Barbie & Ken

I was grinning ear to ear this afternoon as I was painting Barbie & Ken as well as three children (not pictured). I'm so thrilled that this illustration style & process that I have been developing over the last couple years is so useful in this animation project. I'm also thrilled with how naturally the designs are coming together.

Also, in a testament to simultaneous contrast Barbie is a blonde and her green hair will look very yellow in the context of the scene I'm dropping her in.

Neighborhood Scene Revisited

I started playing with my puppet inside the neighborhood scene and wasn't thrilled with the energy between the two. I decided to add more detail and change some little color aspects. Here you can see a shot that will likely never be in the finished animation, but is more exciting than the actual framing with the tops of the houses cut off!

Also, if you look closely you can tell that I used a funky transparency mask on the clouds so that they look like tissue paper. I hope I can find other places to use this effect, because it looks pretty sweet.

Animation Color Keys

Making major headway on my autobiographical animation. Worked out some of the details in my storyboard and did color keys for the whole thing. I didn't actually HAVE to do this step, but I see professional animation studios doing it and it just looks fun! I feel like I could refine these little drawings and have a storybook. I also feel like this simple retro style would be perfect for the animation all by itself! But the assignment is to do a puppet-show-theater style thing with a shallow depth of field, and that's what I'm going to do!

Also, here's the first set (of the neighborhood from the childhood scene) rigged & lit in After Effects. I tried to make it look like the set it built out of different kinds of paper and painted finishes. The whole thing should end up looking somewhat handmade. If you look at this and the little boy puppet from my last post you can get a pretty good feeling for the look of the film.

Character design.

Dear blog, sorry to have neglected you. I'm in school and it's just a lot of work! I have been creating a lot, check out my little explorations on vimeo.

I'm currently working on a 1-minute animated autobiography. It's going to be Richard Scarry animal-style. This is the puppet I created of me as a little boy. And no, I don't remember being dressed like a hipster BUT that's a real shirt! I wish they made things that awesome now. Capped sleeves, diagonal arrows, great color combo. If I had a time machine I would make go back and get that shirt.