Feeling Crappy

For about a week now. Good remedy: search "puppies" on YouTube...

Coloring Scare

So I hit a big roadblock recently when I was asked to put together a color test using a shot in my thesis film this past week.

Wow, a lot harder than I thought.

Now I can spend hours or days musing over colors in an illustration, but I have well over 100 shots to layout and make bg's for...though some I'll be reusing, and some will be very simple and quick. So I don't have days to spend on each bg, and barely a few hours each really to meet a deadline next semester.

My first color test looked like this:



Bleh. It's nice and clean and professional looking, yeah. But pretty bland I was told. And I really started to see it afterwards. It only took me around 45 min to complete this one...but it shows. I was proud of getting it done fast, because I want to breeze through color without much of a thought and have a fully colored film. That's a big mistake though. I hate the way this is colored now. It's pretty flat, and the colors are really typical. My thesis professor pointed out how it looked too nice, too predictable, and others commented on how it was just looking like "another student film". I didn't want to think about color because I didn't want to make a statement in revolutionary looks or anything, but now I realize that if I don't pay attention to it at all, my whole film can suffer.

So I've been musing over color all evening, and practically at the point of pulling all my hair out. I'm without a tablet at the moment so I'm doing everything by hand. It was a real struggle at first, dabbling in watercolor again and getting it to look just right. I didn't know what kind of colors to use really, to make a scene...a mood...a good environment.

Then I finally came up with this one:



A ton better I feel. More texture too (at least for the bg), which I want to show in the film. Maybe not exactly what the final look will be, but a much nicer mix of color (not to mention an actual style now that might work a ton nicer with my animated characters). It's kinda Calvin and Hobbes - ish, but I like it. It was a lot easier to mix colors you wouldn't normally use for areas right on paper. We'll see how this goes more this week later...

By the way...John K happens to be ranting and raving about color uses in cartoons over at his blog...which I highly reccommend everyone check out. It's quite a nice coincidence that he happens to be talking about color right at this point and time. =)

Doodles and Such

As such things go...=) Some doodles of Peridot (that's her name sillies):



and my thesis movie poster! everyone loves posters!



this means my film is pretty much moving up from pre-production to production. exciting!

I suck so bad...

I hate art history. Really. Very very sick of it. I just can't seem to get the hang of taking it for, oh, 3+ YEARS OF SCHOOL here. And that's not including how many times I'm retaking a few of them. =(

I had a midterm for it today. I studied pretty last minute but was doing ok on the ID's. It's the essays that were killing me. Strange thing is they usually don't. I just totally went blank though a little more than halfway through. This is what I did for maybe 40% of the time spent on the test:



horray for spaceships and dragons! sorry...but they're just way cooler than Neoclassicism. Take THAT David!

I also kept doodling myself on the exam booklet doing things like stabbing myself in the head with a pencil and hanging myself at the end of it. They were kinda funny actually...I hope my professor doesn't have me call some help hotline.

Hrm...well at least I'm going to go see Bill Plympton's Hair High tonight and hang out with some cool peeps. Maybe that'll cheer me up. Maybe.

Website Blues

So, sorry if you guys ran smack dead into this but the website is down for a bit until I pay for more bandwidth. Aye be a poor college student and hafta scrape me together a few dubloons to get it back up for this month. Hopefully this will be soon. Peace.

Agony and Torture!

i finally get in the mood to start animating...with all my new gear...and i can't find my pegbar. anywhere.

=(

Theatre Jessica presents....

...some youtube favorites. On friday the 13th waaauuughhhdsljfkdifoda! =D





and of course, footage of a 99 year old master. he'll kick all yer arses.

Too tired right now...

...so....really I've just been too tired/busy/lazy to really keep up with updates on here, what I've been drawing, etc. But I did get to build my desk finally last night to put on the most beautiful hand-crafted animation table made for me:



haha drawing in progress up there ^

Keep in mind, I did NOT make the piece on top. Mister Lee Rubenstein's dad was wonderful enough to make one for me (with payment of course...though I feel like I robbed him for such awesome handiwork). I just build the shoddy-looking table underneath. But I'm so happy though...my very first animation disk and desk. The lightbox has now officially retired. =D

Also, Ottawa and Orlando were a blast this past month of roaming around the country. I put more accurate updates on those two trips on my portfolio website, which I finally got up and running: www.jessica-plummer.com. There's pictures too, yaaaay. Everyone likes pictures!

I've been drawing a bit...started memory sketching. I'm just...yeah, too lazy to put them up yet. Want to color them actually. Been coloring a bit.

Yay.