16/12 - Hand Puppet

Sorry for the lack of posting! I've been visited by my lovely mum for the past few days and I decided to put everything on hold. I don't get to see her often since going to Uni.

Today's post is the hand puppet from Princess Pants. He's designed to be a small decoy for the main bad guy with huge black sluggy eyebrows.

I've been inspired by the Creator from Little Big Planet, who pops up in the background occasionally and steals other NPCs. It's your job as sackboy to rescue the kidnapped. There's a small picture up there to show how he works, and that's how I'd love for the puppet to be. Ideally, the puppet would be more angular, as the big bad boss is, but that's not how a cloth puppet works. 

Could it be implemented to be a red-herring? Or an acting good guy? Hmm...

12/12, Foreground Plant Life

Today I've been working on some foreground work for Princess Pants. Today's an early post because there's a whole lot of busy going on today socially, so stuff is being posted at half one as opposed to eleven pm. Success!

Also, bonus tree ladders from yesterday. More concepts are always great. It gives me more to pick and choose from. I'm not convinced I like the pine. It's too real for a surreal landscape.

11/12 - Tree Ladders

In the game, I imagine there'll be some kind of strange shaped plant like thing on which to climb to get around obstacles. Here's a quick few five from today's work.

Truthfully, there's not one that I don't like so far. I'm particularly fond of the ghost one, (the dark one on the right), and the flower one on the top left. I like the spiked one on the top, but if Princess Pants needs to get to a high platform, something so low down might not work so well. These are concepts, the actual trees will be nowhere near as plain in colour!!


Also something semi decent in photoshop. The artist can never blame their tools.

09/12, Princess Pants final design!

Princess Pants's face is done!

I've done it in illustrator, where there was seven eyes, eight noses and six mouths.

Basically, a lot.

The big four are the ones I like the most.

These were done yesterday, and the compiling was today. All together, there'd be over 300 different variations. I've got no time for that!!

 Yesterday, I did a mock up background. With the character in front, here's what it'll (hopefully) look like!

07/12, NPC Robots

Good evening, folks.

Today I've been working on some NPC enemies for Princess Pants.

The idea behind this is that the main boss is taking over Magical Land (yet to be named. Please comment, I'm getting stuck.), and taking down genie magic to make way for his own desires, which involve no creativity, and boringness.

Enter the NPCs! They're robots. Not that I'm saying robots aren't creative, they just seem like an apt bad guys for the game. They're the henchmen of the game, and there's lots of them. Today I've been making some silhouettes in Photoshop for these guys.

I've designed three types of bad guy. I imagine it to be similar to Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde from pacman, that they all have their own 'personality', and coloured from bronze to gold in terms of difficulty. On the right is an extension of the cowboy. Ideally, he's the second hardest NPC, but I don't like the idea of him being silver. I don't equate cowboys with silver.

So maybe he'll be the hardest in gold, with the knight being silver, and the pirate in bronze? 

Note, my photoshop skills need serious work. I've only ever done one thing I've ever been even slightly proud of in photoshop, and that was by sheer fluke three and a half years ago.

05/12: Princess Pants Mega Post

Hi guys. I've not posted much at all in the last week, so here's a mega post from this week. I've been sketching up designs, hands, gestures, colour tests, etc. I hope you like it as much as I do!

First! These are some old sketches from the summer that Princess Pants was thought up.

The design is still in no way near settled, I've been particularly all over the place this week, just drawing what I feel like. The big changes is from having the head a rugby ball shape to more of a pentagonal one. My thought process is here.

Little Y/N are everywhere.

I'm not loving the triangles, or the two triangles added together. I'm not fond of the upright oval, either.
I do like most of the other ones, the diamond and pentagon are my current favourites.

The more astute readers will probably notice a random 'proud' in the corner. I'd been jotting down things as I thought of them, and the character Penny Proud from The Proud Family is going to be used as a reference for P.P.





Bear with the mess with this one. I was having a test of hands. Shapes, lengths, etc. My entire thought process is here. Excuse the mess, I was drawing in every little space. There's many no/yes/notes in general here. The arrows are from where I'd drawn a hand, and expanded on it some. My surprise favourite came from hitting a block and deciding to use some vegetables as shapes. In hindsight, I was probably hungry. It's the one more or less in the middle with the annotations of 'carrot' for the fingers, and 'tomato' for the palm. Weirdly enough, I really like the shape that it made,

Everything here is to be worked on. Nothing is final, and it'll take a lot of time.

My idea generation is going well. My villain was initially a man with two heads, but has since changed into a giant snake with a hand puppet.


I had a little test of Z Brush yesterday. It went alright, sculpting from the base head. It looks like turds at the minute, but that's part of progress, right?

THINGS TO DO:
BODY SHAPES
HEAD SHAPES
FACIAL DESIGN
NPCs
BACKGROUND
GAMEPLAY



Also! I'm now on twitter. You can find me @AnimatorRobyn. Tweet me whenever!

23/11, Princess Pants Character Sketches

Uh, yeah. There's no colour tests yet, but I'm thinking of having jinn to help the game advance. Plus a little doodle of the title character there, too.

21/11, Princess Pants Concept

Today was spent sketching up some concepts for Princess Pants, my project for the third year.

The idea is that she's a kickass crime fighting kid in a 2D platformer game. She's not actually a princess. Her crown is a pair of her dad's undies.

I've been looking at some cool games for research and I'm loving the style of MIMPI. I've no idea if its on iOS, but it's on android and it's pretty awesome. I think I'd like to create something like that.

Here's a screenshot of the game, and here's some sketches!

20/11, life drawing

Yesterday I went life drawing. As promised, here are some five minute sketches. I done a dumb and had no pencils, but I like the idea of everything being permanent anyway.

19/11 - Hungry Whispers Promo

Oh my life, it's been a while since I updated.
Here's updates on Kemi and Yu concept pieces for Hungry Whispers, if there's anything I severely need to change, please let me know! I also did some life-drawing today. I'll put those up tomorrow.

BEFORE

AFTER

AFTER

BEFORE

14/11, Character Doodles

Today, whilst playing YuGiOh with my brother and boyfriend, I was doodling on the score sheet and made these.

10/11, Elephant

A little something for you. I've appeared to be inspired by my visit to West Midlands Safari Park.

9/11, Studies of Feet

Here's a few quick sketches of my feet from my new sketchbook.

Fun fact, I'm paranoid that if I cut my little toenail too small, it'll never grow back. It's always unnecessarily long.

This was actually from yesterday.(9/11) My phone was having a moment.

07/11, A New Sketchbook!

Today, I went to Paperchase and bought a gorgeous new sketchbook. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be used like that, but it's brown paper and beautiful, because most drawings on brown paper are. Again, I'm doing work that is in no way related to what I'm supposed to be doing, more fool me come Monday. Here's my drawing for today.

It's said that an artist never blames the tools, but damnit, that white pencil is broken the whole way through. Looks like I need to invest in some nice ones!

06/11, West Midlands Safari Park!

Today I went to the West Midlands Safari Park with my boyfriend. We got a whole bunch of reference materials and it was a generally lovely day out.

Highlights include feeding Eland, which were absolute whores for food, feeding giraffes, and seeing Callum try to stop a cow looking thing getting into the car with us.

Seeing Rhinos was weirdly upsetting. It's a shame to imagine that due to poaching, they face a very near extinction.

Back to the good bit, there were many animals, including goats. For some weird reason, I keep stumbling into goat things this week, so I've made a quick infographic to help people understand a little something about goats.

I thought it was having a good time being stroked, standing at my feet. Turns out, it was trying to eat my shoelaces.

04/11, Hungry Whispers Promo 2

Naughty Naughty, Chicken Balti!

What happened to once a day? I'm awful at daily things.

Update.
Here's a second part to Hungry Whispers Promo. Enjoy!

I was working on a whole bunch of ideas. Initially it started out in block colour, the background was the gradient. I realised the lines were way nicer, so I went with this. Then I noticedthere was a black thing in the corner. I went to get rid of it, and...

This happened! Luckily for me, it looks awesome.

I gave it a go splitting the character straight in half, but I kind of like the mystique going on in the diagonal one. It looks more creepy, and creepy is good.

The book binder happened by accident, too. When I colour inverted the initial sketch, I noticed it looked pretty decent. Add it in! Why not!

31/10, Hungry Whispers Promo 1

Oh, I've been naughty. This is supposed to be a daily blog! I've not posted anything in a week. Truly, last week I've been super burnt out, plus After Effects is agitating me. On the plus side, I've become brilliant at Pyramid Solitaire to calm me down.

I've been working on a promo piece for my good friend Jade and her game, Hungry Whispers. You can find out more here, as the playable demo, here, the deviantart group full of concepts, here, on the Tumblr tag HungryWhispers, and here, the original blog from 2011. This has been in the works since Jade was in uni, and I've been backing it ever since I found out about it!

So here's a promo piece, go check them out!

24/10, Illustrator and Apples

I've been absolutely knackered. My first mistake this week was thinking After Effects would behave like Premier.

 Hint: It doesn't. Hmph.

 I've been at work all week and I'm behind on Uni work. Not to mention, I suck at After Effects at the moment. I'm not sure whether that's because I was on a Mac, or because I was just tragic at the new software.

Today's post is a trial on Illustrator. Usually I go with big blocky colours, but today I thought I'd try some shading with only a bunch of colours and opacity. Here's how it looks so far, I got lazy because it's 11pm and, surprise! I'm in work tomorrow as well.

It's nowhere near done, but the original picture is sitting next to it. I think I should have chosen a picture that has a bigger colour difference in the reds.

Now I look at it, I can see clearly I really messed up some of the colours. Oops. That's for tomorrow.

22/10, Nothing to see here. :c

I was halfway through doing something lovely on illustrator when I BSOD'd. My computer shut down before I saved this, and a something I was working on earlier.
A word to the wise, SAVE YOUR WORK BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING. on the plus side, if I made it look nice before, I can do it again, and now I've had practice.

21/10, Unfinished Sketch

I've not been too productive today, but I did a quick character drawing earlier. More updates to come on this, I cut the project short as I had to go to work.

Tomorrow: a test in Adobe After Effects, and a continuation of today's drawing

20/10, Final Google Doodle

I actually had made the mouse quite a while ago and had a hell of a time trying to make the code work. Now I've finally got the code working, this should be a piece of cake. The brief for this assignment was to make a 'google doodle' and make tests to see what we can do, which is where I made the mouse from the post before. My final google doodle is themed on Bonfire Night, a day I look forward to. I can't get enough of that smell. Mmmm.

There's also some sound on this one. For anyone who thinks it's a popup they can't get rid of, I'm so sorry. It's just my blog.

There's a mouse over thing here. The invisible button isn't terrific, but it does what it's supposed to do. I initially attempted to code it, what was supposed to happen was that on mouse over of the Houses of Parliament, there would be some text. However, I managed to code it so it appeared on click, but then didn't disappear. After trawling the internet, I found nothing and decided it might be less hassle to make an invisible button, but that's not going quite according to plan either. Hmph.

15/10, Coding Test

Today I've been practicing coding in Flash to make a character follow my mouse. I'll admit, I wasn't particularly original and totally ripped the idea off this fun whale that follows the cursor.

http://img0.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/c/5/3970/3970473_sprite198.swf

Mine happens to be a mouse. It's nowhere near as flashy, but it was a start to work out how this whole thing works. I had a bit of trouble with the animal not sticking together in the right places. It turns out it was an anchor point problem. It's all alright, now! Admittedly, it does glitch occasionally, but for a first try of putting something together, it's not half bad.

Hello!

It appears you've stumbled onto my blog. I'm awful at diaries, but I'm aiming to make this a blog a day to keep me focused and on track of my work.

I'm a third year student at the University of South Wales, formerly University of Glamorgan. I study animation, specifically 2D, and I enjoy using Flash and Illustrator. I am also working on my dissertation about animation for deaf people. If you have anything to add, please let me know!

This is my first upload. I'm cheating, because I did this sometime in the second year, around this time last year. Tomorrow is for new things!

This was created by using Adobe Illustrator. If you zoom in, you can even see the sugar on the gingerbread house's gumdrops.