So I will share my "other" art for the next few months as most of the character assets will be under wraps at least until we publish the app. But I have other quick art to share along the way and I can still talk about the process and provide the resources and journey textually, right?

So the next couple of days I'm looking at PERSPECTIVE. I need to nail it down for my Duke Day For Annie as well as for the other projects (Whateverafter, Becoming and Lytee).  As a matter of fact as soon as I finish the post I'll be sitting through this one: Four point perspective, and later on review some videos on animating in FLASH.

When I say nail it down, that means at one point I'm going to have to get obnoxious about drawing everything I see. I've found if you do it so much you don't have to "think" about, have a REAL grasp, it has an immediacy and power and you become fearless. I had actually learned this in artschool. I had avoided hands and feet as a kid, because they were too "hard". Granted my then-drawing teacher Ed Douglas had the modernist mantra droning in my ear, but it was still a joke enough that when I would draw it I would also label it: "This is not a CHAIR!".

Even then with the text and image.

But we were to draw hands and feet for a week, and a strange thing happened. After a few days of frustration, I not only started concentrating on the relationships, but fell in love with creating their image. I did compulsively, obsessively, can't-sit-my-butt-down-without-drawing-hands-and-feet for a month. Now I understand their forms so well, I can "draw" a hand from memory, because I understand how their forms work and relate. Which doesn't take away from the best way to draw, LOOKING at what you're drawing. It all just adds to the image, I think.

I did the same thing with the letters "r" and "s", when studying calligraphy. They were my problem letters. So I did them ad nauseum with the same process. By gummy my "r"  have rhythm and my "s"es are downright springy!

In other words, embrace what you avoid, often times you do it because you KNOW you lack. So give yourself that spontaneity and power.

Last night watching a bit of the tube, I could only allow it if I were drawing. To my surprise, I'd drawn Oscar enough he fell off the tip of my Sharpie. Which is fabulous because it will be easy to create a number of images of him and more naturally animate him.  Probably to get a little freer with him as well. Now to give myself the rest of the characters this week. Today I think will be kingfisher, koala and if I have the time, Duckbilled Platypus, because I keep "seeing" him.

Till then, this is my current "Agy" project for my Cafe Press Store, Imagyne. I have another one that is more calligraphy and writer, oriented, Agy Shtuff. My sister had suggested doing a series of "eyes". I had thought about play on words (this means Snake Eyes, in case it's not clear, lol).

Stops and starts

I've been away for a bit. Some of it was life taking me by the hand. Some of it has been my attempt to grab some know-how. I've set a daunting path, so the way I approach and keep at it, is going to be a big determiner of whether I do this successfully. I had to learn HOW a book app/ebook is made (Flash and InDesign are the industry standard, and happily Adobe offers a Cloud subscription).

Then I had to cobble together the tutorials on how to do this, and I'm happy to say between the Youtubes and web, I've been able to get a good idea on what I need to do. I've set this week as a goal for making my first animation, and of course I shall share! Another blog post I'll share some of my favorite links if people are interested in figuring out how to dabble themselves-- it's FUN!

In the middle of all of it, I loved some of my drawings of the animals of Margot's story, but they didn't rise to the level of  'characters'. And I so want them to be identifiable characters, as well as worthy of animation. Amazon offered two books from character designer Tom Bancroft, and I ordered them, (Creating Characters with Personality and Character Mentor, if you're interested in taking a look).

But as much as I love the images, the discrepency of what I saw in my head and what I was drawing, though I could see personalities, were far apart.

Tom's books reinforced what I knew, but tweaked a few things, that I'd not really factored. Even though I knew about it, it took rereading it and thinking about it, for those elements to end up on my radar. I decided to push completely in the other direction, draw in shapes, working for a chibi effect. Here's some of the results.

A little more along the lines, but still not there by any means. So still pushing this idea, and absorbing Tom's Mentor book, which is about taking character design one further. My next post, I'll take one character and show how I meld these images/concepts and talk a little bit about how to develop the character visually.

I think the great thing is to have FUN! I say this a lot, and will be saying it a lot. I'd lost sight of how much I enjoy doing this sort of thing. And truthfully, if it wasn't so much FUN (and hey no one dies, so how serious do I have to take this? Just enough to, yeah, you got it, FUN for everyone), it would be too durned scary.

And I'll leave you with my space alien Roo: