Not Quite Over Here

Hey there Bloggerland,

Sorry I'm not around on this platform much. I've become rather attached to my tumblr account, so maybe if you're here looking for art stuff from me, I'll encourage you to mosey on over that way :)

http://teaelleharris.tumblr.com/

Cheers,

~Tracy

Animation Short - Unwashed Dishes

Ola Bloggerville, I come with my first fully-coloured 2D animation!  I'd actually been putzing on and off with this, but I made sure I got it done before the new school year started!  I needed to feel accomplished in some way :) didn't want to say I wasted my whole summer away working in customer service land.



Originally animated on paper, cleaned/coloured in Photoshop, composited/audio/edited/etc in Premiere.

Do your dishes, kiddies!

Hope you enjoy!

Some Fun Summer Art

Hey there Blogger,

Been playing in Photoshop with some styling and texturing and the like.  So here we have the Destiny Island Trio from the first Kingdom Hearts game.

All three at their best represented locations:
Sora @ Traverse Town
Kairi @ Destiny Island
Riku @ Hollow Bastion (with the Malificent Dragon)

These were fun to play with :)

Background Reproduction Project

Wait, where's all the school work?  I'll get to that... this was my weekend project though :)

I was told I needed to make amends with my arch nemisis: gouache; so I thought I'd give some love to a small and lonely inbetween cel from Samurai Pizza Cats (that I got as a freebee ages ago) and paint a background for it!  Learning + Fun = Good Times

Screen Cap.  This is the ultimate goal for my lonely little A6 inbetween.  Not sure I want to do that yellow pipe overlay though...

Old scan of the cel (current scanner is unplugged).  Francine and the curtain are just sort of floating there.

Some print outs of the screen cap (to get the right size) and pencilwork later, I have a BG that lines up.  I referenced a few wider shots from the same scene to figure out what details were beyond the TV cutoff.

The watercolour paper was too wide to feed through my printer, so some transfer paper and tracing later, it's ready to go.

Some masking fluid used for lighter colour safety zones.  Wish I had an airbrush set.  Other than the sign, my original SPC BGs tend to be airbrushed in their wide colour spots.  It would have been less traumatizing than doing washes LOL.

Progress.  Changed the colour of the parlour counter. 

Progress.

And done :D

That blasted deep blue overhang was frustrating.  Kept having to wash over it to smooth it out (airbrush > wash).  Can't really notice the gradient too much anymore :/ oh well.  More or less happy with it :D

Victory shot.

I trimmed off some of the bottom so it would squeeze into the cel bag.  Package it all up and my lonely little cel isn't so lonely anymore :D

So other than developing a new arch nemisis (deep blue), I've learnt that I cannot drink coffee then paint details LOL.  My hand becomes too unsteady. 

Project completed.

Second Year Animations - Assignments 6, 7, & 8

Hey there Blog Thing, long time no see.  Here be lip synch animations (human, muzzle, & beak) done to Buffy the Vampire Slayer :)

Assignment #6 - Human Body & Lip Synch.  Done in Maya 2013.  I'm still such a Maya n00b.


Assignment #7 & #8 (combined the muzzle and beak assignment).  Back to the good ol' pencil and paper.

Something different but not really? Breaking in my new Animation Disk

Once upon a time, many moons ago, I collected animation cels.  I collected from Japanese animation because it was the thing I was in to, plus I knew where to get them and they were afordable (anything domestic I liked was out of my price range and/or not widely accessable on the internet at that time).

Anyways, last year I started to re-find my love of cels and this year it came back (damn you, painting class).  Bad, bad Tracy.  Why can't I have hobbies that don't involve the spending of so much money?

Friday night is my designated night to do 'nothing' - nothing translating 'do whatever I feel like'.  Sometimes it's video games, sometimes I'm an internet zombie, sometimes movies, but the last few Fridays I'd been taking my cels, BGs, layouts, and cleanup pencil animations into the lab and either shoot or scan them on the nice scanners.  I opened one of my Itoya books and found one of the cels I'd had for quite some time had suffered from some bad line fading.  Poor thing... most of my cels haven't had that problem, but this one just seemed to have drifted away.  Since I'm pretty sure the studios are busy tonight (first years have walk cycles due, I think?) I decided to fix the line fading on my cel instead.

But first!

Tada!  My new disk.  Now I can stop borrowing my roommate's... I'm sure she's tired of retrieving her disk from my room.

Forwards!  It's time for animation cel surgery.  Sort of.

That's the cel that made me sad - from Card Captor Sakura.  I got her Feburary 5, 2003 (it's her 10th anniversary with me this month :D).  Her lines are either thin or pale red now.  I'll do cel overlay with just the line work (not going to draw on the original cel itself LOL... I'm not that brave).

First problem is though, Japanese animation and North American animation don't use the same size of paper or cel sheet.

So, I worked that out.  The best part about that was, I could turn the 12 field blank cels sold at the bookstore to portrait, rather than landscape, and it matched the Japanese cel width and I'd only have to cut it off at the bottom.  Sweet.  To the school I go to punch and cut up 3 cels (one to screw up, one nice one, and one extra just because)

 Voila.  Blank cel.

Now I can just use the sketch to re-do the linework (or so I think.......)

Surgical tools.  .25 pen with lightfast film ink, the Q-tip/tissue/solution(not there) to clean any oopsies, and the tweezers for the blasted cat hair that I can never get rid of.  Cat hair makes an awful mess of linework when it catches the pen tip >_<

This is actually somewhat traumatizing to do.  LOTS OF FOCUS IS REQUIRED.

Hooray line work :D

Ooookay okay wait wh-what?  Now I'm confused.  The line work based on the sketch didn't match to the line work on the cel.  It matches near the top, but stretches and skews slightly near the bottom.  The sketch is matching to the cel, so why didn't this work!?  I have no idea.  Maybe the sketch paper warped over time?  I'm not sure about paper physics.

Well fine.  Bought and punched extra cels for a reason.  Lets do this again.

This time, I'll use the cel for my line work.  It got SO much brighter and sharper the more lines I put in... I was so happy!  I was actually 'warmed up' by this point (I guess) because this go around only took like 1/3rd the time.

Hooray!  This worked!

Look at that!  It's so much better.  I'm so pleased with this.

I think I'm going to do more, because I have a few cels that have line fading and it'll be nice to see them pop again.

So, that's the story for this first Friday night in Feburary... it felt pertinant to this blog :) so it's here.

Layouts - Assignments 03/04

Well, parts of assignments 03 and 04.  Halves of them.

I created a new station (西山本駅), stop number 32 on the non-existant 勇気線 of the Tokyo Metro  system.  It was somewhat inspired by the misadventures of myself and my friend Sarah, when we were riding train on the Keisei line and suddenly it became some other train on some other line and we ended up being who knows where... at least we got back.