Wings of Barbecue

Well, the Xeno thing sort of died at the starting gate, but never mind. I've got enough on my plate at the moment without worrying about non-course related stuff.

Namely, composition. I've got an assignment in Drama class to do a drawing with characters exhibiting joy, sadness and anger as part of a single image that tells a story. So what to do? Well, it starts with clear storytelling, and that means composition first and foremost.

I'd been planning to study film and composition starting over the Xmas holidays, but this pushes my timescale up a bit. Whadda ya gonna do, eh?

Anyhow, I started tonight by doing thumbs based on scenes from the first 15 minutes of Wim Wenders' classic film, "Wings of Desire". Being a story about an angel who walks among humanity, there are a lot of lingering images of people in a variety of emotional states as the angel observes it all, which made it perfect for a bit of practice.

So here's the page I did earlier, before getting started on comps for the Drama assignment. They're a bit on the rough side to start, but toward the bottom two rows I was getting a better idea of where I was going with it.

Off to the races

So I introduced Wendy to you already. Looks like she's gonna be a part of my life for some time, which is hardly a surprise. She'll be the standard model for the rest of first year, and probably the bulk of second year as well, so you'd better get used to seeing her here a lot. That's a good thing really, since she's such a nice, simple model that I can actually comprehend the mechanics of, which I really need at this point. Working with Wendy will seriously improve my figure drawing, and there's nothing bad about that.



So on the topic of projects, the latest is to animate the character from sitting on a box to standing upright. So to figure out the best way to do that, we've done thumbnails to work out each part of the action. I'm kinda new to thumbnailing characters, so it's really valuable information for me. And I see right away the use of it, it's great stuff. The ones with the stars are the images I picked for my progression from sit to stand.

The order to read them is 1, 3, 2, 5, 4, 7, 8, 9, 6.