I’m done with the semester officially! Although I’m, of course, very exhausted, it’s important that I keep making art. I won’t try to draw every day, but multiple times a week? Absolutely. In the meantime, though, I’d like to share some of my illustration and animation work from the past semester, as we’re officially in the summer months I won’t be sharing as many 3D works. I anticipate updating on my crochet progress and any artwork I’m doing in future blogs, so stay tuned for more of my 2D works and crochet!

I’d like to share the good and bad this week. I haven’t shared a lot of my most recent assignments for many of my classes, so I’ll go through those by class.

Digital Illustration

I’ll get this one out of the way first. We had to make an animation of our characters that we have been developing over the course of the class. I bit off a lot more than I could chew and was only really able to finish the walk cycle of the unicorn. I added a head turn for visual interest. Even just doing that took a few hours. I’m definitely out of practice with animation. My friends reminded me that I can likely work on/finish this animation during our 2D animation course next semester! So that makes me happy at least, because the animation is a lot less exciting in this unfinished state. Here is the animation though. The beginning is the nice part, and the rest is just storyboard sketches of what will be happening.

The image here shows the final storyboard all together. Aside from these, I’ll now show some more animation, this time entirely finished 🙂

Motion Graphics

In motion graphics, I’ve made a few more videos since the Alysa Liu animation. Firstly, we had to make a video showcasing the Anatomy of Typography, so I tried to make each letter look like an anatomical sketch:

I’m decently happy with how it turned out. It drags on a little, but for my first After Effects project, I would say it’s pretty fun.

The next animation I’d like to share is a title sequence. We had to make a title credits sequence based on Saul Bass’s work. The example we were given was his title sequence for “Anatomy of a Murder.” All of the assets were paper cut-outs and everything moved somewhat choppily. The movie I chose was “The Last Unicorn” (no surprises there) and I just used the original theme from the movie.

This was also made in After Effects. The ending took a while, but I’m very happy with it. The one thing I might’ve done differently was the sunrise movement at the end stretching a little longer. It stops a bit early. The only issue is, when it was going for longer, it was hard to tell any movement was happening. I would’ve liked to have found a happy medium between the two. I still really like how it turned out!

The last project for Motion Graphics I’d like to share is my favorite. We had to make an animation in after effects that was in the style of the animations linked here: https://prand.tv/projects/cuba 

I took an image of an american woodcock into photoshop and made it black and white. I sliced up different areas of the image and put them on separate layers. I brought them into After Effects and made this looping gif:

I’m very happy with this animation! He’s a delightful guy and I’m happy I was able to successfully recreate his real movement from a still image. After I finished that, I wanted to add the colorful flourishes there are in the Prand videos. Since the woodcock does this dance to coax worms out of the ground, I made this video of him walking around summoning worms. Everyone likes the one with sound better so I’ll put that version in.

I’m glad I was able to make the video a loop as well. I’m sure I’ll post this on YouTube and Instagram in time. Anyway, on to my next class.

General Illustration

I just have my final to showcase from General Illustration. We had to make something “out of place.” I took a long time to come up with my idea. I saw an image of a quail and thought, “He reminds me of a 20s flapper!” I made a few thumbnails and thought the one of a flapper conversing with a quail in a speakeasy was the most delightful, so I went with that.

Big fan of the expression on the quail’s face. Some of the perspective is off and the image looks sort of “flat” but I wanted to give it sort of a “printed in a 20s magazine” vibe. I’ve been encouraged to play with this style, which I likely will. I plan on adding a lot of the images I’ve created (such as this one) onto Redbubble to be sold as stickers and other merchandise. If anyone is interested, my Redbubble is 3separateteas.

That’s all my most recent stuff! I’m excited to see what’s in store for my senior year, and to share these these things with everyone! For now, I’ll keep you updated as the summer progresses and show what I’m working on over break 🙂

More to come!

~Marissa