Almost done!
School Projects
The circus animation is almost done!
Exhibition opening in Galerie Hraničář, Ústí nad Labem
It’s been already two weeks ago that we went to see the opening of our projection exhibition in Ústí nad Labem! The video above shows only a few of all the video’s made by us, but as they are played in an random order I didn’t film all of them. Here are some pictures of the opening, made by Foto Lumpe.
Our super cool flyer with the name of the exhibition (Signály na známa, signals to know), which is somewhat in line with the major exhibition, titled Jak si rozumět (how to understand each other). Shame that they didn’t get the date right, it should be 15.5 – 15.7.17. Oh well!
More comic updates
I feel bad that I didn’t update this blog more the last weeks, but I guess school work has priority over writing about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After my experiments on brown paper I suddenly got the idea that I also can make the drawing on white, thicker and more sturdy paper, scan them, and print them on the brown paper. After that I could go add highlights. That way I don’t have to deal with the brown paper’s inability to take much water and still have it’s wonderful brown color. Yay!
So last week I was practically drawing every hour I was awake. In retrospect I made it also quite some work for myself as I sketched the pages firstly on my laptop in Photoshop, printed them and traced them on A3 paper before drawing it out like you see in the picture.
So the full progress for page 3 was, for example, like this:
That’s right, the comic needed to be in Czech. Well, even though I got a 92% score for my Czech language test, translating poetic English into Czech is still out of my league, haha! So credits for the wonderful translation go to Vojta Koči!
The comic project is officially finished now, the deadline for sending the files for printing was today. But it’s also not officially finished yet, as our klausura assignment is to create a trailer or teaser of max. 30 seconds for our comic. So back to work!
Comic Experiments
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..
Aaaaand again posted on my wrong blog. Sorry!
Another two assignments!
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. 😀
Ligeia Comic Assignment
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! 😀
Circus Animation Progress
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:
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!
Ligeia Comic Progress
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!