Arson&Plunder is here! Arson&Plunder ya está aquí!

Finally here! The game I did the 2D character animation for is already available in the Apple Store. Do not hesitate to buy it (it's only 0.89€), play it, and enjoy it! It's really fun! Available for Iphone, Ipod Touch and Ipad.

And look for my name in the credits! :D

See you!

¡Finalmente ya está aquí! El juego cuya animación de personajes 2D hice hace meses ya está disponible en la Apple Store. ¡No lo dudes: cómpralo (por sólo 0.89€), juégalo y disfrútalo! ¡Es muy divertido! Disponible para Iphone, Ipod Touch y Ipad.

¡Y búscame en los créditos! :D

¡Hasta pronto!

Ilustraciones

Estas ilustraciones las he hecho estos días, con el fin de enriquecer un poco mi portfolio por la parte de ilustración. Los fondos no son míos, los tomé de internet para dar un poco de ambiente. Podría habérmelos currado, pero lo cierto es que Animation Mentor no me deja tiempo para nada. Subiré avances en cuanto pueda.

Jugando con Flash - Playing with Flash

Me apetecía relajarme un poquito y salió esto. :)

I felt like relaxing for a while. This was the result. :)

Portrait - Retrato

Este es uno de los últimos retratos que hice. Ya hacía tiempo que no dibujaba retratos, lo echaba de menos. Este es de hace unos tres meses. El retratado es mi novio, o Emilio, o Mars Attacks si se quiere, le vale todo. :D A él le ha gustado mucho.

Tengo ganas de volver a tocar un poco de óleo, acrílicos, pastel, sanguina... A la acuarela le tengo más respeto porque nunca he aprendido a usarla bien, pero a ver si algún día la cojo con ganas y le pierdo el miedo. :)

Ya veréis más cosas por aquí. ¡Besos a todos!

Life drawing classes

The other day I was told that there were life drawing classes not far from the company. Some colleagues were going to take them, so I immediately decided I would go as well.

I only took life drawing classes once in my life. It was for a period of 15 days in Gijón, in a summer course that I enjoyed a lot. In that case, the model was a quite handsome man who posed for us for one and a half hours every time. It must have been terrible for him to keep the same pose for such a long time (with little breaks inbetween).

This time the model was a young woman, quite thin and with very english facial features.

It is nice to go to life drawing classes. When you see the model naked, you don´t see a person naked; you see a potencial piece of art in your empty paper. It is a very nice feeling. I don´t know about the rest of the people, but when I saw her, all I could see was light, shadows and shapes. The room was in complete silence while everybody was drawing her. The concentration was amazing, I loved that. You could hear the sound of pencil, the more agressive sound of charcoal, an esporadic rubber somewhere, a chair changing place to get a better point of view... I loved those little sounds. I loved silence. I loved the concentration. It was like being for two hours in another world. The cost of this trip was 5 pounds.

In this occasion, the poses changed. At the beginning, they changed every three minutes. There was a man there, drawing as well, who told the woman "ok, it is fine" when the time had past. Probably it was this man who decided to practise life drawing and decided to let other people participate to help with the payment due to the model. That is not a bad idea at all.

As I said, the poses changed every three minutes at the beginning, every ten or so later, and the final pose lasted for twenty minutes. So you could practise everything: with the shortest ones, capturing the pose and line of action; with the longest, pose, light and shadows and even the relationship with the environment.

I would upload the drawings I did, but I don´t have any scanner. So that will be another time.

The bad news is that these classes will last only for another week more. Then, they will be interrupted because they have to look for another place: the big room they were using is going to be engaged for something else. What a pity!

Vectorial drawing

I've made this drawing this morning.

I really like vectorial drawings, they are so clean and delicate. I should do more, so I will try to include every now and then a new one in this blog. This is for the new website I am designing, my own one, and hopefully it is not very bad. I will change it when I make a better one. :D

Illustrator is the program I have used in this ocasion. I am more used to FreeHand and Inkscape, and I find Illustrator not so intuitive as this two, but I can manage quite well and maybe in a while I won´t miss the simplicity of FreeHand anymore.

Hope you enjoy the drawing.

I'll be back soon! :)

Trying to get the correct timing

Here you can see again another bouncing balls. As I said, they force me to use lots of animation principles, so they are a wonderful exercise. Next bouncing balls probably will be alive, will have a tail and... yeah, they will present different variations, to keep on learning. That´s the point of this all. :)

I am getting there! :D

More bouncing balls

When you are animating a bouncing ball, it seems that the only principle you are dealing with is "Squash and Stretch". It is the most obvious, isn´t it? However, as far as I know, you are dealing with:

- Timing, the most important principle for me. Very hard to be good at timing. With balls you are practising it aaaall the time.
- Spacing. It´s not a principle itself (although it is similar to easy in and easy out), but it is the second most important thing in animation. Animating bouncing balls you can see clearly how the spacing works.
- Exageration. Do the balls deform like that in reality?
- Anticipation. Not in purpose, but you are doing it. You can see that the ball squashes before going again into the air. Well, that is not really anticipation, but can be useful to understand it, because the effect is quite similar.

I cannot thing of anything else, unless until the ball has its own tail. Coming soon. :D

Kisses.

Walks

Another important thing to learn animation is to practise walks of all kinds. So here you go, the first one of a lot, hopefully... :) Of course, any comments are welcome!

Animating

And, of course, I have to practise animation from the basics... I know that this is rubbish, but the idea is to improve bit by bit. :)