Weekly Art Practice - Week 24
This week was a return to creatures, with the common house sparrow as our subject. I also attended an animation course last weekend so I’ll share some stuff from that, and I’ve been working on a new Altar Stone video which was more technically demanding than art demanding for the last few weeks.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
While I chose sparrows to continue on the most common animals in Montreal, it turns out I can only imagine them as basic small birds when not using a reference.
Day 2 - Figure sketching
With a reference they still kind of look like a basic small bird, but then the colouration patterns really become important for identification. I ended up focusing on male sparrows as they have a really distinctive black chest marking.
Day 3 - Reference studies
Day 4 - Style studies
Tried out a variety of styles. But I think I like the classic more detailed sparrow the most.
Reference: Stickers by @biateleur
Reference: From VectorStock
Reference: By Shozo Ozaki.
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
Learning Godot for Altar Stone
After hearing the most recent Altar Stone track I got hooked on the idea of pixel art for the video. I’m not great at pixel aren’t and I don’t love it. Watching people making tiny pixel changes and getting a whole new character feels like magic to me. So I got the idea to look for open source assets instead of making my own.
I also had a few ideas for the basic animation but while ideating on how I would approach it, it became clear that this would be something easier to do in a game engine than in an animation program. I had poked at Godot a few months ago out of curiosity at the 4.0 launch and the new Brackey video tutorial. So I understood some of the basic steps I knew I’d have to do.
It turned out to be harder than I hoped to find good free assets. There are plenty out there but when you already have an idea in your head it’s hard to accept the limited options. But I eventually chose a tileset, a cute bat for decorations, and some characters who don’t look too ridiculous in the setting.
And then I made the “level” aka the walking course.
I got the basics of moving the character around, controlling the camera and working with collision layers. Then needed my wife’s help for follower logic code to execute the idea I had of “adventurer party walking”. Final product coming soon to the Altar Stone YouTube channel!
Animation class with Spencer Wan
A few months ago I signed up to a Spencer Wan animation course focused on visual effects. Since effects, instead of full on character animations, is what I have been focusing on in my Alter Stone videos, I thought this course sounded like the perfect fit.
It ended up being 30C+ the day of the course. That’s in the apartment even. So it was the most comfortable 4.5 hours to spend at a computer. But even just the first hour of the program felt enlightening. I did my notes in Clip Studio and then tried to follow the animations steps in SquidToon but the course moved pretty quickly due to time constraints (it was an ambitious agenda!) and only managed to complete the first lightning step by step:
General notes
Overall it was really great and I find myself trying to find Spencer’s catalogue of work and video to see what else I can learn as he was great at breaking down concepts and approaches to very doable chunks.
Conclusion
It was a big week for projects. I have a head full of animation ideas now and want to jump into some more big pieces to put them to use. Might get one more week of art in before I got on vacation for a week. It feels nice as I feel like I'm having ideas for projects at a rate I can no longer keep up with. Nice to have the creative sparks and energy firing at the same time.
Pinterest board of sparrows.