Monster Character Design Work in Progress

Scanned Rough Drawing

Colored drawing using Adobe Illustrator

For this design challenge I was asked to design a Monster inspired by the Characters from Monster's Inc University. I had to pick out of a cup pieces of paper that had random numbers that represented how many arms, legs, and eyes my monster would have. I chose 6 eyes, 3 arms, and one leg. It was really interesting thinking of how to incorporate these elements into my monster design, I have a few very rough thumbnail sketches that I will try to add to this post at a later date. After I had drawn out a rough sketch of my final design and scanned it onto my USB using a printer, I used Adobe Illustrator to draw the line art. I used the pen tool for this, and this was a technique that definitely took me a lot of time to get used to. I didn't use a tablet at all for this drawing, everything was drawn by mouse. It was really interesting exploring a digital drawing technique that doesn't involve using a graphics tablet. I also think that using this method gives you very clean results. I colored The drawing by using the live paint bucket tool and pen tool, for the highlights and shadows I adjusted the opacity and settings of the highlights and shadows layers. This process was frustrating at times because I don't think I fully understand it yet, but for a first try, i'm pretty impressed with myself.

 The reason why this post is currently a work in progress is because there are a few details I need to clean up, like the visible brush strokes on the glasses, and I also wanted to try adding a gradient effect to the monsters tail. 

Adobe Animate Pendulum Samples

Incorrect Sample

Correct Sample

After animating my moving circle animations, I tried a little more difficult task of animating a swinging pendulum. Applying the skills I learned in my previous samples, I made the samples look more natural by thinking about the space and time between each frame. For the first sample, the circle moved in a straight path, however this didn't look very natural when I played the animation back, So I tried again, but this time, changing the path of the circle so that it moved in a more smooth, natural way.

Although I prefer the outcome of the second sample more than the first, I noticed that there is a slight glitch at the end of  sample 2's animation loop, and I'm not sure how I can fix it, This will be something that I will have to look into.

Adobe Animate Circle samples

Animation sample 1

Animation sample 2

I created these animated gifs on Adobe Animate. When animating the first moving sequence, I evenly spaced out the gap between the circle in each frame that it moved forward, resulting in a very basic animation. The second time I animated a moving circle, towards the start and end of the sequence, I placed the circles very close together, getting further apart as it reached the center of the screen. The second animation looks a lot more fluid and interesting. It has more natural movement, compared to the first animation sample, which looks a little more robotic,

These samples have taught me the importance of spacing out your frames to control the speed of your animation, and also allowing your animation to look more fluid and natural.

Completed Black and White Still Life Study

This is my completed black and white still life study. I'm pleased with how quickly I've progressed in terms of using Photoshop to paint digitally. I noticed that after taking a break and coming back to this painting, I was a lot more confident in using different kinds of brushes and tools such as the mixer tool. I could improve this piece by paying more attention to the still life image as the proportions are a little off. I enjoyed seeing the painting become more realised and finished as I carried on drawing, and I think it will be interesting to see how my next still life study involving colour will turn out.

Photoshop Digital Painting W.I.P

15 minute drawing on Photoshop. This was my first time using Photoshop to paint and it was interesting figuring out the different controls and using different brushes and layers to create the right textures and shades. I have experience in using Coral Painter so I didn't struggle that much in using Photoshop to paint, surprisingly, I found Photoshop easier to pick up in terms of understanding the different controls. This is still only a work in progress and I will be working on this further as I'm not happy with this drawing so far, however I haven't been working on this piece for very long so I'm excited to carry on drawing and see how this digital painting turns out.

Embed Test

Kubo and the two Srings - REEL 2016 from Matias Liebrecht on Vimeo.

This post is a quick test to figure out how to embed a video onto a blog post. I thought this video would be fitting to post as Laika is my favourite animation studio as well as my greatest source of inspiration. The video was extremely easy to add to my blog, I only had to copy the embed code of the video and paste it into the HTML code of a new blog post. I'm a little annoyed that I couldn't figure out this trick sooner!

Turn Around Sketches Coloured

Turn Around Sketches Lineart

101 Drawings