I’ll admit: between the first two terms of the 2D Animation and Digital Art program at the Centre for Arts and Technology, the global pandemic, and just the rigours of being in a city that still doesn’t quite feel like home, I went into our spring break very much burnt out. It has become clear to me over the years that one of the tricks for dealing with burn-out is making the most of the free time you have, and for me, that often means letting go of all schedule and letting the spirit move me as it will. If that means working on a project, great! If it means sitting on the couch and binging Critical Role while I eat take-out pho, also great. My break ended up being a mix of all those things, although I tried to keep the pencil moving whenever I could.
So here’s a round-up of projects I worked on during our week-and-a-half-long break. Some are finished, some are still in progress, and some are being put aside, fun had and lessons learned.
A quick, one page comic about a cult of gummy bears raising a giant gummy bear from hell. Born from an inside joke, this comic was fun to make. It was an exercise in getting something finished quickly, and this page – from conception and planning to final image – took less than ten hours. There are narrative problems that I recognize (e.g. the icing has no purpose, there is a third candy head in the middle of the pentagram that isn’t explained) and intend to fix at some point, but I needed to have it finished, so I settled for “good enough for now.”In-progress of the gummy bears comic. Once I had thumbnailed the panels separately, I drew in my construction lines with non-photo blue pencil, and then drew final lines with regular 2B pencil. I largely followed a technique laid out in a YouTube video by animator and comic artist Tony Cliff, whose work I absolutely loved in the graphic novel “Bubble”. This image was cleaned up and coloured in Photoshop to produce the final result. The result of an off-hand joke in the web series Critical Role, I felt compelled to illustrate the Fantasy Uggs of Sneaking. My goal here was to practice rendering the focal point of the image to a higher level of detail than the background, and to experiment with loose brush strokes to imply texture.These occurred to me right after I finished the Fantasy Uggs of Sneaking. Another experiment in loosely rendered backgrounds. I wanted the flops to have the curved, misshapen look that leather flip flops get after several seasons of use, right when they’re at their coziest. A friend of mine is starting a game and IP development studio, and needed a website in a hurry. This was a fun opportunity to dip a toe back in the software world, and keep my engineering skills polished. Even though the work I did previously was mostly back-end, many of the same principles apply to front-end development. Over a period of 24 hours, with my friends mocks, I was able to get the site up, running, and fully responsive and mobile friendly. I used SASS for the first time, and loved it. You can see the finished page (and find out more about the studio!) at Ottodork.com.
