Scraping the doodle barrel part I

Hey hey, look alive! Here's some update again and not a moment too soon ;) The serial pictures, also referred as comics or as in the other case a storyboard were done at this Character Design workshop. It was organised as a 4-day course. The 1st part took place during the comics festival and the 2nd during Animatricks -festival for which I was the Head of Programming. Which was nice.

These were done really quickly so they are a bit unfinished and can be difficult to follow :D . 30 minutes time for the comic and 10-15 minutes for the storyboard. The comic exercise was part of lecture held by comic artist Sascha Hommer The idea was to pick to random words from a basket and improvise a comic based on those quickly...so I didn't sketch any, just drew it. My words were "lottery win" and "birth of a child". They obviously do ring together quite nicely. But I thought what if the father isn't that happy about the child but eventually just finds the baby useful. I'm horrible, I know :D

The storyboard -exercise was part of a interesting lecture by designer and animation director Eliza Jäppinen She had with her self-made stuffed animals/creatures. So we did a short exercise in small groups..playing with stuffed animals :) We improvised a story based on the characters. Then after we had played it out to others we had to make storyboard version of it.

The third picture has some sketches which were part of an assignment given by character designer and animator Ulla Bergström. Between the two festivals we're supposed to draw people in "the wild". I should have done more but that's always the case!

Quest for the doodle

Slow it has been. So here's actually on Oldie Goldie that's a favourite of mine. I did it as a birthday present to my mother in 2004. It shows her as a little, lilliput size girl riding a tortoise (which is of course referring to our pet Yoda) in a magical forest.

Unfortunately it's not a scan but I just took a photo of it with my phone in it's frames on the wall :) So excuse me the low quality.

He lives

Just a a quick post of a drawing I found lying around. The type design (I don't the designer..) is a leaflet I picked up when the university of Helsinki was havin their elections. So while sitting at the bar, I drew our forever young über-president.

Ich bin ein Wunderbaum - high school stuff

I'll continue my Oldies Goldies -posts. With these I was at the same time pleasently surprised that I didn't grin in horror when looking at them but at the sae time thinking that have I improved so little.

These character design sketches were done when I was in high school (circa 95-96). A group consistings of a young and older animation enthusiasts and an animation veteran was thinking about an animation short. I don't remember why it didn't start going forward but I guess that's the case usually anyway.

The character in the synopsis was this wooden puppet (not Pinocchio). And I think we were discussing the name of Wunderbaum for it or it might have been that I just scribbled that next to the sketches. So here are the sketches I drew mostly on the spot. There's a couple of variations on the character. I also included some sketches to samurai character to a short animation that a friend and I were thinking about. Pure gold :D

Nostalgic as hell beginning from the year 1988 part I

I have to apologize in advance that this stuff is anything else but recent stuff. It's one of those "Oldies Goldies" -posts. I just want to share with you the nostalgic joy that I've had recently :)

My Parents stopped by with a couple of boxes of my old school books, comics and drawings. Here are few of those. They're dated between about 1988-1994.

I think it was interesting to see how much I was interested in animation early on as an industry and medium. I copied and inked a couple of animation drawings from the film Fantasia to overhead projector transparencies as they we're animation cels. Then I colored them from the backside as they back in the day ;) Then I painted backgrounds for them in watercolor. I'm really fascinated on the look that the bright cel with clear cut, flat colors painted on them have in contrast to the more muted background. I've been planning for couple of years but never got around to it (yet) to do an exhibition on the idea of "The Animated Feature That Never Was". It takes off from my interest in the "art of" books. For the exhibition I would do the pre-production related work, sketches, maybe even pencil tests, animation drawings and painted cels with background paintings but not the film itself.

In this post it's funny to see how I have marked with "The Comic Characters Inc" etc.

The oldest drawings I posted because they served the purpose of learning to draw by drawing from model. So the oldest here is from -88. There's Judge Dredd that I drew from this cover by Brian Bolland when I was 11 years old...nice bedtime reading ain't it :) Then there's a coloring model of a baby eagle from a Disney short that I have copied from a book on animation around the same time. The dragon creature is from the film The Black Cauldron which has remained a favorite of mine even with it's several flaws. The Batman picture is drawn from the seminal Frank Miller's Dark Knight comic around start of 90's

I bought an airbrush with the money I got from my confirmation party :) Around that time I had also been already a big fan of the Alien -movies. So naturally one subject would be the alien. The colors are just awful on the original so I did a quick test with photoshop to see if it would be kinder to the eye in less colors...

And finally here's a utterly corny comic from the year 1991. I can tell that I've just recently been reading Stephen King, learnin english and found some zip-a-tone :)

The Night Of The Croquis

Life drawings sessions resumed again after the summer at Taidehalli. Felt a bit rusty and tried also a bit of a different technique again. So these are made with a pretty basic ballpoint pen.

How To Train Your Doodle

Collected sketchbook stuff again :) In the last doodlelayout I tried to sketch out some characters in the feel of 50's animation design. Keeping in mind contrasting shapes, curves and tangents. It was a fun little exercise in design discipline because I usually tend to draw just by keeping the pen moving, without actually thinking where the next line should go.
The "fishnaut" is a kind of a tribute to the character in Antti Kemppainen's illustration. Sketched it out with a ballpoint pen while boating at Näsijärvi and slapped in some quick phoshop color.

Sketchesssss

Sketchdump :D!! Well bunch of happy accidents again or ...you'll be the judge. Just wanted to update with something before leaving to a week of some boat action and other domestic travelling. So I again collected the best and the wörst from sketchbooks and scrap papers. There's a lot of stuff so click for a larger view to explore my wandering, not so logical line, enjoy.

Sanguine Di Sketchbook

I'm on my holiday so I have time to sort my pencils and other useful stuff so as I went through my art supplies I came across some pieces of sanguine chalk. Hadn't been using that in ages so I gave it a quick go. Added a touch with white chalk as well.

The Curse Of The Croquis

Again. It's been a month since my last update and these I compiled from last couple of lifedrawing sessions. But hey it's summer right :)?

In glorious Black & White Vision.

How To Train Your Croquis

Not drawing nearly enough these days! But here's some new lifedrawings anyway :)

Doodle on a Wire

"My my, what a mess!" so here's a small update with collected doodles of various age and origin plus some lifedrawings among them..special :)

Fried Green Lifedrawings

An update!...with lifedrawings. Yay.

But seriously! With these I tried out again a different technique, black and white pencil on tinted paper. The change of medium affects the style and forces me to change the way I draw.

Of course I can't completely escape my underlying "style" :/

Mobile Animations

Went through my hard drive and came upon these GIF -animations exported from my old Nokia mobile phone. They were made with the excellent Animator 3000 -animation program developed at Sulake in 2007 (nowadays the guys of Secret Exit). The program unfortunately never saw the light of day :(

Good thing I exported these since I no longer have neither the phone or the program files...

Fear of the Life Drawing

Yeah, croquis again :)

Out of Croquis

The semi-regular life drawing sessions at Taidehalli have started again, so I'll keep posting that stuff here until something more substantial appears :)

These are mostly 5 min drawings with a couple of 10-15 min ones too. The funny thing is...that there reaally isn't much difference between those done in a short time and those done in a tad longer time. Maybe in terms of some more shading and more accurate depiction of the head area. I still want to do a really long pose someday and maybe even paint that. So here's waiting those retirement days then!

Doodleland in the year 2010

Gee, it's a whole new decade. That's sci-fi.

But I on the other hand haven't evolved to digital or any other than pencil, pen and paper doodles on my spare time on dry land.

So I present you once again with the collected doodles and random scribbles from various scrap papers. (Click for a bigger and better view.)

But! I promise that this year, I will deliver something a bit more substantial. I just won't promise you when :) (I can hear my millions of "followers" gasp right about now.)