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. 

 

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.]

Post Halloween Environment Design

This got a higher-than-average number of likes over on Instagram for some reason. Played around with having a larger drawing as if it were shot through a long lens to see if I could cut in closer to the characters and get decent or interesting compositions without having to rely on a) action poses and b) wide angle perspective tricks. Individual close-ups below:

(Cheated this one with a blur filter to give it some atmosphere.)