I've been completely done with classes for the summer for a little under a month, and let me tell you something: I am so relieved! Degree Project (DP) was NO joke... I barely finished it! And while not totally satisfied with it, I have to at least pat myself on the back for completing something so crazy and difficult. I had to drop one of my critical studies classes just to focus more on DP and I still didn't have enough time! I'll post the mostly finalized version of my Degree Project movie here soon, but I wanted to update the DP blog with all the extra progress work first ^^;
My Animation Portfolio class was really great! I was really stressed at times because I was worried about finding time to work on DP, but it was so awesome getting our professional stuff done. I'll show you all the business cards, dvds, and dvd covers, I did in another post soon! Also, I really need to thank my teacher for being so understanding about my situations with DP throughout the semester. You rock Steve! :D
Narrative Illustration, the class I busted my butt to get into, did not, unfortunately, live up to my expectations, mainly because of the professor who taught the class. Their bad attitude, short-temper, tactlessness, and unwillingness to take responsibly for things, made for a difficult working environment and made me all too glad that I was part of the Animation Department.
Unpleasantness aside, I did learn a lot of great things about narrative illustration. One of our assignments for the class was to make a children's story book with some very odd constraints.
The teacher gave me and each of my classmates a small plastic toy sea creature or insect. We then had to create a short story that started and ended in 8 pages or panels featuring the creature we were given. Also, the story had start with the line, "One Fine Day, a giant _______ fell to earth."
Since I got a purple crab, guess what mine was about... That's right! A DOG! :D
Anyway, I wanted to make the style cute and fun, for a children's book, but also simple to draw as possible. This was because I would have to complete multiple other assignments for this class during this assignment, and I had to worry about work from other classes... Like DP.
I first started the assignment by sketching the whole story on (crappy) normal paper. It didn't need to be perfect, but it had to be clean enough that others could understand it and that I would be able to change it if needed.
Next, linework. I wanted a very clean, but simplistic line, so I decided to do the linework in Flash.
I couldn't figure out at first how I wanted to color it, but I did want to experiment. Finally, I came up with the idea to try a technique I learned from my super awesome teacher from last semester, John Roman.
The technique involved painting with watercolor on watercolor paper or bristol board, then scanning the paper into Photoshop and applying the watercolor to the figure, background, etc.
It didn't make much since, as they only ended up taking the two sheet paper copy version, but my teacher strongly suggested I bind my book together, for the reason that it was meant to be viewed as a storybook. My teacher lightly mocked my lack of book binding skills, and though annoying, it was true. But hey, I did the best I could.
So here's it is the finished product in "comic form", the way I handed it to my teacher.
And before you say it, yes, I know it's missing the word "do ", but I'm not going back through several Photoshop documents just to change it. I'm lazy, I admit it :P
This was a cool assignment and I was very happy with the results. I'm not interested in writing children's books, however I think I would definitely consider illustrating one.
Anyway, thanks for reading! Hopefully I'll have more work up sooner than later... >.>
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