Christmas: A New Hope ???

Or, you know, whatever. All-around-great-guy Lar de Souza provided the line art and I just coloured it in.

A generic, ordinary..not that wookies are ordinary for Christmas... but average colouring.

And a little something different...

.. and a minor variant to that something different.

Mjolnir Homework for ComicExperience

So, this is my homework for the Intro to Digital Painting course taught by the amazing Scott Johnson.

Not familiar with his work? Google-image "Palladium books" or "Rifts RPG" He painted up some of those covers, notably the shiny armour ones.

Anyhow.. homework was to pain Mjolnir.  I managed to squeeze this out in the 3 & 1/2 hours I was listening to Lar de Souza's ustream. Done in Manga Studio 5 with a variety of brushes.

It was supposed to just be the hammer - painting planes and angles without lineart, but I couldn't help but add some effects.

Here's Mjolnir without the effects.

Tinkering with AnimeStudio

So, after messing around with some Anime Studio [Pro 9], and some yapping back&forth on twitter with the always great Lar de Souza, there was a mention[my fault entirely] of Bacon Shark.

With the Octo-shark Vs. Vegemite Girl and Sharktopus and Shark-valanche and Sharknado and Shark-in-your-eye and all the other aspiring B-movies... hellllllllo BaconShark.

Music scored by John Williams and performed by The John Williams Orchestra.

And yeah.. animating water coherently and believably is kind of a pain!

So here's an hour's worth of goofing around in AnimeStudio.
Exported to AVI, then converted to MP4 in Any Video Converter. Dropped from a 110mb file to 11mb file.

Okay, so after watching it here... WOW... issues!
There was loss of layer order...and some animation I never did [like the shark turning in the middle of the stage].  I also have no idea why the water & sky keep changing colour.. they were supposed to fade to black in the last 10 frames of animation. Issues, issues. Stuff to figure out.

So, obviously, converting the file may have done something, like losing frames, or I may have exported it incorrectly or something.

Still.. for only going on what I can figure out with the program, not too bad...
but definitely not good. Think I'll stick with the drawing and colouring thing for now until I can beef-up my chops with this program.

Colouring the Lartist

The always-a-great-guy Lar de Souza was kind enough to send me his line art & inks for a piece he's doing for a convention or some such thing - you can check out his own colours and such HERE.

I had no idea what colour scheme he would be using for anything, an didn't want to see his finished piece before I made solid commitments to my own colour schemes.  Thankfully, I only saw his after I'd already laid out my flats.

My only complaint is the line art & inks he sent weren't signed by him. I believe in giving credit where it is due, and this wouldn't have happened at all if not for his art.

So here's my colours on his awesome art:

First the flats:

And now the finished piece: