Isobel Wilson’s Animation Blog

I’m slowly making my way through and finishing all of Anne’s design sheets. So here we have the turnaround which needs a bit of tweaking, her hand pose sheet and her foot pose sheets. I am also finishing up on her prop sheet too.

In this week’s class we had to come up with characters background answering the main 7 questions. I came up a knight character named Anne. After the class was over I made this mood-board and continued to work on her design and backstory. I’m really happy with how she’s turning out.

I completed my daily drawing challenge for October!

I am pleased with quite a few of these and not so much with a couple of others. But overall I feel like it was a great warm up exercise for me each morning and kept me on track with my other work too!

I’m excited to do it all again next year, or maybe try some other challenges too 🙂

Here are of the drawings I did for the second half of the month, some of them were too big to upload on here

This afternoon a group of us from the course visited 180 strand for the lifeforms exhibition. The exhibition was excellent! The use of animated forms in a space was so interesting to me. It was a great example of walk cycles which I know we will be learning about in the coming weeks. I have visited the gallery before over the past couple of years but this particular exhibition felt a bit different.

This afternoon we worked with Bianca for the character design workshop online. I was very excited for this course as I know I really need to work on my character designs and i hope to improve over my time at university to create characters better suited to animation.

We did an exercise that I often do in the first pages of my sketchbooks to loosen up and explore new shapes. I really enjoyed doing something like this and also seeing everyones version and what they came up with! Everyone was so creative and i always love seeing peoples unique styles. Here is mine

For the next exercise, we took a character that Bianca created for a project she worked on and redesigned it in six different ways. I got some good critics on my designs and i left the class feeling like i had some ideas i could incorporate into my work immediately. I am excited for the next class now 🙂

Every year since 2017 I do a daily drawing challenge in October, from Inktober, artober to now Peachtober. I really enjoy these challenges and find them very beneficial for speeding up my process, sketching and trying new techniques.

I really liked Peachtober’s prompt list this year so I’ve been making my way through the list as the days go on. Here are days 1 to 15 as a kind of mid month check in. I’ve been doing a mixture of semi-rendered full scenes and basic coloured sketches. I use the same brush for the whole drawings too.

I am looking forward to what the rest of October brings!

Today we moved onto our first proper exercise after bouncing ball. This exercise of follow through is very important to our understanding of animation. I am still struggling to full comprehend it and I do think I will need to practice further in my own time to fully complete this exercise.

Below I have attached some videos of my work from today.

My understanding of how the tail would move became clearer once someone described the figure of 8 technique. Having the tail follow the this path makes it flow so much better. I will need to look into this further to fully use this in my animations in the future.

This morning I had a very quick trip to the British Museum before meeting with a friend for lunch. As I was only there for less than an hour i just stayed in the room of ’enlightenment’. I sketched real animals, trinkets, statues and paintings. I’ve attached some pictures below for reference. I have applied for a student art pass so will be able to visit more galleries in the future! Very exciting

For my world animation presentation I will be focusing on the life and work of Jiří Trnka. He is one of my favourite animators of all time and is very influential figure in stop motion animation. I first watched his version of ‘Midsummer’s Night Dream’ when I was child and then later on in my teens I was shown ‘The Hand’. It left a big impact on me and is one of the films I would credit to me wanting to become an animator myself.

I have done work/presentations on ‘The Hand’ previously so had some base of understanding for Trunk’s life and art process. But with the brief for the project mentioning the effects of soil/political influences and impacts on animated films/series, I felt ‘The Hand’ would be prefect to discuss.

For my first bit of research, I visited the library, I know they have several copies of Animation: The Global History. This is a great resource as it shows Trnka’s impact on both Czech and European history.

Next, I looked online for articles and interviews discussing more about the making of ‘The Hand’ and the decisions leading up to it being released. Here are some I found below.

https://english.radio.cz/masters-czech-animated-film-8710154/1

https://english.radio.cz/jiri-trnka-100th-anniversary-birth-a-great-czech-animator-8556282

https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/c016dce1-5491-4dd4-8a40-f511193006c0/jiri-trnka-a-long-lost-friend/docs-for-sale

These are very interesting to me because of them includes an interview with his daughter who mentions that Trnka loved the children in his life to be involved with the films and highly valued their opinions. They were able to come into his studios when no one else was able to. This is very relevant to my presentation so I won’t include it but I felt like it paints Trnka in a new light for me.

If you have not yet watch ‘The Hand’, I highly recommend it. I have attached a link below 🙂

I took a trip to the sir John Shane’s museum on Sunday. Since moving to London I have really been enjoying visiting all the free galleries and museums around the city. This museum in particular is my Dads favourite museum and he’s been recommending it to me for years, so I thought I’d check it out.

I was so amazed with the sheer amount of things they have managed to fit into such a small space! I wasn’t able to sketch in the way I usually do, I only did one spread of sketches but really just took my time wandering around and learning about some of the pieces around the house.

I sketched a variety of things, paintings, etchings, statues, pottery and stone carvings. Ive spoken to a lot of the others on the course and there are quite a few of us who enjoy visiting galleries so next time we all might go together!

I have attached some of the sketches and some pics of the museum, even though I couldn’t quite capture the intenseness of the museum that well.