Reflection #64 – June 23

Hello hello!

I’m sitting here comfily, a fresh gush of rain just washed over us, fed the plants and cooled us off a good bit.

These weeks have been very hot, and pretty much affirmed my speculation that this summer is getting rough, we haven’t even gotten into August yet…

Anyway, this marks my first month in self-monitoring work. It turns out, I took some inspiration from my internship to put some structure into my daily life. I have done a weekly schedule of work; not as strict though, more like guiding lines to stay focused on what’s to be done every day a week. So far, I could uphold my resolutions very well. Though as of late, it’s gotten hard to get up as early as I wanted to and the pressure of work piling up had me disregarding most of the ‘details of my plan. It remains a very good source of structure to my days and I’ll keep it up. So far I have been working mornings on my script, afternoon on sketches and animation exercises and evenings on personal projects, split up by some breaks or workouts.

Doing sketches prior to animation wasn’t very productive, it was hard getting into and even then, I would quickly abandon it to get to animating. All in all it’s not easy to stay focused while working at home, especially when you got your bed always close by to relax some more. I am still thankful I get to have this free time to spend working on my personal projects, not just for school.

Speaking of which, my animation film project is under way. The scrip presented a fine challenge for me to get the best out of my writing hands. The concept, emotions and story beats are satisfying to me for how simplistic the animation has to be. Sadly, I had to sacrifice my time working on it for finishing my deadline-specific projects, so I’m hoping I will be able to finish the script throughout the first week(s) of July.

While we’re at it, let’s talk about my illustrations this month.

I’ve been hard at the drawing board besides work time late May, to get my fruit hat piece out there, it just needed some final touches otherwise I would’ve been able to finish it last month. The main difficulty here was the rendering of a painting, although I simplified it with the figure. It was complicated with the background, perhaps as I’m not used to doing these so much anymore. I would have liked to add more detail on the beach but there simply was not much time. Other than that, I’m happy with how this turned out! It’s super idyllic, invites to explore and some really liked the glasses-design. Sadly I had to sacrifice the tail here because I couldn’t find a way to make it work compositionally…

This was the big bugger this month, and took about all of my free time where designing and filling this piece with sketch work and lines was nearly 80% of the whole process sadly, these skeletons taking up most of the time… Aside from the rib-cages and pelvi, they actually were quite fun to do. A weird thing that happened was, I changed the interior design from a moody dark parlour to a luxurious estate while sketching. I thought it would fit the story of this piece more, even though I had to drop all the voodoo interior I had planned to add to this place.

Afterwards, colouring just took a day, it was a simple process, merely applied a little bit of colour variation, all the magic happens in the grading process really. Which was quite challenging here. I half-heartedly mixed some blending modes together to achieve somewhat of a colour balance and then adjusted the local colours separately. It was a bit of a back and forth but I’m very happy with the result and I hope it will be featured in this years Eurofurence con book.

So I did a couple animation exercises this month, which I want to address quickly. Animating is still one hell of a ride. I think the hardest part is to actually draw what you need on the frame. I think I have a pretty good sense of timing for these, designing the sequence and movement – however – is a whole different deal. Though with more exercises, I will get to learn these as well, although I do want to stop doing these with such refinement of the lines, which takes approximately 65% of my time on these projects.

Last week, I sadly couldn’t get myself to find more ideas of simple animation exercises I’d like to do. I hope Art Fight will help me with my lack of inspiration.

Yes, I’ll attend Art Fight again and I am stoked to get back to it honestly. It’s always a wonderful event for me, however, I want to take it easy this time, do simpler things, don’t experiment too much with styles and focus on how I’d like to present a given figure and design in my way. It will be exciting to say the least!

What’s left to address? Oh, it will be interesting to see if my applications will be answered. For one of which I had an interview this week and they made a very good impression, I hope I can land there.

There are not much more plans I have for the following month, so I let myself be surprised.

As for now, I will go to a show by a lovely local comedian with my dad and am very excited to see how it goes, as I can barely remember the last time I was on a show like that 😀

I wish you a splendid new month and hope you will spend it well!

~Souvillaine