Some more comic progress! The first page was a first test but the teacher didn’t really like it, it lacked contrast and drawing it with fineliner would make it to soft and delicate for what’s basically a horror story. So I went on an experimented with water-soluble pencil on wet paper – I got nice black expressive lines but the paper couldn’t take water very well… And I really wanted to use this paper because I like the color and when I draw on it with black and white it reminds me of old photographs and gravures.. And it’s cheap. I did another test where I drew the panels first and then went over it with water but it didn’t feel right yet..
Two weeks ago we got another two assignments and then the blogposts stopped, which is I guess the best illustration of the lack of time that I have now! And it doesn’t help if we go on all kinds of trips visiting other cities XD
About the new assignments: one was really short-term and in fact I finished it just last week, it’s the video up there. We had only two weeks to create a short animation of max. 30 seconds somehow connected to Ústí and Labem, a Czech town near the German border which has changed sides frequently through history. I made a kind of abstraction of that history. Fun about this is that it’s gonna be projected in three different rooms in a gallery in Ústí, which is why there are these rectangles overlays in the animation. The viewer will only see one of the three parts at any time. 😀
One of the assignments I have here at UMPRUM is to adapt a short story of A. E. Poe into a comic. I got Ligeia.
I drew this as practice for the characters and furniture and fashion, because our teacher really presses us to make it authentic with 19th century clothing and furniture. So I present you some Biedermeier which was totally the rage in the 1820s and 1830s! 😀
Time to show some progress for that circus animation, isn’t it? I should be ashamed, I’m working on it for months now and still haven’t showed anything! Thing is, preparing all the characters, props and backgrounds for a paper cut animation takes the most time, while it only starts coming to life in the end when you finally can start animating.
Anyway, without giving away the whole story of this 30-second animation, these are the characters, a knife thrower and his lovely assistant:
Work in progress of the main background
First puppet in the works…
And after scanning, printing on the right paper, protecting it with fixative and carefully cutting it…
…the fun task of making the edges of the paper black begins. This is to make sure the edges don’t reflect on the plastic sheets between the characters and the background, as this reflection would be visible in the animation.
You can imagine this is task that requires full concentration, as almost anything involving paper puppets, haha! Drawback of this black line is that it bleeds into the front side a little, so all the parts have this black line around them now.
And this is where this black line becomes a problem: on the arms for example, when the parts overlap more during movement, this black line becomes visible. Oh well, nothing to be done about it!
Showing some progress of my Ligeia comic! These are the earliest sketches I made. I really liked the effect of using black and white on this grey paper, so I wanted to use that for the final comic as well. After doing sketches and studies I storyboarded the whole story…
… and after that, draft layouts! The comic spans over seven pages now, these are the first three. For next week I’ll have to finish one page, see how that goes!
So to make up for the lack of posts, less talking and more pictures.
Two weeks ago, there was a camera lighting workshop arranged for our studio, but there places were limited and therefore there wasn’t any place left for us Exchange students. So Zuzana, one of our teachers, arranged an etching workshop at AVD, the academy of fine arts and the other art academy here in Prague.
Thing was that this workshop lasted the whole week, every morning from 9 till 13. With me having classes at the same time it was also quite hectic, but fun!
The etching itself was awesome, I made an detailed aquatint and a small soft-ground etching, which I hadn’t done before but is a very nice and quick technique too!
Last week was the final week to make a choice when it comes to the elective courses. In the end I settled on Figure Drawing, Czech Language, Genius Loci of Prague, Very Anxious Meetings, Clay Modeling and Czech Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture. This is more than I have to, but there is just too much fun things to choose from! Also if it turns out to be too much I can drop one or two, I still need only 30 ECS and with this I will be having 34.
But let me tell you what these courses are all about! Well, Figure Drawing, Czech Language and Clay Modeling are self-explanatory, but what is this Genius Loci of Prague? It’s basically a weekly tour through Prague with the teacher talking about modern architecture, think first half of 20th century. It’s fun, I get to know architectural styles and periods I didn’t know about and maybe I’ll be able to tell from which period buildings are from their looks in the end! 😀 And the teacher is really enthusiastic about architecture, especially Functionalism and Rondocubism, which is something typically Czech, it seems. Czech Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture is similar, but we will visit museums, galleries and monuments instead. So I go twice a week visiting places in the city!
Last Friday we visited the Vítkov Monument:
This building is kinda strange because it had so many different functions during it’s history… It was build as a memorial for Czechoslovakia in the thirties, then the Nazis used it for storage, during Communism it was the place to display the body of the first Communist president of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald. After 1989 it was left unused for years and now it is a museum. And a memorial. And there is a ceremonial hall which is sometimes still in use.
The view from the roof is amazing, though! We visited the TV tower the day before with Genius Loci of Prague. 🙂
On the very last moment I decided to take the Anxious Meetings course as well. :/ It’s a quite varied course with discussions, guest speakers and sometimes even excursions. Last semester the course concluded with an exhibition. It’s called Anxious Meetings because no topic is too weird or personal to not speak about during the discussions. I kind of missed some theory in the other courses, and the exhibition looked promising, so I decided to follow this one too. So far it’s been fun.
This first week of school was quite hectic! And guess what? Almost all the classes were in Czech! 😀 But my Czech fellow students helped to translate what was said, as wel as the teachers whom can speak English. XD
No, it was fun! Monday I had my first studio class, were we got our assignment for this semester (although I think we will do more than just this one). We get to make a comic of a short story of Edgar Allan Poe! We had to pick the story from a hat, and I got Ligeia. Pretty interesting, I hadn’t read that one yet! (actually the only Poe story I have read is The Cask of Amontillado)
I also got another assignment, to make a 30-second paper animation with a circus theme. From what I got is this an assignment for the first year students, but I’ll gladly do it too because i never did paper stop-motion anyway!
Its worth mentioning that all students, no matter first, second or third year get the same assignments simutaneously. Only the paper circus thing is aimed at the first year students by means of practise, I guess.
These are actually some of the ‘cleaner’ spaces, most of the corridors are filled with all kinds of artworks and furniture… Which will be supposedly get cleaned up during the next weeks. This week was still exam week for the Czech students.
Also, fun fact: dogs are allowed in the school! As well is smoking inside. :/
One of the most fun classes I had was clay modelling! 😀 I’ve never worked in clay after a living person before, and the teacher is really nice! Looking forward to this class next week!
