BlogBlOgBlOgBloGbloGblog

Two friends have recently started their own blogs.


Luis, whose drawing style I really like, can be checked out here. He´s got some really great stuff. Like these: O O O O O O

Pekka has also started a blog. Check it out and get ready for some impressive stuff. Goooood .

Brush pen, T-shirt ideas, masks & monkeys

I finally bought ink today. I´d forgotten how much fun drawing with a brushpen is.

One more time

So here I am enjoying my second "inspiration" night. I have to finish some drawings for a present. I think I´ll leave it until tomorrow, and then I´ll have a fresh look at what I´ve done tonight.

I tried a new style ( cheers, antti). I wanted to use black ink, but I didn´t have any. But in the end, the grey one was better: I could lay down more values.

This is the kind of thing I´m doing. Hope you like it. I think I more or less do. There are some things bothering me, but I think I will go for this style for the present.

I think it was Alberto´s last posts that made me try using really saturated colors. I just thought about it.

Night time inspiration

So here I am at 4:47 in the morning typing this.

This all started when I was rereading a Hellboy comic. I though: "Hey I should copy some Mignola-faces see if something stays". So I took my sketchbook and started referencing the drawings to draw faces. Everythig was crap. Then I took some magazines and started drawing faces.

After a few minutes of warming up I actually did some drawings that I like!

Here they are. Of course not all where done on the same page, I only pasted the good ones.

Hope you like them!

don´t you love gorillas. they have such a powerful design!

Blog discoveries!

It happens from time to time, you find some blogs/pages that completely blow you away. To me it has happened several times, always the same way. Good blogs link to good blogs, so once you find one , it´s easy to be overwhelmed with what you find. It happened to me when I found Hans Bacher´s, Harald Siepermann´s and John Nevarez´s blogs. Then it happended again: Limbolo, Alberto Mielgo.

Now it happened one more time. Make sure you check out this blogs/sites, the work is amazing.

Antoine Birot. Beautiful artwork. But the thing I liked most was the animations he had online. Check out the one called "Hector". Amazing, sweet design, nice colour palette, fluid animation. Really enjoyable.

Evka´s drawings. Really liked the drawing style. Go & see.

Xav Animation Illustration. Envolved in the production of "Le Building", need to know more?


I DID NOT DRAW THESE : ARTISTS LINKED UP HERE


copyright owned by respective authors

One of those days in which you feel you can´t draw

This was it?

I just remembered I had e-mailed a w.i.p. low-res version of my showreel to a friend (hi, Teemu!). After losing the info in the DVD on which I had the showreel, I thought it was going to be almost impossible to get anything back. And I remember this e-mail. I just had log into my account and download it!

I though the reel was good. Now I look at it and, well, I don´t feel that proud at all. Guess that´s something good...

These are the parts of the reel that I like the most. Sorry for the big files and the really bad quality...


This was a short little test I did playing arround with Flash and AE. I used a simple cycle for the character and spent most of the time on the transition and on the shadow of the car. I was going for a very atmospheric style. If you pay attention, you can see a sun reflection on the window right before the car exits the garage. I though it looked great, but its on screen for so little time that no one notices!

I quickly added some sounds now.

This one is the very first time I tryed cut out paper animation out. I loved it! So direct. The character was a 2cm drawing I had in my sketchbook. I liked his pose and looks, so I scanned and retouched it in photoshop added the joints and started animating.

I was going to add a background, but in the end it ended up looking better as it is, with no background! It actually transmits some sort of atelier feeling. In one of the tests you could see my feet popping in and out under the glass table! After I shot it, I added a hand-drawn mustache in Flash. The clip here is part of a small film that I did, all improvised.

No sound here, which is a pitty , because I think the sound really made it better.

And these are the jazz players. I wanted to keep on experimenting with cutout animation. This time I did it in flash. It took me a looong time to retouch the painting so that the arms could move without leaving a blank space behind them. The same with the instrument and the head. If you pay attention , you can also see that in some parts, the linework "floats" over the watercolour. Unluckily, this video is very low quality... This time I also drew on top with flash.

I tryed to sync with the music. I was on a rush, so the finger animation is horrible. But I still want to do a jazz players animation, with lots of reference this time!

I would realy appreciate any comments.

thanks in advance!

Sketch Dump

All these drawings are part of a sketchbook that I intended to self-publish last year. Things dind´t work out as expected and it never happened. I liked the idea of sharing my drawings with others, although I didn´t know if someone that wasn´t my friend would buy such a thing.

Anyway, at least I can share them here. These are some of my favourites. All drawings are from life except for the ones of the old men which are from tv. I drew them in front of a TV that had a remote control with a "freeze" button. Great thing if you see an interesting face!

Last summer I took my sketchbook with me all the time. Somehow I didn´t have the energy this summer.

I hope you enjoy them.

Warming up

Haven´t drawn much lately... that´s bad. Tomorrow I´ll buy a brush and some pens and I´ll go sketching.

This is a picture I did straight in PS. The street is in a tiny amazingly beautiful village in Spain called "Albarracín". I had been there as a kid many years ago, but I didn´t remember anything. The street was beautiful and I had forgotten my sketchbook home that day.Its one of those places where you go "Dam it, I wish I had brought my sketchbook!".

Check some pictures of the village here: O O O O

Sketches

First of all, make sure you check out Pekka´s incredible painting here.

Some sketching. First two with Alias Sketchbook Pro, first time I used it. Seems better for sketching than PS. Last one is an unfinished speedpaint. When I dont use reference I always get to the point where I cant keep on painting...

More

These are some of the drawings I did in Prague. They are concept drawings for two different animations I was going to make. I was trying to draw with a style that would depart from what I normally do.

The guys playing were supposed to appear in a Jazz concert. I tried to develop a story in which the little bird from the last post would appear on screen at the same time as the musicians . Like he was flying arround the city and peeking through windows in pubs and houses.

The black & white drawing was for a story of a guy that dreams of living in the beach, fishing and riding his bycicle arround, enjoying life, but has a boring computer job.

I actually did some animation of these two ideas. For the jazzguys, I combined cutout animation and hand drawn animation (all in flash) and for the other story I worked on 6´s in flash.

I was really happy with how the jazz animations turned out. Those animations where in the DVD that was damaged, but they are also in last years animation department DVD of which I will get a copy, so I might be able to post them in a few months.

Watercolor and ink on paper.

Lost & Found..almost

I spent days putting my reel for this summer together. It ended up looking quite nice... interactive DVD with menus for animation tests, drawings and a little shortfilm. But I arrive in Spain and BANG, no dvd player or computer will recognize it! So, all my work, to hell.

I had some flash tests on my mp3 player, those I saved. So now that I can post videos for free (www.putfile.com) , here u go. Its a little something I did in Flash and in After Effects. Straight ahead animation. It was very spontaneous but I tryed to give it a 50´s animation design feeling, dont know if it shows. I found the original flash file and quickly rerendered it in AE. hope you like it!

Catchin up

Wow, last post May 12... I was still in Prague.

I´m so stupid that it has taken me almost a month to realize that I´m not happy if I don´t draw.
Simple as that. For some reason I forced myself into not drawing, even when I wanted to, I made that feeling that you all know go away. To see what happened. It ended up turning into a vicious circle where I would never feel completely ok and never feel like drawing anymore which made me feel "not so good". bla bla bla.

So, for a few days allready I doodle arround. Trying. Delivering crap. And then I check out some art blogs. Inspiration. Like a chain reaction: straight to the computer, plug the wacom for THE FIRST TIME in 3 months and start drawing. I end up whith something that I like. Nothing special, but Im happy with it and it gives me some lost confidence back.

Hope you like it.

by the way, these are the blogs:

John Nervaez . Great style & poses

Great sketches by different artists

Amazing portfolio

I'm Back!

Arrived yesterday. I had GREAT time. Don 't have much time to post now so I 'll post more in a few days.

Festival animovaných filmů Třeboň!!!!

Yep, the whole animation department is going to Anifest animation festival, in Třeboň. I'm really looking forward to it. We'll be there for six days.The weather is great, the town is beautiful, we'll be watching tons of animated films, there's going to be workshops bla bla. What more can you ask for?

Still working on my showreel. Should have it finished for June, since that's when Klausura starts here. Only a couple of week to go... And things are not going well, at least today. I hope Třeboň has some reenerginzing effect on me...

Stop Motion!!

Yep, we´re finally going to be able to make some animation tests in Barandov Studio. We were al so excited! It´s great, we have a room just for us. An old VHS camera, a computer, a wooden table and a puppet, all we need. We didn´t have much time today but I´ll go there again tomorrow. I´m really looking forward to it. What we also saw today was a special stopwatch they had there. It measures time in frames, so you can act out things, click at the beginning and end of the action, and , there you go, you have how many frames it took you. It will come in handy.

This is Nao working in the studio

I also started doing animation tests on the computer. I have a looong way to go yet, but what I did looked much better than what I was expecting. It took me about five hours to finish it. I want to keep doing exercises like that, and when I´m not very bad at it, move on to some acting tests, which is what I really want to do. I downloaded the lowman rig for 3ds max (get it here ) and that´s what I´m using for the animations. After struggling with bones, rigs and setups last year, finding a model ready for animating was a very nice surprise. Check out the animation, its here : "http://members.fortunecity.com/germanobanano/animations/salto9dobriweb.mov" you´ll have to copy paste the link,sorry.

Wacom´s back!

I finally used my wacom tablet after months of having it on my desk. My computer hasn´t worked properly since the day I bought it from the most unreliable person I ever met in my whole life. But anyways, I plugged the tablet to my pc a couple of days ago, and using some pics of my fellow illustrator/cheeselover Antti Berg for reference, I doodled arround. And these two I liked. It´s Mikko (hi, man!) and Takanori. Hope you like them. I have Mikko´s one as a desktop image now, get it here , sorry for the low res.

Change of direction

Yep, until yersterday I was going to make a shortfilm for this semester. I had allready spent some time in the storyboard and the animatic. But it looks like a huge proyect. I like the idea, but still, if I want to be an animator, theres sooo many things I should learn before embarking in a shortfilm. So , thats it, no shortfilm anymore. I will work on my showreel. But I dont want it to be like most of the ones I´ve seen, with just one clip after the other. We´ll see....

what should I do...?

Sketchcrawl, Visitors and Barandov

It´s been some time since last update. Oscar, Kriki and Luigi came to Prague for some days and I didn´t show up in the school that much, so no internet access. We had a great time, czech food, czech beer, went to nice bars and also rented a car and drove to Cesky Krumlov (sp I think, wrong). I hope I´ll go there with some drawing buddies to sketch, it´s an amazing village, let´s see if I can post some pics soon.

Last Sunday´s sketchcrawl wasn´t very successful either, no new people showed up. And my drawings aren´t very good either...Luckily, spring is starting, so I´ll finally be able to go outside and draw. I´ve been waiting all winter to do that.

Today, I went with Pekka to Barandov Studio again. We saw some animated films. They had been done using "half-plastic" puppets (that´s the translation we got from czech). The puppets are placed on a horizontal glass to be animated, you don´t get to see the back of the puppet, and there´s interchangeable bodyparts for when it´s supposed to show it´s back to the camera. Don´t now if I managed to explain... Well, we saw the movies and then we got to know the technique with which they had been done, and the actual puppets that were used for the films. I was really blown away by one of the films : "Potkali se u kolina", something like "meeting in the hill". The animation was excellent. The film was from the late 70´s and the lead animator was Boris Masnik. I´ll try to find more info on him.

new sketchbook cover. boredome + white pen + red cover = this

sketchcrawl wasn´t very succesful, but still I managed to draw. This was at night, having dinner at Juanantonio´s. This was an Irish guy I got to know that night. He liked the drawing, and his friend asked me to do a portrait of him for a beer.

This one was in Velryba (sp?, we call it "the place near Tesco").

This was in the metro. I love drawing in the metro. I like these oldwomen faces. But I should stop drawing sideviews, so easy to loose the form.

Some character research for my animation.

That feeling

Did you ever get that feeling? Your just walking around, in the tram or wherever and you see a face, a car, a house, a landscape, whatever and you feel you HAVE to draw it in your sketchbook.

Well, it happened to me yesterday night. Going back home in the night tram and I see a guy sleeping. He had a face, a really expressive face, I had to draw. At first I doubted, what will the rest think? (was with some friends) he just has to start drawing right now? But then... what the hell! So I took my skechtbook and a brushpen out and started to draw. It was like a 20 sec drawing, I didnt want the guy to wake up, the tram was moving, so it didnt turn out very well. I put the sketchbook back in my backpack. But the feeling was still there, and the drawing was no good, so I took it out again and drew until I had to get off.

Then I moved to one of the back seats of the tram in wich I transfered to, and started to draw again. Lots of people sleeping, so I could take my time.

Have to do this more often.