Monday, January 31, 2011

Goosed Out


Today I discovered a hard as a rock baguette hiding behind some kitchen pots and heard the loud quacking of stupid Canada geese who chose not to migrate. (They are now freezing their butts off as a consequence for being so lazy) Since they are already fed by so many people, but still choose to be jerks to everyone (there's about 50 of them and they hang out at the parking lot near my apartment building) I jumped the bandwagon and thought I'd get some nice inspiration feeding the birds. Yes, I am 19. I got some great photos, some beaks and wings in my face (animal instinct for food is scary..) and one bit my butt to get my attention and be fed. All in all, my characterization of my character goose (scroll down) is pretty accurate. Selfish, irate and...eats anything. About all these geese seem to do. And soil the kids playground too..

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

My First Go at Animation


Clara & Goose is a project I've been working away on for the last 3 months. I have no formal training in animation (yet hopefully) but this does not stop me from trying and cramming my head with animation books and software manuals. So as far as this animation goes, character design is done traditionally, using animation paper and a home made light box which came out to a fraction of the cost of a drafting/light table.

Here's a quick pencil test preview of some scenes from the short:

Clara & Goose Pencil Test from Yuliya Stone on Vimeo.



The pencil animation is 3/4 done at this point, I'm thinking ti will be about a minute long, and I'm now starting to consider how to ink/colour the short. Here are some test trials I went through before I settled on the final draft. And its time consuming, all 3.
1)Digital Inking - the really hard pen lines don't really work with the organic bouncy feel of the character, plus it takes 30 minutes to ink each frame..(I have about 400-500)But colouring is fast and effective as the paths are clean and you can just paint bucket the thing in minutes.

2)Pencil Inking - takes only 6/7 minutes a frame but scans horribly, magic wand tool picks up nothing when I try to colour as there is so much grey going on, and it blends the character with the background way too much.

3)India Ink - takes about as 4-5 minutes a frame, but about 1-2 extra minutes to fix up the drawings as I ink the rough directly and some of them are messy or unfinished. Colouring picks up alright,t here is space between colours where the line goes over, but by setting it to multiply, it isn't noticeable. And I like the look of it best. Let me know your thoughts if you have any.



More of this spam will soon come our way, enjoy!

Saturday, January 15, 2011


Since everyone else seemed to have one, I've decided to jump the art-blog wagon because yes, I am a meek follower of things and ways of doing. And to start it off, here's a crappy 1 hour sketch of a character from some of my old work.