Everybody's Got the Blues

The light tables' are glowin'

*Duh dun duh dun nah*

The pencils are scratchin'

 *Duh dun duh dun nah*

The people are slavin'~~~~~

Doin' their animal walk

 *Duh dun duh dun nah*
We all got the blues
 *Duh dun duh dun nah*
Animation blues

I just really need to do something unrelated to painting and animation right now. There's a human threshold for painting and animating and I am clearly approaching it. So instead of playing STALKER and wasting the rest of the night, I have decided to do a little bit of updating on this, my oh so neglected blog. 

I've done a lot of stuff over the past few weeks, but very little that I would actually call presentable. In fact, some of the stuff I'm posting actually sucks, but I'm putting them up in the hopes that when I look back upon this moment years from now, I can remember how MUCH it sucks. Officially. For perspective purposes.

I've included the age sequence assignment from character design. Some bits look wonky, and the silhouette for the infant stage is awful. Could've had a better color scheme too, I guess, but that's attached to a cinder block in the water under the bridge now.

And, some layouts. Top is the texture assignment (I know there's no texture), and bottom is the big small assignment. I post these now, because as soon as I get a chance to do it, I'm going to repaint/rework them (but I'm not in a hurry, given that all the grades are already in and aren't liable to change). I'm not proud of the execution of either, but they pad up the post real well, don't they? Why, they must almost occupy nearly 1/4 of the screen! Blimey!

I just finished the roughest gorilla walk cycle ever conceived by mortals. I'd rather not talk about it. If any expert wants to conduct a study on PTSD and its relation to animation students, here's your chance.



And finally, my greatest failure this semester.

It's not that I couldn't make it look good, it's that I didn't have the grit to make it look good. They say grit could make or break a man. If you ain't got it, chances aren't too good of you seeing many more sunrises. My eyes strained under the eggshell white glow of the animation table. I found myself trapped, between a peg bar and a hard place. Not enough patience to fix the problems, not enough energy to correct the imperfections. It was just one last speed bump before the light at the end of the tunnel, some small, insignificant jostle that didn't have to be any more than that. It was practically begging to be driven over, without a care, like the carcass of some small animal whose only reason for being is to add gristle to the road. It was beckoning, almost enticingly so, to be glossed over, to be buried by the highway and lost from memory. I'd never heard of a schmuck that wanted to make life difficult for himself, not in this business. I wasn't about to be the first.

I'm certainly going to redo this, sometime over the summer, I expect.

And now, with an escalating sense of dread, I am compelled to return to painting.