Final Life Drawing Portfolio...EVER

That's right! I finished my last life drawing course ever this past semester. What a long journey it's been. Since my first ever life drawing course in 2010, to my heavy obsession with it around 2012, and my final course dedicated to it now in 2016, I've taken such giant strides that I'm quite proud at where I am now. I never had experience with it until I came to college for art fundamentals and it's quite amazing to look back. I originally started with chicken scratch and now here I am!

Here's my final life drawing portfolio for my fourth year in animation! I focused more on improving caricature and acting this year. Of course my final pieces could be stronger in that regard but I am still pleased and proud of what I was able to create. I was even surprised at myself while making it, I didn't know I was capable of doing some of these pieces. I made the effort to attempt many different styles and approaches with my final portfolio and it led me to expand my shape language and learn a lot of things along the way. It's important to stray away from what you're comfortable with to learn and expand your work!

Without further ado:

"Pest"

Played around with a more sketchy style with a bit of Ronald Searle, and also played with different shapes and texture that I normally don't do. I looked into some french animation for other shapes! Even though I suck at layouts, I wanted to incorporate a minimal one to give it some grounding and a bit of context sort of like Hank Ketcham. 

"Cold Water"

I wanted to push the proportions of this model as well as make it more graphic. I used a lot of shapes here that I normally don't and incorporated some more modern aesthetics into the design. 

"Hitchhikers"

I wanted to play around with the physical format on this one. After struggling to figure out a decent composition for these two I had the clever idea of putting them two in a polaroid and it fit with the theme and tone of the characters that I was going for! Afterwards, I even printed it to scale of an actual polaroid. The style I did for this one was SUPER loose, I was holding my pen by the eraser side with my finger tips and just scribbled and scratched until I made shapes I liked such as Raff's head tilt. 

"Regicide"

I really enjoy the style of Riccardo Guassco and Conor Whelan for its beautiful simplicity and basic shapes and colours. I wanted to take a tiny sketch/composition I made into a style similar to theirs with my own flair as well. I had a ton of fun making this the most and it took a lot longer to make because I was figuring the method out as I went along. This one is the one I learned from the most and probably my favourite from the bunch!

Here's an extra one I handed in with the portfolio. My teacher liked it a lot and thought I would throw it in there as well!

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Here are some life drawings throughout the semester! Apologies for the photo qualities, they're not the best...they were just quick pics to take home so I can work off them to create other pieces. Some are the original drawings of my final portfolio pieces! So it's cool to see progress! So enjoy some scribbles and gestures from my last life drawing class:

These were two separate drawings that I was going to combine, maybe I will someday soon.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

From my thesis film characters! :)

Art was hand drawn and scanned in!

Super Science Friends!

Here's a trailer for upcoming Super Science Friends episodes! This was a fun project I had the pleasure of working on during the summer at Tinman! Really cool to see it all come together. A couple of scenes I worked on are featured in the trailer!

Hippie

Been super busy with my film as well as those damn electives lately. I haven't had the opportunity to work on my film as much these past few weeks due to the amount of work that piled up for them near the end. Bit of a bummer since all I want to do is work on my film. 

ANYWAY...less electives complaining since that happens too often at school, here's a doodle of a hippie I made today as a warm of that is sort of based on a life drawing to tide you over until I post thesis film stuff again. 

I'll post film stuff very soon such as my animation tests. I'll also probably post during my winter break of a description of my film! The break's in a few weeks and although I'm excited for it, I'll be spending those 3 weeks still at school in the studio working on my film. 

NO BREAKS UNTIL I'M DONE!

The Evolution of Art

Meet the main character of my thesis film Arthur, or Art for short!

This is a page of gestures I made of Art not too long ago and his design has changed a bit since then. He is based on a question mark due to the theme of my film as well as him being a curious character and the embodiment of intrigue. I'll reveal the story premise soon!

I've done some animation tests recently which resulted in me changing his design a bit mostly on the legs to be more tube/rubber hose rather than thin tapered legs, they still taper a bit. This change was recommended by one of my teachers pointing out that since in my story the character is seen in varying distances (close ups to extreme long shots), thin legs would be lost/hard to read at certain distances and actions. This is why animation tests are important! I'm glad I started them early.

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Below are, in order of my progression, of the character since last year when pitching the idea in 3rd year to more recently. Originally he was very nondescript character so that anyone can project themselves onto it, he still is but less so. Although I haven't revealed the story these drawings might actually give a hint to what I'm doing...

Originally I wasn't sure if I should give the character a mouth or not. I want him to be expressive but more through body language and pantomime. In the end I went with a mouth because I ended up making certain poses that looked weird when you couldn't see his eyes, such as looking up so a mouth was necessary. 

During a lecture in 3rd year a friend of mine was cutting some paper so I decided to glue it into my sketchbook and use it.

Here I was recommended I put pants on the character which I ended up liking a lot and went back to some old drawings and threw it on. Afterwards I felt like he looked bare chested now with just pants hence why I added suspenders and added the hat for secondary action later on.

Here was when I went more with a curvy approach to the design and started to implement the question mark as a gesture. I was really leaning towards the design on the top left but after some critiques from several people it seemed to be really 50/50 with people liking it and people thinking I could push it further. It looked too "basic", very standard. and in the end I agreed. 

I approached a former character design teacher of mine, and although he did like my original design  he agreed it could be pushed further. So to start from scratch he made me consider parts of the original design that were "Non-negotiable" or parts that I NEEDED to keep which ended up being:

-big eyes for clear expressions

-big nose because it looks funny and cute

-big hands for clear body gestures

-a bean structure or bean like body

       Art needed to move certain ways due to my boards, so a unibody couldn't work.

-question mark gesture

He also suggested I work graphically then complicate the character the moment he moves in dimension, such as opening its mouth and revealing complex shapes within a simple circle head. The above drawings were leading me really close to the final...

Then I made this drawing! THE drawing that led me to my current design. It had everything I wanted and more such as his design making him gesture in a certain way. His hips are wide so he can't really put his arms down so instead he puts his hands on his hips for resting, which gives it this bit of a judgmental feel from Art and fits his personality exactly. 

One of the advice I got from my previous character design teacher when I was redesigning Art was to, "Create a design that makes them immediately laugh. The moment he appears on screen and the audience laughs, they're on board with it." And ever since redesigning him I've gotten chuckles and laughs when I've shown him around!

Thesis Film Sneak Peek!

Here's another small slice of work from my thesis film. This was made sometime early September, lots of progress since then! Work on the film is going along extremely well! I'm about 2 weeks ahead of the school's deadlines and I'm trying really hard to keep it that way. I will reveal more about it really soon and I'll be posting some more artwork on it this week! Look forward to it!

Spooky Doodles

Just kidding, only one spooky doodle. Sorry to have scared you at first thinking there were more. The rest are just some silly doodles I did after getting tired of storyboarding for my film. Which is going pretty good so far! I'm on track and way ahead of schedule! Hopefully things remain this way for the rest of the year haha.

Busy, busy, busy! ALREADY!

End of week 2 and even though we have such few classes this year, I've been super busy on my thesis film! Constantly working on it since the first day and I already have a ton of pre-production work. I'll be posting those very soon. In the meantime enjoy a story sketch and a pose I really dig. Character designs aren't final of course! I'll divulge more info about my film the more concrete it is.

I have also added the tag "thesis" for anything pertaining to my fourth year film for quick searching. Look forward to my film! Fourth year is already one hell of a ride and I'm both excited and nervous. 

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3rd year film post-mortem will be delayed until I have time to do it. Compiling all those images and info is one hell of task. There's just so much to talk/post about. I WILL do one, it's just a matter of when I have time to do it.

Colour Correction

Here it is our group film Colour Correction! I hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it! Lots of love and hard work was put into this project and I'm still proud that our team managed to accomplish this ambitious film. Go Kaleidoscope Studios! Woo!

I will make a post with my artwork on the film as well as some behind the scenes stuff sometime next week since I also finished my Tinternship today! It was a great experience working at Tinman and I learned a TON of stuff there and had the pleasure of working on so many cool projects! Now it's time for one week of vacation until....FOURTH YEAR. 

Tinmanijam '016!

The artists at Tinman each got 4 hours to come up with an animation based on the previous person's sequence (an anijam) and this is what they came up with. Enjoy!

This was a super cool thing to participate in and I had a lot of fun rushing to get it done! My bit starts at 1:10! Everyone did a super awesome job!

Colour Correction Teaser

Something awesome is coming very soon...keep your eyes peeled!

Colour Correction Teaser from Marco Rivera on Vimeo.

Rotoscoping!

I got to contribute to this cute series of videos (1 of  6)! I did some rotoscoping to get rid of the puppeteers, heads popping up, and hands that would occasionally appear in frame. This is probably my first project that I contributed to that was fully completed and released! Everything else is still in production (Cuphead, Super Science Friends episode 2, etc.) Funny too since this was my most recent project to work on haha. Somehow word got around that I'm After Effects savvy at work and how I composited the majority of my group film. How it happened I don't even know since I asked the other Tinterns if they said anything and no one did. Regardless, it was a job I wasn't expecting to do during the internship but did so and enjoyed it anyway because I got to use the beautiful program that is After Effects!

 Anyway enjoy! And remember to check out the 5 other videos on the Super Simple Songs channel.

Some recent Tindraws:

"Superheroes"

We did superheroes to send to Ben Austin, a child who was recently diagnosed with a form of pediatric kidney cancer. Read more of the story here.

I did Mr. Incredible with the message "You're Incredible!".

"Stranger Things"

Woo! So happy that was the theme. I'm so glad so many people are watching it now. I had no one to talk about it to and speculate with when it first released. But after the surge in popularity and pushing people to watch it (muahahaha) I can practically freely talk and theorize with people now it's so much fun. If you haven't checked out the new Netflix series GO WATCH IT NOW!

Not Dead Update

Heyo! NOT DEAD! Just been busy with work and other life stuff got in the way such as a cousin from California that dropped by and we brought him everywhere.

Here's a little bit of what I've been up to at Tinman! 

One of the projects I get to work on is the next episode of Super Science Friends and in this month's animation update it features a good chunk of the FX work I've been doing on the show (and a hilarious scene from the episode). All of the FX, except when Tesla gets angry and all super saiyan, is mine! I also did some character posing for the episode at first and also character animation. Anyway enjoy!

Tindraws

"Horror movies/games" 

So I did the spitter from Left 4 Dead 2!

"Unicorns" 

Self explanatory. 

"British television shows"

I was going to do one of Black Mirror but instead did Utopia because no one knows of Utopia, which is partly why it got cancelled. I recommend you check it out, one of the few television shows that had great cinematography and use of colour. Not to mention such an amazing one of a kind soundtrack.

BONUS Benedict Cucumberpatch. After a friend and I were discussing how weird it was to draw him I did a quick 15 second scribble of him that I ended up liking haha.