to keep it the full size. Still, I want to make sure that I can’t find something to fit the full size. It looks like next weekend will involve and excursion.

Now that I’m feeling better I expect to get back to working on things. Sticks still needs to be rigged, the guitar piece needs to be worked on, and then there are all the other projects to work on. I wonder what will get done this next week. Check back and find out.

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Weekly Update August 10, 2015 — The Body Thwarts the Mind’s Intentions

Posted on August 10, 2015 by SusanG

Yes, this is a day or two late. I always intend to have my update posted on Saturday and it usually doesn’t get done until Sunday. This week it’s Monday. The only real excuse I have is that I spent the weekend sick with some upper respiratory viral thing. It made thinking rather difficult, as well as breathing and sleeping. And it meant that all the best intentions I had of getting started on things early in the day and getting chores done and projects worked on, they all went out the door as if being sucked out by a vacuum. It’s very frustrating. I managed only that which really needed to be done over the weekend and everything else has been deferred.

That isn’t to day that I didn’t make some real progress on things this week. I did spend a more time working on the guitar stippling project. That is coming along and I think I have decided what to do about the background. So I’m looking forward to getting that much farther along. No picture of it this week though.

I also worked on my mascot for SusanG Productions. I came up with the idea for him a few monthes ago and have been working on just how I wanted to create him for use since I
want to be able to animate him. Well, in a moment between projects at the day job, I figured out what I could do. It was a pretty obvious answer but I wanted to make sure it
retained the personality of my original stick sketches. I used 3DS Max to build him and put him together. I still need to rig him so I can animated him. For now though, I would like to introduce you to Sticks, the mascot for SusanG Productions.

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It really was my big accomplishment for the week. Now I’m excited to get him rigged and then to start animating him. It might even get me spurred on to work on some of his
friends. This could be a lot of fun.

So to the sketchbook now. I will admit that I started a little slow with ideas this week and when I couldn’t think of anything else on Monday morning I decided to draw my hand. Not very original but still a good exercise.

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This guy reminds me of an animal that when I saw a picture of it it made me think of an either a wrinkly baby or a really old wrinkly person. It had great personality to it. This isn’t that animal as that animal had much bigger eyes and ears but it is inspired by it. I think it’s kind of cute in an odd sort of way.

 

 

It’s a fish. It’s just a fish with big fish eyes and fish lips. And as simple as it looks it was fun to do and amazingly satisfying.20150809_110928_sm_crop_wm

So I wanted to do a freaked out deranged sort of bird of a cockatiel or parakeet. This didn’t really turn out the way I had hoped. It did turn out a bit Frankenstein-like. I think I got the head too tall and not sure the eye is quite right. Oh well, it does serve as a slightly disturbing picture of a budgie though.

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This started out all about the hat. That was what I was drawing, though not from reference, just from imagination. At some point it needed more so it got someone wearing the hat. I’m actually kind of pleased with the way this turned out. Not my best portrait work but certainly a likeness of someone I don’t doubt. I really like the way the nose came out. Those are always a challenge for me. And the mouth as just a thin line really worked out as well.20150809_111045_sm_crop_wm

There was one other thing accomplished this week. Well, actually this weekend. I finally got my other website working. Or rather the developers at GoDaddy were finally able
to clear an A record that had the site being intermittently available. It was quite frustrating. But things look stable now so I guess I had better post an update over there.

Here’s hoping this week pans out better and things get back on track. I have a few projects that I really want to work on and even a couple with some deadlines so it would be really good if I could kick this virus thing and get back on track. I’d especially like to make some good progress rigging Sticks as well as some really good progress on the guitar piece. Everything else I will consider bonus.

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