Animation Hellhole Memories Part 5

Full two page spread below. Some story ideas and more memories from the Animation Department over at Allan Hancock College.

The one page was loosely based on when friends would skate over at the Oak Knoll Bowl / Orcutt Bowling Alley shopping center. I don't remember if they ever tried to do tricks off the elevated foundation and walkway. Either way it probably wouldn't be possible to do what I drew as he'd land straight into the railing after clearing the steps. But maybe that was the point.

The other page on the right was a memory I had of a bunch of us jammed into the Animation Hellhole, working on lame Monty Python-style cutout animation on one of the test machines. This was probably late November or sometime in December, before winter break and all of us going our separate ways til the next semester, so it has that bit of a holiday nostalgia filter for me. All of us laughing like idiots making dumb cutout characters doing even dumber things, improvising most of the action and voicing over the dialog whenever we'd play it back on the crappy little tv they had in there. Sometimes good memories are hard to come by depending on what transpires after the fact, but this was one I was able to hang on to for whatever reason. 

Another redux of stuff I posted earlier. Wasn't happy with some of the poses I did in the previous version - I'm not totally happy with what I have here either - but well, what can you do other than try to not get too lost in nostalgia while drawing and to keep going. 

That was always something that tripped me up, up until maybe a few years ago, the excitement of having an idea or wanting to finish a drawing (or just being under some arbitrary deadline), but not having the patience or discipline or time to really look at what I was doing and think "Maybe I should do a couple more takes on this drawing or pose and really figure out what the hell I'm doing or trying to do." Anybody from the Animation Hellhole days can tell you that I locked myself into the testing room more than a few times to try to finish a scene. I instinctively knew like most everybody else would in that kind of situation, I needed to block things out in order to get things done. But that realization would get lost later on down the road once I started going to a "real" art school and doing time at studios. Alot of intuitive things would get muddied during and after the Hellhole days.

 [Older sketch from a few years ago.]

Haste makes waste as they say. I'd say being overwhelmed in whatever way you can imagine while simultaneously trying to "make it" is another surefire method to totally miss the mark while being blind to your own mistakes.

Animation Hellhole Memories Part 4.3

Another set of studies for night scenes revolving around the old Animation Hellhole courtyard over at Allan Hancock College. Full image below.

Not much to say here other than I wanted to get a better feel for how the scene would look at night, so one obvious method was to include the skyline along with some major silhouettes like distant trees or the roofline of the building.

[Some exploratory sketches I did around the same time. Most of these are pencil undersketches with ink on top, but a a couple are just loose pen. Lined Moleskine notebooks are a good mental escape from "finished piece mentality" and are more of a launching point for ideas and further drawings.]

[Only when I see these sketches in thumbnail form do I start to realize how much further I need to go with pushing shape choices. Maybe the inking or the smaller format is limiting my decisions or just reinforcing my bad habits? (One reason I've stayed away from Inktober.) I keep telling myself that these notebooks are to just mess around and that nobody is going to see them, and yet here we are. I need to benchmark myself somehow though, and like I said once I see my drawings like this it gives a good overview on how I'm approaching shapes or poses.]

Garageband

 

Full image below. And no, not the great graphic novel by Gipi. Just an illustration of a bouncy metal girl, courtesy of Albert Campillo Lastra (@he_perdut_el_llapis over on Instagram), along with her backup band, the Allan Hancock Animation Hellhole Quartet. Yes, that's a capybara on guitar and a tetrapod on a six-string bass. And a yokel on drums. 

 

Blue Collar Acanthostegids

 

Some random character design and digital painting pages. (Yup, plural.) Not much to say other than I really need to figure out why I keep adding tetrapods in average everyday settings in my drawings. 

Animation Hellhole Memories Part 4.2

 [Close up of a naive overworked kid at the studio. Larger and colored 2 panel version below.]

I don't remember what the intent was with these. But if this was going to be one of those notebook drawings with narration, the top panel probably would've been: 

"Thinking about the future, he probably had no idea that that very moment, lost in thought inside the confines of that hidden college courtyard, would be the time he'd look back on nostalgically while stuck in a cubicle, pulling OT with little to no air conditioning." 

(Which would've been at a studio called... Phlegm Romain. I laughed when I came across a news article from back then playing up all the great new shows Phlegm was looking to do, with an anonymous comment at the end; "What a joke, that place is a sweatshop." In hindsight, I can't really argue with that. Maybe that's why they up and moved down to Mexico, deep respect that Corporate Animation Management has for the domestic workforce and the Animation Guild.)

 

[I realized after the last post that most nighttime settings use cooler colors for anything either outdoors or not under direct light. So, I played with the color levels to reflect that while trying to keep it from being too dark. I've done this sort of scenario before, so you'd think I'd have remembered the process.]

 

[Last minute addition: Here's a recent redux of an old piece I did back when I was at said studio. Sort of an anniversary present to all the time spent there. As you can see, a happy worker with the proper motivation. The original piece is still somewhere on here I think, but I'm not one to show off old underwear if I don't have to. Good luck finding it.]  

Animation Hellhole Memories Part 4

Part of a sketchpage that I started a few months ago but got around to finishing up recently, playing with the lighting and colors a little bit. Memories of the animation department over at Allan Hancock College, in the wee days before "official" art college and even more Official industry jobs. See below for more panels.

[Night version panel. Most of my memories are of fall semester, so the days would get dark at around 5 or 6 pm, by which point one half of the class would bail. The half that stayed behind were the ones near the animation test station (the janitor's closet in the background that Julio's stepping into). Drawing, flipping paper, a group of 3 or 4 people making dumb Monty Python cutout animations on the test machine at the same time and being generally stupid. But usually the main focus revolved around deciding where to go eat afterwards.]

[Alternate take on one of the poses. Doesn't this kid know how to sit properly? In fact, he'd tend to sit like that more often than not most everywhere, as well as cross-legged. Still does. Dumb hippy.]

Childhood Nostalgia - The Local Bowling Alley

(Did some revisioning on the original, mainly the one kid in the foreground. Shapes should flow or at least have some kind of balanced rhythm, no matter what the pose or clothing options.) 

Hazy memories of the bowling alley our sleepy little town had, off E Clark Ave if I remember right. Was torn down and replaced with an Albertson's and extended strip mall years ago, and as far as I know no pictures of it exist online. Remember it having a really nice arcade in an area leading down off the main entrance, and that me and several others spent an entire day in playing TMNT when our grade school class did an end-of-year trip there for whatever reason.

I also remember several of us stealing bowling balls out the side entrance during the high school years. Alley bowling mostly, though one of them ended its existence by being blown up with an M80 inside of a garage.

And as one of my childhood friends pointed out, endless prank phonecalls to the main desk. Half the time some of us would be hanging out there only to hear over the intercom "Ray Paguy. Mr. Ray Paguy to the front desk please."

Character and Story Development Pages

Two condensed pages of recent character studies that sort of bleed over into either story or scene ideas. Spitballing pages, more or less, figuring out both character design and personality.

Slumberhexe - Daydream Notebook 01

Intended more as a WIP progress page, throwing a few non-sequential panels together from separate pages. Was also an excuse to explore color options a little more.
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~ The original full pic that started the process:

~ Panel detail of the peasant riot:

Slumberhexe - Daydream Notebook 02

The original full page, which ended up going counter clockwise starting from the top right for whatever reason. Trying to create anything should mean allowing yourself to get messy; and despite the eternal critique of other artists (read: animators), getting the creative juices flowing sometimes means not giving much of a damn about everyone else's nitpick; "Not left to right? I can't follow, I don't get it."

Yeah, neither do I. Not fully anyhow. Hence the process of creating.

Slumberhexe - Daydream Notebook 03

 Several of the individual panels given their own page.

A close up of the last panel.