Week 10

Hello everyone,
So this week was a lot of integrative work, as far as the project goes. In my proposal I talked about an integration step which I have finally reached, where my work is slowly being formatted and then fitted together on a medium that accommodates all of the parts.

There are two ways that I'm going about experimenting: through wix and powerpoint.

For those of you who don't know, wix is basically a website that helps you design your own website. It's much like blogspot or wordpress, but in this case it's more for website creation than blogs.

There's not too much going on with that as it is mostly busy work (formatting, copying and pasting, sizing, etc.) It's going to be interesting though once I an see the final product!

In other parts of the project, there are some more interesting things going on. I've had two recording sessions so far for the score. I think I'm going to have one more session, and then I'm going to transfer over into garageband and start adding in other digital instruments to accompany it.

Animations have been going full steam ahead! My mentor and I have been working hard to get all of the illustrations and animations completed, with the deadline approaching so quickly, and with the additional work I had writing a presentation for the project, I'm definitely beginning to feel pressure!

Here's a teaser animation, it was one of the earlier ones that we did. It's pretty simple, but I liked the way it came out and it does a nice job of setting the scene up.

Honestly, illustrating and animating are beginning to blur together right now since I am starting animations as soon as the picture's completed. It's getting to a point where I just have to keep churning out the art in order to finish. It isn't the most pleasurable thing, not because I don't enjoy the art, but rather because of the rate at which I'm having to work. 

So while I'm exhausted, I'm still hanging in there, and the work is still very enjoyable overall. Here's an illustration that I finished this week. Animating it is going to be extremely difficult, probably the worst yet, but I'm excited to get started with it. It's definitely one of the starkest illustrations in the scene, it's really one of the few where the colors are vivid and saturated. The goal with this was to create a magical, otherworldly feel when designing the costumes for the red knights. They look very solid and tangible, but then they sort of just fade away into a silky wave. Hope you enjoy!

~Keanan~

Week 9 of SRP

Hi everyone,

I can’t believe how quickly the project is going by! I feel like it just started honestly, so the approaching deadline is seeming very daunting right now as I’m scrambling to finish up each part of the project.

This week I made leaps and bounds as far as the score and website design go. I have officially written 6 pages of music that loops for my scene after a surge of creative inspiration I felt this week! I can’t believe that I ended up writing that much, and I thought it would be much simpler than it actually turned out to be. Some of the sections are actually kind of difficult to play on the piano!

Dealing with score isn’t off my plate entirely though. I still need to record it. Right now it is just sheet music on a website called noteflight. I’ve decided that I am going to be using garageband to record the song. Originally, I thought that I could create the recording just using the digital instruments that garageband provides, but that changed. I had overestimated the selection of instruments that I would have on that program, as well as the quality of the sound for some of them…

Where it stands now, I can’t rely on the digital instruments to make the soundtrack, instead I’ll just use a few of the better sounding ones as accompaniment to the track. As of right now, I will be the one recording myself on my piano at home. Originally, I had wanted a harp to be the main instrument, with some flutes and strings accompanying, but after I played the song a lot this week, I decided that the piano will work just as well. Now I just need to manage a decent recording of it! My playing isn’t as accurate as I would like it to be, as far as tempo and notes go, but thankfully garageband has the potential to let me mix and match recordings that sound good, and it provides a metronome for me to stay in time.

In a lot of ways, I am kind of happy that the digital instruments were lacking, because being able to record a real instrument provides a lot of benefits over strictly using the software. In garageband, the only way I would actually be able to record notes would be through using my tiny keyboard as a makeshift piano. This is greatly limiting to me, since I would have to break up parts of the song that span over multiple octaves, go back and edit over each note I played on the keyboard to keep it in time, and record only one hand at a time since there is no room on the keyboard for two.

Here’s a pic of one of the pages:

And I guess if you are at all interested in hearing what it sounds like (with really poor sound quality) click on the link here:

My Score

Normally there would be a repeat bar towards the last few measures, but I took it out so that way you could listen through to the ending without any loops.

I cannot stress to you enough that this is my first time trying out musical composition, so please don't expect anything amazing!! I will say though that I had a lot of fun making this, and musical composition is definitely something I want to study more and improve in!

Look forward to talking with you guys soon!

~Keanan~

April 1st- Week 8 of SRP

Hello everyone!

So my illustrations are getting darker each week as my character plunges deeper and deeper into the storm… As far as art goes this week, I was doing a lot of iterations of the main character in different shots:

There’s not too much to say as far the art goes for now. I’m still just marching through all of the illustrations.

In the animation department however, things are doing much better than they were a few weeks ago. This week actually several of the animations came together quite nicely, and I’m so excited to be able to present them. One major obstacle that my mentor and I had to deal with though was lag time. When you’re dealing with as many layers and animations in a single file as we are, sometimes it can be too much for the program to process, so between buffering times, the occasional crash, and me still getting the hang of everything, it was a highly time consuming ordeal! What I have planned for the animations is to have the majority of them completed pretty soon, and then move on to animating the text. This may or may not happen depending on the amount of time I have left, but basically the text is all going to appear in panels like this one:

The picture is pretty self-explanatory as to what I’m planning on doing with them. But the hard part, (which I hadn’t anticipated) is that these kinds of animations are not able to be replicated like others. For instance, the falling rain I posted a few weeks ago is very easy to recreate, but since the text is unfortunately going to be different for each panel, the same kind of principle won’t apply like I thought it would.

So my project is now entering the stage of where I’m beginning to integrate all of the various elements into one multi-sensory reading experience. This is going to involve several steps, chiefly including website design, page layout, page animations, and score composition and rendering.

For the design of the website, I’m going to be meeting with two professionals next week, who are being kind enough to point me in the right direction as far as what this site is going to need, both aesthetically and functionally. Website design is after all something I know next to nothing about, so this is yet another way in which I am being exposed to a completely new field during this project.

Another area in which I have no experience is in music composition and music editing/rendering/recording… in fact I’m not even sure if that’s the right terminology. I’ve been doing some research in between everything else I have going on, and I believe I’m going to be working in programs called DAWs. I’ll let you guys know more about my findings next week though, there’s nothing too substantial with the score yet.

Talk to you next week!

~Keanan~

March 25th- Week 7 of SRP

Hello everyone,

This week I switched back over primarily to illustrating people/faces, which are my favorite things to illustrate. Over the years that I have done art though, I’ve mostly used traditional media for my art, which are things like pens, pencils, markers, paints, etc. But now that I’ve transitioned almost solely into digital art, I’ve found that the processes I once thought were so easy and natural for me have now become a lot more complicated.

A lot of this has to do with the layers I’ve been mentioning throughout my posts. For even if something might seem easy illustrate by hand, the layers behind it might be extremely complex, (whereas other things that seem impossible to draw by hand suddenly become extremely easy with a computer)

Take for example this close-up of one of the characters in the scene (and try to ignore the terrible quality):

Sorry this REALLY isn't finished yet, but  I thought it served as a good enough example of what I've been primarily working on. If you haven't realized this yet from viewing my previous artwork, it's all very amateurish...

Using a pencil and sketchpad and some markers, creating something like this wouldn’t have taken very long. But due to the way this illustration has to be animated, and how my software allows me to create something like this, a very complex, but highly enjoyable process forms.

Painting on a digital medium requires a completely different mindset I’ve noticed as far as creating artwork. You can’t think of subjects like you normally would as a collection of 2D lines and colors. Instead the entire work has to be visualized completely before you embark on creating the piece. This was something I had to learn the difficult way, but now I’ve been able to completely adjust the way I go about painting.

First, I go to the rough sketch in my storyboard, and I gain a general sense of how I want the picture to look, and what I want to include within it. Then I work from the deepest part of the painting up, meaning I go from the background, to the very surface of the painting working out what every single layer contains, and how I should divide them. From the standpoint of an artist, some objects might require more than one layer to look their best, while others only need one. From the standpoint of an animator, a layer has to be constructed a certain way, or it simply can’t even be animated.

So after I’ve crafted about about twenty blank layers and I’ve labeled each of them, I make rough sketches on each layer of what’s going to be present in the illustration before consulting with my animation mentor. This is probably the most important step, because if a single layer isn’t compatible with, or isn’t as cohesive as it could be for the animations, then I would basically have to start the whole piece over, depending on how severe the error is.

So once the game-plan is set, I begin bringing every layer up to the level of detail I want. It took me a while to get used to this because with traditional art, you simply draw or paint something exactly the way it looks the first time around, and then you go back and tweak around with things and add a couple of details usually. But with digital painting, I favor a different kind of process. Basically, I start out with big blobs of color across the digital canvas, it’s like viewing the final product while wearing  a pair of glasses make your whole world turn blurry. In traditional art, there’d be nothing I could do with this, but in digital art, this is me just getting started. Everything that follows is just me gradually making these blobs of color more refined, giving them shape, giving them highlights and shadows, and then finally drawing details.

Talk to you guys more next week!

~Keanan~

March 18th- Week 6 of SRP

Hello All!

Great progress this week, I am officially done with the first section of the chapter. I have a very detailed plan as to how I’m going to go about completing the rest, so let’s hope everything stays on track.

Animal studies were the focus this week as far as illustrations, since one of the subjects in the chapter is a horse, whom I have had to illustrate many times so far.

This is a picture of one of them that I am sort of satisfied with:

What I’m happy about is that over the course of this project, I feel like I’ve been forced to grow and be adept at drawing almost anything. Up until this project, all I ever really sketched or painted were people, faces in particular. But now that I’m having to illustrate so many different things: horses, trees, mountains, skies, clouds, etc. I’m changing the way I learn. When I illustrated faces, I was solely concerned with how to draw eyes, or how to draw the nose, basically how to draw any specific object or part. But now that all of the sudden I’m required to illustrate so many different things, I’m learning less about how to draw specific things, but rather I’m just learning how to draw in general, which is great for my growth as an artist.

What I’m currently starting with the animations is probably going to be one of the toughest yet, the fiery illustrations I posted last week. To be honest, I only have a vague idea in my mind of how I want it to look, so I’m definitely and a bit of a stand still as far as those go.

This weekend, one of the next huge things I have to figure out is how I’m going to format this entire hybrid novel, and find out what medium I’m going to use. First, the big decision I have to make is choosing between an eBook, and a web story. If it’s going to be on the internet, that removes any publishing business from the entire work, but if it’s going to be an eBook, I need to find out how I’m going to incorporate sound into the work. Truthfully, this is something I know very little about, so this weekend I’m just going to finish up one of my illustrations and get right to work on that. I have some ideas of whom I want to contact for more info, so I will keep you guys posted on my findings.

Talk to you later!

~Keanan~

March 11th- Week 5 of SRP

Hi everyone,

I got back from New York this week on Monday (which was amazing), and I have been able to resume all of my work once more.

This week was my first time working with the Program called Flame Painter 3 Pro, which is an application unlike any I've ever seen before. Basically it works like Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop in that you work in layers, but Flame Painter is different in the sense that it's more of an add-on to these programs. You can't really create any artwork in Flame Painter, you can just greatly enhance existing artwork.

Most add on programs are simply for adding textures, or finer details into nearly finished artwork, but Flame Painter is completely different program in that all of the brushes it uses are constantly moving across the screen. The brushes in Flame Painter are like a trail of dots, and when you paint, those dots leave behind their color in a sort of ephemeral way, and when they cross paths, the colors lighten each other. In fact, they can be programmed to have a multitude of different properties, which makes Flame Painter amazing (and amazingly difficult) for creating special effects.

Take for instance one illustration which I plan to become an animation:

Now watch what happens after I enhance it with Flame Painter:

I'm not an expert at using the software, but it makes it possible to create stunning effects, and not just flames or explosions. I'm going to be using this software to make clothing, stars, etc. 

Since it is so hard to really explain the program, here's a link to the web site that gives a demo of it: 

http://www.escapemotions.com/experiments/flame/index.php

That's just a really basic demo of it, in the actual program there way more to it. And I have to say, while this seemed so exciting at first (because you're instantly able to make fire or whatever,) actually incorporating this into your artwork, morphing it into the shape you actually want, and creating the desired effect was almost impossible! I guess it can only get better with practice.

The work space in Flame painter looks like this:

This is a really basic overview, but you can see the layers Panel in the bottom right, above that are the brushes, and above that is the color/gradient that you can select for your brush. On the left is all of the brush settings, which can be seen better in this picture, along with some examples of the brushes that I work with:

Factors such as speed, chaos, noise, etc. all have to be controlled for when you want to use the brushes to your desired effect, which is what allows you to create all of the different shapes and effects seen above.

The reason why it's compatible with Photoshop and Clip studio is because the layouts are similar, and both programs accommodate these layers that I work in.

So all in all, it's been a fantastic week for me. Unfortunately, my animation mentor's computer broke this week! Resultantly, not much got done in that area, but the best part about my project is that there are so many things that I can be working on at once! So in the case where animations, or illustrations can't be done, there's always something like score composition or storyboarding and layout that I can work on.

Thank you so much following along, and I hope you enjoy playing and experimenting with the Flame Painter demo, (hopefully you'll see why its such an addictive art software to me!)

Enjoy your weekend, I look forward to talking with you guys again!

~Keanan~

Spring Break

Hello,
Sorry I was not able to post over the weekend. I was in New York for the majority of last week for college tours and interviews. It was an amazing experience, but unfortunately I was left with little time to further my project, and my general lack of internet access made it difficult to make any posts.
So basically I am taking this week, which would have been my 'spring break', and applying it retroactively to last week.

I have a lot of work planned for this week, and I can't wait to share all of it with you.

Talk to you soon,

~Keanan~