What a lengthy title for this post. I'll try to shorten it next time.
I've talked the talk, but I never really proved that I walked the walk!
Here it is! Here's some progress on the second super focused character redesign overhaul on the Class of 2422 cast!
So I understand that there's only two people on here, but there is more that will be added soon. Kate-T3 (the Android that I showcased about last week) isn't on here because she's still currently in the designing process, so for now I'd like to introduce you to the two main stars on this particular series!
On the left is the musically-talented Marilyn, and on the right is the slacking-all-day kind of guy Robert! The reason they've been getting all the developmental attention is because I'm really trying to get their personalities right. Trust me, to you they're pretty good with their character, but I feel like it's not fully done yet. Plus, Mary's kind of a Mary Sue, so I'm trying to fix that.
Nonetheless, I'm kind of putting these two to rest for now since I'm pretty much done with fleshing out their (school uniform) design and personalities.
In all honestly, I'm really looking forward to working on the other characters in the cast since they're really the more exciting in terms of toying around with what kind of people could fit in this futuristic setting.
I'll be back with more progress soon!
Thinking about how long it's been since I've done any sort of animation, I decided to play around with some animation with Flash. However this time around, I wanted to test out and see if drawing each frame in Photoshop and importing each image into Flash is a possibility.
It turns out that it is!
...kind of.
First off, here's a short gif of what I did with this technique:
It's nothing too complicated; it simply has a simple character with a poorly drawn background. As I said, everything you see in the gif (except the lines by his head) were all drawn in Photoshop and imported to Flash.
Now here's a screenshot of what happened to this exact same animated scene when I exported it as an .avi file:
what. the. fuq.
Why does that happen? How does that happen?! Keep in mind that the gif and the avi file came from the exact same animated scene with zero alterations when it came to exporting both files. Could it be that it does a crappy job with exporting with imported images in the Flash file? Probably; I haven't found any answers as to why this happens.
If that is the case, that pretty much leaves out any possibility of drawing out frames in Photoshop and then importing them into Flash. That would suck; I was kind of hoping nothing would go wrong in this process.
Oh well. I'm still playing around with this process anyways.
So I had like more than three weeks for complete these two drawings for my Anatomical Drawing class, and I managed to somehow finish 'em both the night before they were do. Jesus Christ, can I be even more worst at time management or what?
Anyways, despite the fact they were done at a last-second sort of basis, I was able to complete 'em both and I'm kind of surprised how well they turned out!
Basically, we had to copy these figure drawings from our textbook and draw the required sections of the skeletons, hence why I jokingly call them "spooky drawings."
I'm not too big of a fan by how the second skeleton resulted mainly since the body had a bit of a turn coming towards you and I mistakenly copied the reference of a side view of the skeleton more faithfully than I wanted to. Oh well, overall I like the end results of these two skeleton-in-figure drawings.
A long time ago, and I mean a REALLY loooooooooooooooooooooong time ago, like at the start of this blog's very existence, I talked about a project that dealt with a setting that took place in the future. I probably brought it up again a couple times throughout these last few years, but I know that I haven't talked about it at all as of late.
Long story short about that project, it's another series that I'm currently developing along side "Codename: Summer Vacation" (which I'm finally working to give it an actual official title for it now). This particular series takes place about 300 years in the future, and it goes by the name "Class of 2422." It was easier to title this one.
From the name, you can probably guess that it centers around a group of students that are in their Senior year of high school, one school year away from graduating. And the kicker? It takes place IN THE FUTURE. WOOOOOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOOOOO.
And if you didn't guess that, well I just told you the general jist of the series. Obviously, the setting is definitely not important at all, but I have always wanted to do something with a futuristic setting so I can come up and make my own predictions about how our world and society will change 300 years from now. Seriously, imagine how different our world was 300 years ago! Crazy amount of changes and developments have occurred these past centuries!
Speaking of developments in the world of tomorrow, I'd like to show off one of characters in the cast of this series! She's an Android robot that looks, speaks, and acts like a human in every way! May I introduce Kate-T36229!
...or parts of Kate-T36229. We'll just go by Kate-T3 for short.
The top image is Kate-T3, but literally in a deconstructed form. As of currently, her appearance and personality are still being worked on since I admittedly haven't given her much attention. I really disliked how I previously designed her; she's gone through different redesigns, all of which I was never satisfied with, so I'm glad that I can finally just really focus in on how she should be. More of the character development has been spent more on the two human stars of the series rather than everyone else, but I think I've done as much as I can with those two because now I have an Android, an alien, a third gendered human, and a completely out-of-touch country girl that really needs my attention to overall character development.
Oh yeah, by the way there's an alien, a third gendered human, and a completely out-of-touch country girl in the series, so that's gonna be fun.
The second image is more of an idea of how to design a robot body. As of now, I currently draw any Android character (which is only just this one) the same as how I'd draw a human (because you know, advancements in humanoid robots exists), but I'm toying around with the idea if I should distinguish appearances between humans and robots or not.
Either way, I can't wait to show off progress of these characters soon.
So the other day, I was admiring this photo that I used for my lock screen wallpaper. It was a Japanese playing card, but with a Super Mario theme to it. I don't change my lock screen wallpaper too often, but it's only whenever I find a really cool picture online.
Then that got me thinking: "I should draw up my own lock screen wallpaper." I'm not the kind of guy to toot my own horn, but I think it came out really great!
Pretty sexy, right? In fact, it looks way better when it's in action!
Now I can't stop looking at my lock screen.
Originally, I was going to have that stripe-crossed background with my characters in the white spots, but I quickly realized it wasn't going to work out at all. After some quick thinking, I arranged the color stripes in a frame, drew up a rough version of the group of characters you see above, finalized the line work, colored it, and then used the original stripe-crossed background as, well, the background.
I was really hoping to include everything in the cast, but with a 720px x 1280px size, I was limited with including who goes in. The wallpaper was actually finished on March 9th, but after having it as my wallpaper for a day, I realized it needed some tweaking before I unveiled this online. The interesting thing was that originally it was going to have just a plain white background, but just as I described it, it looked to plain and white to leave it without any sort of background.
As of now, I'm thinking about whether to exclude the words that surround the apps I have on my lock screen. I thought it'd be funny to include those humorous names for the phone, messaging, Chrome, and camera, but now I feel like it's just out of place.
Overall, I think it looks pretty great!
*Edit: I looks better without the text at the bottom, so now I'm going with that.
Before I can talk about the second character designing process, I want to say that I'm working on a brand new character for the recently finished character line-up I posted not too long ago! See, when I created the cast of characters in the link above for this project, I wanted an equal amount of males and females in the line-up. Currently, there's three guys and five gals; I had two more other male characters that I wanted to work on and redesign in the process, however I've never brought them up before, nor even had them appear at all in any cartoon drawings I've posted before. Even though these two characters were created from the very beginning, I made the extremely tough choice to drop them from the cast altogether since they simply didn't belong all that well with everyone else or in the overall grand scheme of the project. I don't think I'll miss the nerdy nerd and greaser jock much anyways; they simply became uninteresting for me to develop.
That leaves the door open for two more male characters to bring balance to the Force. One of 'em is currently going through the creation process, but as for the other guy, he doesn't exist yet. I'll post updates on these two characters later on.
And now another vigorous redesigning process! I've done 'em with the characters linked above, now it's time for the cast of characters from my "Class of 2422" project to undergo the same exact treatment! I'll post some notable progress when I have something to show off, but all I can say is that it's got an easy start for now! I just have some little changes in the characters' school uniform design added, and did small tweaks on the appearances of the main characters, but after all that is finalized, that's when the real work begins for everyone else.
Can't wait to post some process soon!
So every now and then, these people will come around my school and ask random people on campus if they're native-born Americans so they could put them to sign their petitions. In that process, they'll ask if you're a registered voter and kind of push you to register if you're not one already.
I honestly extremely dislike to interact with these people for a small number of reasons. One of which was that my first encounter with these people kind of pressured me to register to vote when I had absolutely no desire to register at all. I still don't want to be registered, but here I am. "But Doji, it's good to be registered! You can blah blah this and blah blah that!" Shut up, I have my reasons.
However, there's nothing wrong with signing their petitions. They always have good causes to stand up for, such as more money for cancer research, gun control, etc.; all that good stuff. They're stuff I'd sign a petition for if I'm in the mood to do so.
What I have noticed is that these people, in my opinion, almost always tend to look like those weird people you might see and run into on the streets of LA. I'm talking about those people that have a sense that they probably have a screw loose in the head and might sometimes start a random conversation while you're minding your own business and you want to break it off with them but don't want to be rude to them.
Those petitioners seem look like those kind of people. I drew a couple of 'em right here!
I dub these people the "Cuckoo People" since they usually tend to look like those "cuckoo" people on the streets of LA. I just realized how long of an exposition I typed up just so I can introduce the drawing.
I apologize if I came off a bit of an a-hole on this post, but I really wanted to make my point across on this subject. I'll end off this post on a light note by saying that these people were extremely fun to characterize since they just look so...so...well, that.
Now I hope to see more of these people just so I can draw 'em.
