And just where have you been, young man?

Molding. Lots and lots of molding. I had done about all I could do with just a metal armature and needed to work on putting a body on the thing. It took a while, but please, allow me to introduce you to MCDONOUGH 2.0!



I'm finally ready to start test animation with the new puppet. There will be clothes and paint to come but for now we're back in the animation realm! I've documented the whole process on McDonough's Facebook page. Check it out if that's yo thang. Oh and if you happen to approve of the page, you're welcome to click that button that says "like", though I won't ask you to. I don't even really know what it's for.

Stop Motion Acting Exercises

So I thought I already had this up here, but since I just finished a new one tonight, y'all get two to look at.

Here's the first one. After I finished this, I started working on eliminating any pauses in my animation.

This is one I just finished tonight. I did a few takes on 4s before I did this one on 2s and it really helped. If you're struggling with going straight from pose test to animation, give it a shot.

Feb. 11 Second Club, First Take

"Y'know what I do when my hands are stuck together?"

11 Second Club January Submission: Edgar & Philip

Heard the audio, sketched up two old farts and started animatin'! Fair amount of work but so much fun. Can't wait for February!

Four Main Characters Down, Turnin' Round.

I'm feeling a lot better about my coloring for this one. I think I've found the ratio of hard outline shadows to soft gradated values.

Cesar is sort of the moral compass of the story. I wanted his character design to reflect a certain meekness to him, something he has to push through in order to reason with Blanco.

More Coloring... More Turnarounds....

OK. I think I know what needs to change. I've had this habit of doing crisp, darker values (look at the far right hand). It's just not gelling with the softer values like I want it to. I think I'll tone that part down to just creases and facial details. Otherwise, I can take the softer values and create them as their own separate layer in Flash (still the solid vector shapes), take that into After Effects, blur it and set the layer as a clipping mask for the main color layer.

Coloring Exercises and Turnarounds.

Trying to get better at coloring. Trying to see how much depth I can add to this character design. Not sure how well adding real textures will look animated. Need to try that next.