I was in a creative accident!

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

I’m fine though, don’t worry. I hope you are doing great too. I just wanted to let you know that Sbass and Monica from The Inkwell Alley were kind enough to let me share some thoughts with their readers on Feature Friday. They are creating an awesome community of artists that want to make their creative dreams come true under the motto Is not who you are, it’s who you can become. A writer and an artist, these two great women have been very busy promoting their relatively new iniciative, that I know will be a great success. Make sure to check out their blog at http://inkwellalley.blogspot.com.

If you are coming from The Inkwell Alley, welcome to I’ll tell you a story…. In this blog I share the things I learn while trying to figure out how to make drawings come to life through 2D animation. Since blogs tend to be a bit difficult to navigate, I thought I’d show you around. You might enjoy these posts:

Creativity development

How I’m fighting the animator’s block

The Importance of Staying Creative

The production process

Building Character is not the Same as Character Development

From A Forgotten Piece Of Paper To Life

Illustration tips and tricks

Creating Stunning Backgrounds with TBS!!!

Animating Effects: The Best Form of Procrastination

Backgrounds: Getting your perspective right with Google Sketchup

Backgrounds: From Google SketchUp to Toon Boom Animate

I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I love writing it, but above all, I really want you to find it useful. Any thoughts? Make sure you let me know in the comments. Have a great day!

To do list

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Hello everyone. I have a few things that I want to share with you (although I won’t just yet). First of all, I want to show you The Deadly Truth. Its release is loooong overdue. I thought that was going to be an easy thing, but once again, having a demanding day job and (yes I know) not enough discipline has pushed that deadline endlessly. The purpose was not perfection; just mastering Toon Boom software. Shame on me. After my work trip to Holland, I came back to a lot of backed up work that just had to get done. Things are more relaxed now, so I’ll get right on it. Along with The Deadly Truth,  I want to share a series of posts regarding the various stages I went through to create it (including all the things that should have been done in another manner). In The Netherlands, I met with fellow animation enthusiast Voynitsky, so in the following days you’ll see a post about our conversation and some of his work. Great guy. In the past days I’ve been getting a lot of traffic directly from gooogle, and the search terms that keep coming up are “toon backgrounds” and “animating water”, so I decided to write detailed tutorial posts on how I go about doing those two things. Even if it’s only from my amateur experience.

My purpose is to make this blog as informative and useful as possible so that animation enthusiasts everywhere can benefit from my learning process.

So, over the next couple of weeks you can expect the following:

1) Completion and release of The Deadly Truth.

2) A series of posts about The Deadly Truth’s production.

3) My conversation with Voynitsky and  some of his work.

4) Tutorials on “toon backgrounds” (indoors and outdoors) and “animating water”.

[Update:] I don’t like posts without visuals. After all , this is a blog about visual storytelling, so I want to show you the animation that got me started with this hobby back in 2006. It was done for a challenge at animationforum.net, run by Greg Kapersky. The challenge was called Dance Off and we were given a one minute piece of audio called Lalla, from the album I Have a Small Penis by M. J. Katamajäki to which we had to draw a character dancing. Go figure. I did it in Flash MX and had a lot of fun doing it, so here it is (opens in a new window):

 

Dance Off by Renato Vargas. (Click on the image)

I want to thank everyone that has kept coming back to this blog. It’s been great having you here. Don’t be shy, leave a comment .

The Deadly Truth: first update

My little clip is coming along nicely. Backgrounds are close to done and rough keyframes are in place. Everything on schedule. Progress!!

 

“The Deadly Truth” will be released on Sunday, June 7th, 2009.

Edit: For those interested, I will post more quick updates through Sunday on Twitter. You can follow me here.

Backgrounds: From Google SketchUp to Toon Boom Animate

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Hey there, just want to show you some stuff. In my last post I showed you an application called Google SketchUp. Since it’s an incredible tool to develop three dimensional models of whatever you want, I thought it would be a good idea to use it as an aid in the creation of two dimensional backgrounds for animated shorts. I’m still working on the outside shots I showed you before (I’ll post how those turn out in another post) but I’d like to show you how SketchUp is of great help when it comes to drawing perspective. You don’t even have to think about vanishing lines and what not.

We start off with a fairly simple Sketchup cube and with the push/pull tool we create a two wall room (or set). After that we pay a visit to the 3D Warehouse we populate our room with a suitable bed and a nightstand (although here I just modeled this “placeholder” as nightstand). Don’t forget to punch a hole in the wall for our window. We paint everything white, move our view around to get the best shot, and snap a picture (export an image). I’d like to point out that SketchUp is full featured software, so it is capable of much more than these simple things I’m doing. I want to keep the models simple because afterwards, the painting portion will take up most of our time. We end up with something like this:

 

We then import our image into our drawing software (in my case, I’m using Toon Boom Animate) and put it on it’s own layer. After that, it all becomes about “imaginative tracing”. Use your SketchUp lines as guides and make sure you keep every drawing in it’s own individual layer (you can group things afterwards). How about we start with the footboard. You can color as you go, or you can color everything when you’re done.

 

Now some courtains…

 

Now the bed and we improvise a nightstand using our SketchUp placeholder as a visual aid (don’t mind the shadows; that step comes afterwards, but I forgot to take snapshots without them ).

 

And we finish with our walls and the window. At this point you can color everything. Your aim is to accomplish a certain atmosphere. After all, we’re trying to tell a story…

Make sure you build up a nice atmosphere with every layer you paint.

 

I’m falling in love with SketchUp more and more. It’s an incredible tool that can save you a few hours. You should give it a try. How do you like our final product?

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