Character Design - Assignment

In highlight of the enviroment design workshop I did two weeks ago, we had to do one of people.
We we're given an assignment to design people that would exist in your world.
I found this to be a bit vague and hard to do in such a short time, but I picked the one where
I had to design a character that was similar to me. So how do I make a character, that is similar to me,
in a Art Deco post-apocalyptic setting? Not sure I did, but I gave it a try.

In regard of character design, I should add this little thing too. I did this character design of a butterfly for a storyboard assignment. It was never used, but it was still fun to design the appearence and behaviour of your own character. I think I would have a lot of fun being a character designer or concept artist for a project.

Action and Reaction

New 2D animation. Back to the cubeman, who is surprised by a unusual ball.
Yes, folks, another animation with balls.

My 3D balls

My very first 3D animation, and its really not something to get your hopes up on.
Basicly the assignment was to animate two balls that bounces in each its own speed.

Creating a world - assignment

This is a assignment we got handed today, to create a fictional world based on a artstyle.

I chose Art Deco, and based my world in a post-apocalyptic setting, with flaming cars, barbwired walls and other forms of chaos.

Assignment: Storyboard

We got an assignment to draw a storyboard for a pre-written situation that we had to describe ourselves
through storyboarding.

Bouncing cube

Oh, and I also made a quick animation of a cube shaped man who jumps from one place to another.
This was a excercise on how to make something "lifeless" as expressive as possible.
I will most likely go back and fix this, but here you go.

Collaboration project - My part

We had a collaboration project in class, where everyone had to animate a certain theme using the very last frame of the person before you as a starting point. This proved quite difficult, not the actual animation (that was quite a breeze), but to find the person before you and have him/her hand you the last frame before the deadline.
I merely started from a certain point in the animation, forseeing what the person before me would work on, and just worked towards the end. After that I just waited on the last frame to arrive, and animated the last few drawings to complete it. That is why the color of the paper may look different in the first second, rather then the rest.

A practice in muscles (and some coloring thrown in)

This one is a bit old. It's actually one of the sketches I submitted for my portfolio to the Digital Animation course.
Wanted to draw a muscly warrior, but ended up with a muscly softy. Later on he dances in the meadow and picks flowers. I always take a long time when drawing complex muscles like this, because every muscle group has to interact with the movement of him raising his arm and letting the butterfly land on his finger.
As you might guess, it would be a lot more difficult to re-draw every single one of his muscles for every frame, which is why I notice in superhero cartoons, like Batman or Superman, that the muscles are often "suggested" by use of strategic lines that says "this man is buff", without actually going into great details of the every muscle groups and rather draw biceps, chest and abs.

As you can also see, I took the time to really define his muscles to get the realistic impression of size and depth, to seperate each muscle and not just make him a big lump of mess. I would admit that this guy would not represent the average human male, but it's fun to play around with the image of a exaggerated human being, like most superhero comicbook artists does.

Here we have the same man, but with colors. Even the butterfly has been colored. Good for it.
The point of this was to play around with how to avoid mono-colored skin and actually make it look more human, and make it interact with possible light sources. I used a "make-up" brush on Adobe Photoshop, which can be found on deviantart.com for free, and gently brushed the skin with it to make certain areas darker then others and give the skin some contrast. I kept the dark outlines too, since I have a soft spot for that kind of art-direction.

New ball to play with

Geez... I seem to be getting a lot of balls in this course.

Anyway...

Another short assignment, where I had to animate a bouncing ball.

Took about 30 minutes, normally 15, but I forgot to make the lineart black for the

camera to see.

Here is a updated one. I didn't like the previous, so I went back and gave it more life.
Now you can see the ball spinning as it bounces.