Interview for Limerick Post

A screen shot of my interview with the Limerick Post digital edition. The paper copy is out this weekend, 23 Oct.

Pretty happy all in all - hopefully it'll drum up some business!

Thanks again to Rose Rushe at the 'Post for making me sound life i might be fun to be around.... sorta.

Still Life With Jeans

 A second to add to the Still Life Series. This had some challenges - the crusty muffin look, and the denim were a bit of a pain. Which is to say the whole thing was tricky, but started with a good sketch, and it made it bearable at least...

I have a screen capture recording that i'll have to edit and speed up, to let any one interested to look at the process that was gone through to get this done. Could be anther couple of days...

Update: Video uploaded! Was a bit of a churn - 10.5 hours reduced to just under 9 minutes, speed increased by 8000% (for god's sake....). 

Pencil 2D Animation Software Revisited

Well, maybe i should have found out about it sooner, but i just jumped straight in and began drawing... didn't look at te size of the area i was working to, just pushed through to about 1500 frames (no, not every frame, just the animatic...).

So, then i try to export and it can't handle a file over about 700px wide it would seem. Fine, i'll render it at 600 wide. But now the animation is really small, and can hardly be seen.

Try camera layer, you say? Right! Oh, hang on now nothing renders, though i do get a folder with an image sequence of the entire thing....


I think this may not be for me.

In import into Flash proved difficult with 1500, 1000px wide jpg's, and after a whole lot of crashing, went and batch resized the images for import in Photoshop. A million years later, importing a few humdred at a time seemed the best way.

Then came the deleteing of static frames - when pencil spat out the jpg sequence the were 12 frames or jpgs for every second that the picture stood still as well as for motion. This was expected but it did lead to a bit more arseing around than i was perhaps wanting.

Is there a lesson learned?

Yep.

Anyway, here's where it's up to now spat out by Flash... the timing is still pretty bad but it's progress people, progress!

Beneath

Submitted for Illustration Friday topic "Beneath".

I had worked through a few idea for this one, intending to go with the main gist that something would be partly submerged, one thing on the top, and beneath it turns out to be something else, eg, an island that is actually the shell of a turtle, sort of thing....

I had a sketch of an 'island' and the water line, then moved down and it ended up looking a bit like a body floating backside up. Then it got tied up in ropes. The i added a weight to it. Then going back to the 'island', i drew a palm tree, coconuts and a monkey.... it all got a bit stupid  - looked like the tree was sticking outta the date -  so i pulled back to just the body completely submerged.

Decided to try a new 'medium' of Painter 11 that i haven't used, the Airbrush. I quite like it , but it'll take some getting used to! Might need to look at getting one of these if i want to keep using it....

Pencil 2D Animation Software

I've down load the free 2D animation software, Pencil. So far it's actually pretty impressive, and i appologise to the guy geeking away in his room for no money to make it, but i wasn't expecting much. But i'm kinda into it now....

Issues i've come across to date:
- Adding length to timeline doesn't always work. Toggling scrub size, and actually resetting the number in the timeline length field seemed to trigger it to work properly. eg i've upped it to 1000 frames one time, then dropped it back to 900 another.
- Re-opening the file causes the timeline to revert back some default length eg, my animation is currently about 600 frames, but i cannot scrub past about 280...
- Marquee tool to copy doesn't disappear automatically. To make it work select object to copy -> ctrl-c -> click another part of the screen to deselect before trying anything else... like pasting whatever it was you wanted wherever it was you wanted it.
-Adding a new key frame adds a blank keyframe. This requires one to redraw the whole frame again (unless you want to go copy the previous).... would rather it set a key frame with what is in the previous, allowing you to erase the parts that need to be altered, eg: hand or foot or face. Maybe i should be putting all this on separate layers, but sure....

Anyway, these issues aside it's great fun so far. Zero crashes, software freezes etc.

Keep you posted.

Until then, here's what i've been doing. It's a kinda detailed animatic (work in progress....) for a future attempt at animating the Acrobat image i did recently...

Blogger has compressed it , so it doesn't show up too well at the moment, but when it's actually inked in, it'll be much more visible.

Process Diary: Cowen

Starting off some of the process diary stuff. This is a work in progress of the leader of Ireland, Brian Cowen. I've done a quick one of him before, but wasn't completely happy with the likeness, so i'm having another stab at it.

Getting the jowls right is more of a challenge than i'd thought possible, in particular getting the to hang properly off those mammoth lips, but at the same time kinda prop them up...


Well see how this develops over time. Hope to keep going with it, but have to juggle a couple of other jobs at the moment too. Maybe it'll be ready for Halloween...