Fanart. Lots of It.

Hi everyone!

I've just submitted my last final project for the term and I am now only three short semesters away from graduation (whaaaat?) For the past few days I've been settling into a consistent pattern of working and sleeping with brief breaks to eat and to Christmas party. So it's weird not to be in the art lab right now and not to have anything particular to do - I still have this nagging feeling that there's at least one more storyboard that needs to be drawn and timed out. Cause that has been my LIFE recently (well that and CG animation splining, but I really don't want to write about that. Don't ask.) Even with all the work I did before break, my final animatic for Storyboarding 2 was still quite the task to finish on time - but I'm happy with how it came out! It's a absurd murder mystery comedy, but I don't know when I'll be able share it here. There's a chance it could be made into a Actual Short Film and so I'm not sure if I want to spoil it before it's all colored and pretty. Anyways, the project is at a good stopping point and I figured now's as a good a time as ever to eat a TON of Takis and talk about the other work that I've been doing:

If you're one of the people who follow me on Instagram (a hearty crew) and you also happen to be reading this now (a happy few) then you maaaay have realized that I've been posting exclusively fanart since Halloween. I'm a little conflicted about this - I'd rather it be original stuff, but fanart has been just so fun recently. Since I'm doing original storyboards during the day, it tends to be Pokemon and Disney Channel amphibians that flow most easily onto my iPad at night. And these pieces also tend to be in color. I haven't gotten a lot of chances to work in color or make much "finished" work this semester. I'm only taking two animation classes. CG Animation, not surprisingly, doesn't include a lot of drawing, and most of what I do for storyboarding is rather rough and black and white. And DANG IT, I MISS COLOR! AND SHADING! 

musharna (pokemon)

I've also been doing some serious style studies/fusions of my favorite artists, and fanart allows me to focus on the technique/form rather than worrying about the subject/content. Studying Saira Vargas has been incredibly helpful to me, and I've been practicing her style in my fanart. I've been combining her half-lineless style and dynamism with some of my old favorites - an artsy gumbo, if you will:

yubaba (spirited away)

polly and hop pop (amphibia)

Both of these two pieces were made for contests, another reason why I've been doing so much fanart recently. I guess when it comes down to it, fanart is a happy meeting of fun and learning: fun, because you get to draw what you like and it's easy, and learning because you can absorb good design and experiment along the way. You also get to celebrate beautiful things and call attention to the good - which is kinda our job as artists and people :P 

But I still can't get past the feeling that drawing fanart is kinda like playing covers of songs - worthwhile and career building, but not something you want to be known for. I don't just want to be a fan, I want to be an artist too - to create rather than purely iterate. So although I am for sure gonna be drawing some fanart during this Christmas break, maybe it would be good to draw some new stuff too? I'd really like to do some designs of literary characters, maybe from A Christmas Carol or Lord of the Rings. I know that's halfway fanart, but I've got to have some kind of prompt to bounce off of! Or this month's Character Design Challenge sounds fun too: "Axolotl Adventurer." Who knows!

In the meantime, I plan on catching up on everything I missed/forgot to do during finals: baking, reading books & blogs, movie watching, rest, general merriment, and drinking eggnog. My Christmas spirit has been high this year and I'm hoping it stays that way until at least the 25th. I also hope to be here on the Roost more often! The end of the year is approaching and I feel a sense of reflective retrospective-ness coming on... which means we're in for a post. The Roost is about to turn one year old and I'm excited to take stock of the ups and downs, and God's constant faithfulness throughout 2019. I was looking through my Instagram today and it's crazy to think where I was just last year! 

So see you soon! And an Merry Christmas to ya!
-dh

Late Halloween Fanart and the Not Busy Weekend

Hello Everyone, and Happy Halloween!

A few days late.

Already my mind and the mall are quickly shifting into Christmas Mode, but before the ghosts fully depart from our mortal plane I wanted to share a few pieces that I made (or at least started) in October. That one up top is some Halloween Day fanart of one of my favorite Pokemon, Chandelure. Love its color palette, its Fire/Ghost typing, and (laugh all you want) the fact that it's a gothic haunted CHANDELIER. This piece took a few extra days to complete cause I wanted to try some new things with the coloring. Just one more step in my perhaps eternal journey to capture the playful simplicity of Louie Zong's work.  These next ones are some Harry Potter doodles I did while watching the movie with some RA friends. I usually don't draw during movies, but I've seen Sorcerer's Stone a fair amount and drawing also helps me to feel a little more comfortable in new situations and friendgroups - kinda like a security blanket made of scribbles. Also I haven't drawn a lot of HP and now felt like the right time to draw some cloaks and capes.

 a dumble

a snep

I decided to keep just the initial sketch layer with some color underneath - I've found myself doing that an awful lot recently. One critique I've been commonly getting is that my clean-up line loses a lot of the life and spontaneity of the sketch and becomes too noodley. I can't see it as easily, but I agree. So the obvious solution is to ditch the clean-up line entirely, right? Right? But I also have a fair amount of construction lines in the initial sketch that shouldn't be in the final image. Oh bother. 

. . .

I'm in a comfortable calm-between-two-storms moment in the semester. Last week was crazy with RA events and Halloween socializing. If I wasn't working an event, I was attending one. There were chili and ghost stories on Halloween, and an intense dodgeball tournament in a dorm courtyard the next night. But now Halloweek is over, I've been given a time of rest, and finals are just far enough away where I haven't started to worry about them yet. Which meant that this weekend I had only ~3 hours of homework to do. An absolute rarity. I didn't have a lot of motivation to draw, so I just did nothing. Which felt very wrong, yet also kinda needed? Everything I've read from animation pros in the industry talks about their insane work ethic and willingness to hone their craft in seemingly every possible moment. And so as an animation student with a lot to learn and a lot to prove, any quiet moment feels like a wasted one. Even when homework is minimal, there's still books I could be reading, sketches I could be completing, personal projects I could be progressing - you get the idea. So to do nothing, even for a weekend, feels a little like a hit to my future career. Like I'm being lazy. But that can't be the way people are supposed to live. I believe in the importance of stillness, solitude, of things other than animation. So where do those fit into the get-a-job-in-cartoons plan? It's a balance I've been trying to discover since I showed up here at Lipscomb. 

But for better or for worse, I put art on the backburner this weekend. I spent hours talking with friends. I sat outside and looked at trees, and talked to the people who stopped by. I played Splatoon 2. Made muffins. Got kinda lost with friends in the woods after dark. Things happened, but they weren't art things. Career things. Or resume things. 

Of course, if I did this every weekend it might create problems. But perhaps those hard-workin pros have weekends like this as well? And maybe it's not just a rat race scramble out to a Hollywood job, but a journey with time for rose-smelling and side-quests? Maybe it's more like Ecclesiastes suggests, where there's a time for everything? A time to draw, and a time to not draw. 

What do you think, bloggerfolk?

-dh