Wacom´s back!

I finally used my wacom tablet after months of having it on my desk. My computer hasn´t worked properly since the day I bought it from the most unreliable person I ever met in my whole life. But anyways, I plugged the tablet to my pc a couple of days ago, and using some pics of my fellow illustrator/cheeselover Antti Berg for reference, I doodled arround. And these two I liked. It´s Mikko (hi, man!) and Takanori. Hope you like them. I have Mikko´s one as a desktop image now, get it here , sorry for the low res.

Change of direction

Yep, until yersterday I was going to make a shortfilm for this semester. I had allready spent some time in the storyboard and the animatic. But it looks like a huge proyect. I like the idea, but still, if I want to be an animator, theres sooo many things I should learn before embarking in a shortfilm. So , thats it, no shortfilm anymore. I will work on my showreel. But I dont want it to be like most of the ones I´ve seen, with just one clip after the other. We´ll see....

what should I do...?

Sketchcrawl, Visitors and Barandov

It´s been some time since last update. Oscar, Kriki and Luigi came to Prague for some days and I didn´t show up in the school that much, so no internet access. We had a great time, czech food, czech beer, went to nice bars and also rented a car and drove to Cesky Krumlov (sp I think, wrong). I hope I´ll go there with some drawing buddies to sketch, it´s an amazing village, let´s see if I can post some pics soon.

Last Sunday´s sketchcrawl wasn´t very successful either, no new people showed up. And my drawings aren´t very good either...Luckily, spring is starting, so I´ll finally be able to go outside and draw. I´ve been waiting all winter to do that.

Today, I went with Pekka to Barandov Studio again. We saw some animated films. They had been done using "half-plastic" puppets (that´s the translation we got from czech). The puppets are placed on a horizontal glass to be animated, you don´t get to see the back of the puppet, and there´s interchangeable bodyparts for when it´s supposed to show it´s back to the camera. Don´t now if I managed to explain... Well, we saw the movies and then we got to know the technique with which they had been done, and the actual puppets that were used for the films. I was really blown away by one of the films : "Potkali se u kolina", something like "meeting in the hill". The animation was excellent. The film was from the late 70´s and the lead animator was Boris Masnik. I´ll try to find more info on him.

new sketchbook cover. boredome + white pen + red cover = this

sketchcrawl wasn´t very succesful, but still I managed to draw. This was at night, having dinner at Juanantonio´s. This was an Irish guy I got to know that night. He liked the drawing, and his friend asked me to do a portrait of him for a beer.

This one was in Velryba (sp?, we call it "the place near Tesco").

This was in the metro. I love drawing in the metro. I like these oldwomen faces. But I should stop drawing sideviews, so easy to loose the form.

Some character research for my animation.

That feeling

Did you ever get that feeling? Your just walking around, in the tram or wherever and you see a face, a car, a house, a landscape, whatever and you feel you HAVE to draw it in your sketchbook.

Well, it happened to me yesterday night. Going back home in the night tram and I see a guy sleeping. He had a face, a really expressive face, I had to draw. At first I doubted, what will the rest think? (was with some friends) he just has to start drawing right now? But then... what the hell! So I took my skechtbook and a brushpen out and started to draw. It was like a 20 sec drawing, I didnt want the guy to wake up, the tram was moving, so it didnt turn out very well. I put the sketchbook back in my backpack. But the feeling was still there, and the drawing was no good, so I took it out again and drew until I had to get off.

Then I moved to one of the back seats of the tram in wich I transfered to, and started to draw again. Lots of people sleeping, so I could take my time.

Have to do this more often.

Mental Block

Its been a couple of days without being able to concentrate on my work. But, still, I started sketching more often. On Sunday I went with Pekka and Nao "sketchcrawling". I would have liked to sketch more outside, but it was really cold, so we had to stick with cafes.

I also bough some cheap markers yesterday, so I´ll start puting some colour into to my drawings now.

This was in the night-tram on my way home a couple of days ago



This was part of Sunday´s sketchcrawl.




The first one, is from an old woman I saw in the metro and I had to draw, the next one is from lunch in Indigo today.




And this is our favorite mustard!

Let´s get started!

So, as I said, let´s get started.
I want this to be a place...well I don´t really know what I want this to be yet. So we´ll just see with time.

Today I went to Barandov Film Studio (every two mondays), I wish I could post some pics, but no cameras allowed. Many great czech animations have been done in Barandov. I get to see some everytime I go there visit. Really happy for that, it´s a different way of conceiving animation to what I was used to seeing.