uploaded this lady on Instagram and tumblr without putting her steps to music cause I couldn’t figure out anything that would fit. 5 minutes after posting I realise the violin track from Night is short walk on girl would’ve been perfect in every way. Devastated.
School, work, commissions, house chores and commuting often mean I don’t get any time left over to relax, let alone create art for myself. I’m also often so exhausted that I don’t want to draw – but I’ve been enjoying making these little collages. They’re a low stress activity that are all the more charming for their imperfections, and all I have to do is visualise, cut and paste. And they look great on my wall!
A dear friend gave me a bunch of pro markers that she wasn’t using and I’ve been trying them out! When I paint or do coloured commissions digitally, I tend to do solid blocks of colour and only use line when I need to. Interesting to see how it might translate to traditional art. But there’s a lot less room for error!
Oh man this movie!!! This style fucks!!! We watched Masaaki Yuasa’s feature length film NISWOG at our after school animation film club and the sheer joy in the animation blew me away.
The colours are vibrant, the character design playful, and the movements are just so reality bending and taking full advantage of its form.
I come from a literature background (BA in English lit and Music, don’t ask me why) so I believe in the adage of “a good story can save bad style, but a great style can’t save a bad story.” NISWOG is maybe the first example I’ve seen where style trumps story and it’s still a delight to watch. The narrative is honestly not that great – it feels more like 5 short episodes stitched together and the storylines aren’t that gripping.
But it works! The narratives may be flighty and whimsically shallow, but it works well with the equally whimsical and unpredictable tone set by the animation and visual style. You see it and expect a fun time, not a profound narrative. It seems that in NISWOG, story is just there as a vehicle for the best animation I’ve ever seen. And that’s okay.
These viviva colour sheets were a birthday present from ages back but I was too scared to use them cause I’m not a good painterwhich is of course bullshit. But I finally used them on the trip back from Bognor Regis! A few little dreamy dreary scenes. They’re fantastic to use on the go, even if the colours are a bit too vibrant for my taste…
This past term a couple of us started a very informal storyboard club on WhatsApp. The premise: every month we take turns to submit a prompt and everyone draws a storyboard or story-led drawing in response. Anything is welcome, even preliminary character sketches or just the seeds of an idea. The October prompt was “a spooky story snippet, where the goal is to build an atmosphere of tension and fear (which can be released or not)”. We’ve had another prompt since, but everyone got too busy to do it :///
Went to Bognor Regis this past Christmas. British people take Christmas pretty seriously so when I told my roommate (Sam) that I was just planning to stay home and work throughout the holidays (no family here in England, so) he wasn’t having it and invited me to his family shindig. We took the train to this quaint little seaside town and i sketched passengers from the window.
The sea was beautiful! I hadn’t seen her since I left Hong Kong. Growing up near the sea probably instils in you a constant longing for it when you move inland. Spent a nice time lookin for rocks that resembled the planets. We have Mars, Jupiter, Earth, and the moon so far :))
I had a great time at my first traditional proper Christmas! It really is a beautiful season.
Feel like my recent weeks have been taken over by life drawing. I joined the UAL life drawing club because I was worried that I’d miss out on important anatomy and gesture training if I didn’t get to draw in person. I go on Mondays and Sundays now, in addition to Wednesday storytelling life drawing with Mary-Clare and Thursday nights for the animator’s life drawing. This past week I also went to a pop-up life drawing event at Jazzbourne, a super classy and intimate jazz club.
That’s probably too much life drawing. I’m wary of developing the artist’s version of “fingeritis”, a thing that happens to jazz pianists where your fingers go on autopilot and play the same riffs and licks by default, your soloing becoming stale. I see mistakes in my life drawing that have become default to me (I always draw girls too muscular and chonky) and it’s a fight against my brain and my hand!
I think it’s really useful to do external life drawing in addition to animation life drawing, in which the poses are 30 seconds to 3 minutes long only.
The 10-20 minute ones are great too, because I get to slow down and really look at anatomy.
Tried to participate in Gouachetober this year, since those paints I got back in 2018 are slowly but surely drying up…
The challenge was to do a painting for every day of the month, which is a noble goal but completely impossible when you’re trying to (finally) move into an unfurnished apartment. At least it was less painful to be on hold on the phone with water/electricity/gas companies when I was painting at the same time.
I didn’t even do a painting every two days! but I think the challenge was still overall effective because I left it feeling less scared of breaking out the gouache. And I’m sure it was helpful in developing my eye for colour, composition, light and shadow, which are still useful for animation!