Life drawing

Some of this semesters life drawing:

The last two are from weekly drawing sessions to help with Dancing Nina, at Dundee College's 'The Space,' where they do dance courses. Since the dancers move so quickly the poses are probably somewhat incorrect...

Horse references

Just a quick post about the useful references I've been looking at to understand the movement of horses for when it comes to animating. I won't be doing any 3D animation, but it's still helpful to know so that I can direct the animation properly.

This one is pretty useful as it's in slow motion - helpful to see all the muscles working :)

I went to one of these shows when I was younger. These andalusian horses are trained to do some pretty crazy things, movements that regular horses wouldn't normally do so it's good reference for extreme poses.

And these are from the incredibly handy 'Horses Inside Out', run by a woman who paints the muscular and skeletal structure onto her horses!

Lighting Tests

I did a couple lighting tests for Kelpies last year but they were pretty bad (and quite frankly terrifying), so I gave it another shot. I can't remember how I did these exactly but I basically just mucked about overlay and multiply etc.

Lighting is something I'm pretty interested in, as it can completely change the tone of a scene. This is one of the interior scenes, where Murdo is sitting next to the fire. There isn't much other light in the room, so the firelight would be pretty intense on one side of his face. The second one is too red, it looks a little like light in film processing dark rooms, and I think the first is a bit too soft. The third one is probably closest to where we'll go with it, but it's maybe a little too dark on his hair. I also haven't given his eyes any highlights.

I also did a very quick test with the lighting on all three 'types' of Murdo (exterior daytime, interior and exterior storm). The lighting and shadows definitely add a lot more to the character, and I think it would help blend the 2D and the 3D together, but realistically I'm not sure if we have the time to do traditional lighting effects with every scene, since it takes a lot of time and we're behind schedule already..

Colour Schemes

I've been trying to get the colour scheme right for the exterior scenes. This isn't a colour key, more like inspiration for out background artist. I want them to look somewhat enhanced in terms of colour, but to remain fundamentally 'Scottish.'

There were a few more but I'm still dealing with computer problems and these were the only ones I uploaded to Facebook. At the moment I think we'll probably go with the more orangey tones, but with a sky colour similar to the last one. I also didn't do anything drastic with the water as that'll be determined later on with 3D and what not...