Danny the conductor - rough animation

Last week Fabian Erlinghäuser from the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon (Secret of Kells) was our tutor at animation school. We had to animate 5 seconds of classical music by Bethoven and let Danny, the main character from "Cats don't dance", be a conductor. It took me a week (let's say about 5 days) to finish those 5 seconds. Thank you for the great hints and critique, Fabian :-) Now I feel a bit more confident about animating!

revengesaurs take revenge

With Christmas coming up and character design and layout having to be finished, I neglected my blog duties. Well at least I manage to show new sketches once or twice a month. That's worth something, isn't it?

awesome dinasaurs, ey?

Take a left

We're heading in a new direction. We changed our ice-fairy tale a bit and finally get set on a design. So I'll show some of the last development steps we had for our character. What a journey a character design is! New suggestions are made constantly. And the other ones from my group also made designs and so we all pushed us further and further. That was an important experience :-)
Adobe Bridge was so kind to put together the images.
By the way, I had to switch to left again, because the right elbow started hurting again - apparently it didn't heal properly. Or it will just reappear for the rest of my life... at least it seems to get better sooner than the last time.

revengesaurs

Oh my..I forgot to make some posts a few times o.O// It seems I have been busy (sounds more suitable than lazy ;-P). Anyway, here are the drawings from my second visit to the ballet dancers. So I could take revenge. To get back my portrait of the old red haired lady. Maybe you remember.

funny animals and obsolete designs

I saw some funny animals photos in the web a few days ago. As I couldn't save them to my computer I decided to draw them :-)

In animation school our story has changed quite a lot. Here are some of the old, obsolete designs. Again the robins and the bunnies ~

good bye autumn

I really love autumn. The air is fresh and despite the grey, hazy weather, the colorful leafs illume everything. Here in Hamburg, I believe winter soon will arrive, so my fellow friends from animation school and I went to the huge park called 'planten un blomen' to catch the last bits of the beautiful season.

color moods from a few days earlier

nice and neat

This time I'll show some shallow, cheesy, nice stuff. I made postcards for my parents weddingday and sent them to them. I figured out that Gerbera means "With you, everything is more beautiful".

In order to take a break from character design I drew a portrait without reference. Like inventing a girl and trying to make it look as real as possible. I hope nobody will take it as a perfect drawing or portrait, which it isn't. I just think I might have improved a bit drawing faces. The result is rather dollish.

Birds and Bunnies

Still developing character designs for our animated winter tale. Still not the final designs, but I like these pages quite a lot! Robins are so cute <3

ballerina bitch slap

So, here's the thing:
Along with me, three other students from animation school went drawing ballet dancers at training for one and a half hour. The ballerinas were very mixed: from approximately 25 to 80 years old, all shapes and colors. So we went for the red haired, hunched, 80 year old, constantly grinning woman. She could hardly move, just turn around and make a few steps. She was quite a character. After their training most of the dancers came over and were impressed by our studies. I had done the drawings with both, right and left hand. They recognized the old woman and everyone liked the sketch.
A bit later, we were standing in the corridor, the old lady approached us and said: "Can I see the great artist's drawing again? For it was said to resemble me very well." So I showed it to her and she went on about how she liked it. So I offered her the sketch as a present. She gladly took it and explained: "Good, now I can tear it apart."
And so she ripped the paper apart several times. We were all shocked, incapable of moving or saying anything. She went on about the others, who had drawn her well and stuff, but what I had done was impossible. Keeping on grinning all the time.
She left and we couldn't believe what just happened. We had experienced pure perfidity. Sure, we figured out that the woman really doesn't see herself the way she is. But I guess every artist out there knows the feeling of pain and disrespect, when your artworks gets destroyed.
I've learned to be more careful with my work: Sell it or keep it ;P

the negative looks quite cool :3

foretaste on studies

the human body - unwrapped

Wait for tomorrows post: my own personal encounter with the wicked old witch of the west, coming along with studies on ballet dancers!