More Light Painting

I have more light painting! This time was MUCH better. I figured out the bulb feature on my 11 yr. old DSLR. Also, everything was covered in snow, and yet I still had a nice reflection going. I'm so excited!

Frozen Lake Light Painting pt. 2

As promised, here's a picture of the light painting I was talking about. I took a look at the footage and was very disapointed with how it turned out. I fiddled with it in photoshop and just pushed the levels around a bit. Its...closer to what I wanted it to look like...but it was a bit of a disaster. I hate when beautiful...no...PERFECT...conditions are marred by inadequacy, both technical and otherwise. But that's life, no? I just hope the ice and moon keep up the good work >.<  I'll be giving it another go on Sunday. Same equipment, but with an actual photographer.

Frozen Lake Light Painting

I did some light painting today!  I wanna show it off so baaad, but I lost the cord from my camera, and I can't afford a card reader right now *goes off into a corner and cries*

I went to a pretty shallow lake and it was frozen over, so I stood in the middle of it to light paint, so you get this fantastic reflection! It was so much fun. The moon was too high to feature it in the frame, and my camera couldn't hold the shutter open for more than 2 seconds...and I couldn't get the bulb feature to work. BOO. But...yeah, once i get stuff to work I'll edit this post and show!

Being Bad

Ay, ay, ay... I'm being baaaaad. I havn't worked on anything for two days. NADA! ZILCH! sure I made some work pages for my students to complete, but zoot, that doesn't count!
 At any rate, here is a recent piece of artwork inspired by the Secret of Kells:

Oboro Muramasa Background-WIP 2

Eghads, off the bat and I'm already not keeping my word! Mayhaps I am too ambitious? More likely I'm letting errands, sleep, and the final season of the Tudors keep me distracted. But, I am still working! I did not post anything I did yesterday because there was no real way to show it. I've been working on all the components, and putting them together in AE.
Something else I enjoy about the Oboro Muramasa backgrounds is the subtle animation in them. Giving backgrounds for animation/game a slight motion tends to bring them to life, no? So, here are some screen shots of what I have done so far. I need to figure out an efficient way to animate the grasses.

 

Although I like the way the sky fits into here, It is too overpowering for a background. I'm going to go for the more yellow/overcast sky in my reference picture. I'll either play around with the sky in AE or redo it completely in photoshop. 

Oboro Muramasa Background-WIP

Busy day today! Unfortunately was not able to *complete* anything. You can all slap my wrists. I decided to start out with a background from a Japanese video game called Oboro Muramasa. Its absolutely gorgeous. So I wanted to make an animated background to start out with. So of the many different options I had, I decided to go with the following as the base for my first exercise:





I really loved how this one stretch took place during sunset, so I wanted to emulate that.  Very often I find that I completely ignore "time of day" when doing a background. Lighting can add so much to the *feel* of a piece, and that is dependent upon time of day. After looking at some photos and starting, I realized that I'm doing something a little to complicated for the kind of sky they use here, which is overcast.

Definitely not one of my best skies, but its a WIP, so hopefully I'll have more energy for detailing it tomorrow. Here it is!

First Post

Well, I've spent the better part of today figuring out how to make my blog visually a little bit more exciting. Hurray for favicons!

So, as the description says, I'm setting out on a small experiment to improve myself as an animator, update my knowledge of the digital tools I use, and to strengthen my backgrounds. I sincerely hope this works, I am normally *awful* at keeping up with blogs or diaries or any form that revolves around logging moments in my life. But, perhaps this will be a bit different?

In case I get bored with one thing, I'll probably be hopping around different things. Tutorials, books, experiments, what have you. If I can force myself to do a complete work a day, then all the better. I wager that I'll most likely get lazy and put up random pieces of art or character designs. Notice that is not something I listed, seeing as everyone and their mother wants to design characters. I'm not very good at it, and frankly my background in art suits me better to doing, well, backgrounds.

...

gulp.