Here are some of my life drawings from the class yesterday.

I am doing a bit of cartooning in flash everyday and getting used to the tools more and more. Here is another little exercise I did.

Drawing with the tablet is quite tricky and a bit frustrating, I keep wanting to pickup a pencil which responds so much more predictably. I have been doing more cartooning exercises in flash and using the undo button alot because the lines just dont come out looking right and going over them creates some jagged edges which I then have to erase which can be alot of work so I use the undo and try to draw the line again.
I could use the pen tool instead of the brush tool but I find the perfection of the pen tool’s line a bit lifeless.

I am sure after a while I will get used to the new tool, does anyone have any tips for me?

Here is today’s cartooning exercise.

I have been meaning to improve my cartooning ability for a long time now. A couple of months ago my partner and I purchased a Mac, a tablet and the adobe web creative suite package which now includes flash and all the other goodies, so I didnt have any excuses any more. I started following a teach-yourself cartooning book by Christopher Hart who is an ex Disney animator hence the Disney style, eventually I want to develop my own style but for now this will suffice to teach me the basics and get me into regular drawing again.

While doing this I am also thinking ahead to animation, I want to be able to eventually animate the different parts of the characters so I am making a Symbol from each part in Flash and saving it in the library. I have done a little flash example which shows how the symbols are combined together to create the whole.

I have spent the last couple of days working on a flash web site for an online bicycle store, specializing in touring bicycles. You can have a look here: 2Pi Cycles

I am really happy with the birds, they are a swarm using flocking algorithm. The program is not that complicated but I decided to write it in an Object Oriented form in actionscript so I ended up spending a lot of time figuring things out about new stuff in flash.

The other thing that caused a lot of headaches for me was the TextArea component of flash. This component is meant to allow you to display HTML code in a scrollable window inside flash but there seems to be a lot of bugs in it. I used this component to display the various conent pages on the web site, thinking that it would be easier to have the content in HTML instead of hard-coded in flash but the whole thing turned into a big ordeal and right now I want to spend more time preparing my application to RMIT than banging my head against Flash bugs so ended up having to fudge the html until it looked right inside flash.

For the preloader I want to animate a little cyclist going around until till the movie is fully loaded when he finally find his way out.

I went to life drawing again this week, still a bit rusty but I am slowly getting back into it. Here are some samples from the last 2 weeks.

I am still going through the AIM site looking at the links, the staff, the students and the alumini. While looking at David Atkinson’s site I found Mr Felix being mentioned! Mr Felix is responsible for the Mr Pumpy site
which inspired me to go bicycle touring in South East Asia. Previously
to that I had cycle toured in Tasmania and New Zealand for 3 months and
enjoyed it very much but cycling in a foreign culture and not knowing
the language was beyond my comfort zone. It was Mr Pumpy’s web site
with its quirky humour which inspired me (and my partner) to take the
plunge and spend 4 months cycling in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. And
now I find that Mr Felix was an ex student of AIM!

I enjoyed looking at David Atkinson’s web site…great photos and writing. Maybe one day I will get around to putting my travel photos together in a web site.

Did some more work on the 2Pi Cycles web page, wrote a basic version of the content. I’m not the best person to write sales blurbs but it will have to do. H is going to translate some of the German brochures for me to fill in the content. I have to start looking around for a web host.

2Pi Cycles is a small online shop that I want to setup for supplying quality German made touring bicycles to the Australian market. Good touring bikes are so hard to find in Australia, while when I was in Germany I could pick from a number of good quality touring bikes by just walking into the local bike shop. Anyway the market is very small so I am not really expecting anything to come of it but it has been a nice learning experience building the web site.

Just arrived at the land of blog…

My partner H saw an ad in the MX for mid-year intake to the AIM MA course at RMIT. I went to the info night and it looks very inspiring. Starting mid-year would mean doing the research part of the course first which could be a bit strange but it might be good in terms of seeing the current students working.

I am going to apply and see what happens, it is all a bit rushed, originally I was looking at applying for next year but not that this has come up I have to quickly get a portfolio together and get ready for doing the selection test.

I have been looking at the AIM site and following some of the links from peoples pages. There is a lot of amazing work out there that I never knew about. I really enjoyed the Strange Attractors
and Winged Sandals (it’s a kids educational site but the animation is great).