Satan, you've met your match

This is a Flash character made by Kirk Barnett for his Flash Project. The person managing the project thought the character looked too much like a villian, and wanted Kirk to change the design. You can blame that logic on someone with a name that rhymes with incompetent. Thankfully, the design wasn't changed. Isn't the lighting awesome? Kirk spent a lot of time mastering this lighting technique in Flash.

Punch Cycle.



Walk Cycle!



Lipsync.

Probably easy to figure out, but the first was made with cut-up bitmaps (trace the shapes, then apply the bitmap as a color type) then distorted and animated to breathe life into them. Kirk taught me this technique, so try it OUT!!!

More fun with flash!!!

Things I've been thinking about lately:

1) Achieving a draftsmanship manner of drawing

2) Simplifying silohouette creation

Things that I could imagine anyone who does calligraphy would think about.

1) I started counting strokes. Starting in roughly rounded but swinging forms, I then deliniated the character in counted strokes, of either 1, 2, or 3 part lines. I've got some examples in my sketchbook that are a little sketchy so I'll try to show what I mean later. This allowed me not only to conserve in my line mileage, but as well my strokes became a lot more articulated and helped me overcome the straight line syndrome.

2) I started to relate single strokes, not simply plume lines, to the entire shapening of the resulant creature. Going back to thinking of the whole at first, then adding details, something that has been pounded into my head throughout the whole of my schooling. I thought about how single symbol words of other languages could help with creating "characters" from characters, but made up characters of my own creation and definition. Drawing words was I way I finally thought of it.

Theories work only as far as you continually test them...so...zip

This is "The Beast". Notice the:

- Laser eyes that actually shoot across the room

- Gaping, hideous mouth of DVD-RW drive

- Cute moveable eyebrows and (single) arm

- Miniature Convinient store mirror

- Neon party lights diffused across a custom acrylic case

I've been trying to fix this baby and taker of my viriginity over this past week to no avail. He probably needs a new motherboard. He is in no such state any longer, as I took him apart before shipping him to myself.

Fu painter! Even fucking around with the most basic shapes in Photoshop (a single line) can create crazy results, especially simple brushes with the texture option. Hell yeah!

Smartist

= Kirk

Ask him about paths. He's a fucking beast.

I learned a couple things today when scribblin' for Flash class. 

To get those squiggly shading lines prevalent in graphic art,  you simply make a single line and then scrub backwards, inheriantly in a different stroke, resulting in knit but interesting line. 

As well, thinking of hair and clothes like an effects test (in the traditional sense--a fire, smoke) can really help paste the knottiness of it down. Fun stuff. 

TeeFury flash assignment!

Going into Painter makes me just want to go back into Photoshop and make custom brushes. I really am not seeing the big deal with Painter, except maybe that it will force me to buy more RAM, but considering my intsy bit of experience there I'm sure there is more to it. Like flaming backflips!