frazer irving

frazer irving dropped by our college in leeds and gave a great presentation that was a sort of story of his life/ gallery exhibition. anyway it was a great insight into how he came into the industry and some of his working practices and such, its actually the reason why i made some photo references for my drawings because he showed some of his work along with the photorefs he'd taken at it looked like a really successful way of doing things. as well as that just looka t some of his work in the pics above, how good is he for perspective, plains and dynamic shot stuff!? good referance images abound, i actually dug out some old books i've got with his art in to have a look so i'll probably blog about them later as well.

referance photos

here you go hahah, it feels a bit silly because these photo's are just me and lucy dicking about with my camera phone but these are some super helpful reference pictures taken on the advice of frazer irving's working practice to help me draw awkward high and low angle images. they should be pretty helpful especially beacause (as you may have read in a previous post) i've never really done a drawing that was from any kind of dynamic angle. they're all just eye level headshots and junk.

theres even two pics of me for you there as i try my hardest (and look slightly bewildered) getting a high camera angle. turns out my arms arent long enough and you just get a frame full of face.

(heheheh, doesnt lucy look a right monkey in that bottom picture)

how to draw manga

http://www.organicmetal.co.uk/OrganicMetal1/index.htm



the art of drawing manga is a pretty old book that i own by ben krefta, its a good resource for learning as well as reference. i'm not sure how much i like kreftas art now but his book gives some very practical and useful advice on how t draw characters, colour them, pose them and even how to draw pages and panels for your own manga/ anime style comics. so its a good starting place and you can check out his website, organic metal, where he has his own gallery, links to other great artists galleries and tutorials like the ones in his book as well as community activities. its a well good site. helpful stuff.

paper and pens

the images of my work that i've posted up so far a mostly a bit cack arenrt they? its the cheap paper and pencil combo. the ultimate fail combo. i'll try to use ink and better paper from now on so i dont have to keep saying 'look at the big version, sorry its so faint.'

turnarounds

drawing these was a bit of a pain and they arent 100% accurate in terms of proportion from each drawing to the next but they'll make good reference images for animating and despite them being a nuisance to make they actually helped me learn to draw the character better through practice so i'm a bit more fluent and confident with drawing them all now. sky didnt get a turnaround because she's not in the animation (check the storyboard in a previous post) it might be an idea to make one anyway though just to get a better grip on drawing her but like, she's only in about 3 panels of the comic too so maybe i could spend the time a little better.

monster hunter porno

whats with that? my innocent little world has been crushed by pervy hunters. there is monster hunter porno comics, i'm not gonna post you a link or put up a pic but yeah, if youre really interested just google monster hunter hentai without the safe search on or something. hahah still, what does that tell me about my target audience!?

well, it was still manga/ anime style so i guess thats a consistent theme. and the 'heroine' was wearing kirin armour like sky, maybe i didnt make her slutty enough for this dirty audience....

i'll keep it pg i reckon.

animation stuff

for the animation its a good idea to make character turnarounds as a reference for animating, that way you know how your characters look from all sides and it just makes life a little easier. these arent those though, i knocked these up to be a rough guide and help me draw the character turnarounds later. i'll post them when theyre ready.

presentation part 2

just thought it might be cool to show you some of the slides i made up for the presentation, its just the messy drawings from earlier but i put them into boards so each character has their own board with some of there concept art on it.

the presentation

we did like powerpoint presentations of our work so far for our research and development part of the grade and we had to be dead professional and stuff, you can probably tell by my writing that i struggled to be all suave and professional. i find it hard to communicate my ideas, there development and my research so my presentation was a but sweary and informal.(eek)

anyway,in spite of myself i got some good feedback and i'm ready to get on with a second draft of the comic, people liked the characters and the backstory of monster hunter no one seemed confused and no one said my story ideas were bad, they just need planning out a bit better. its cool as well that not many of my class has played monster hunter but they werent confused by the story, characters and themes or anything... i mean they werent turned on to it or anything but they arent my target audience. it might have been wierd if all the non hunters were on board.

rough layouts

For the comic I wanted a short story that would introduce all five of my characters and let me do some interesting action drawings. The sketch reflects a lot of aspects of the game that fans will hopefully instantly recognise (the guild hall, Kutku, hunting, carving, base camp, the kitty kart, ect.) and I’ve tried to make it so that the events still make sense to a reader who’s never seen the game. So hopefully its not an appalling read

I’ve attempted to make use of Barry Kitson’s (comic book illustrator) advise by first writing out what the story will be panel by panel and then drawing up a rough plan to see how to make the framework and speech bubbles work. And although it does annoy me just how rough the rough version is (its not only a rough version but it’s a bit rushed too so I could get some help and feedback with it when I showed it at presentation) it has helped amazingly,maybe not for the final thing but for a second draft. hahah

also sorry again that its dead pale,i promise if you press one you see it more clearly.
maybe i should start working with something that scans a bit better.

animation storyboards

i know i've only really been talking about this project as a comic book but thats just because thats the part that excites me the most. its also an animation and now that i have the characters and world figured out a bit i can storyboard for it a bit.

I brainstormed a few ideas for events from the game that could happen inside 60 seconds (the intended maximum length of my animation.) and that draw on iconic aspects of monster hunter(previous post). I know i should story board more just to see where they can go but i chose to run with the idea that could keep me excited about working for the longest and provide me with plenty of opportunities to practice cel animation, like I specified in my brief and i felt like this was the obvious choice. The storyboard is a fleeting little action sequence of a successful hunt followed by a ‘carving’ sequence. (in the monster hunter game rewards are gained by carving the corpses of fallen monsters.) the carving sequence being my crappy attempt at a monster huntery punchline but still i think it lets you know that jins team suck.