DIY Line Tester

I’ve finally done something that I have been meaning to do for a good couple of years….I’ve built a line tester! Scanning animation drawings is such a pain in the bum, so this will be a huge time-saver. Since built-for-purpose line testers can cost a fortune, I made one by cobbling together other junk. I first needed a camera that could capture images of a decent resolution straight to my PC, but that had a small price tag. I opted for a webcam. The Microsoft LifeCam Cinema to be exact – a webcam that can capture images with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. It’s of course nowhere near as good as an SLR camera, but it only cost £45. The camera is great because it’s focus and exposure settings can be altered via the software on the computer.

I next needed some way of fixing the camera in place over my animation drawings. For this I went for a similar solution to many other animators, in the form of a photographic enlarger. I found a Durst F30 enlarger on sale just down the road from where I live for £30. This piece of equipment consists of an adjustable stand on which a box rests, containing a lamp and a lens mechanism. I dismantled the box, taking out all this stuff. The hole left by the lens was small and circular, similar to the diameter of the webcam housing, albeit a little too big. My solution was to cut a strip of foam and wrap it around the camera, so it fit snugly into the hole in the enlarger box (see the image on the right). I removed the rubber clip used for mounting the camera to a computer monitor.

Once the camera was in place, I fed the USB cable up through the enlarger housing and down the back of the stand. I finished off by rebuilding some of the housing around the camera to provide a bit of protection.

You can see the final product in the image on the left. There are two components still not in place. I require one or two lights to illuminate my animation drawings, and I need a pegbar to register the paper correctly.

I love how easy it was to put this together. My little DIY projects usually end in tears, but this one worked great. The camera was an almost perfect fit for the stand and the base of the stand is the perfect size for 12 field animation paper. Below is a quick test of the equipment using the lamp from my animation desk and a glue stick.

Fighting Reluctance

With an aim of doing some proper hand-drawn animation, I will be spending the next week learning to draw one single character in the hope that it will make animation a bit easier. The character I have picked is the one that I felt had the right balance of complexity (not too simple and not too hard) and that I had some decent model sheets for. With those things in mind, I’ve picked Sir Giles from Disney’s ‘The Reluctant Dragon’.

 

As you can see from the image of my dusted-off animation desk, I’ve also taken a few screen grabs from the film itself to help me.

Skullerific

Without saying too much, I have a rather large incentive to get my standard of drawing up. To that end I have been scribbling away every single day as much as I can.

Tonight I thought of quite a good study exercise. I picked a well-drawn bony cartoon face (on the right) from the internet and used my model skull (on the left, whom I have named Clive) and a mirror (to look at my own head) to study how the cartoon compares with the real thing.

When I started, I didn’t think much into whether it was a good exercise, but I learned so much from it. To start with I just made a copy of the drawing above, but starting from what I thought the skull was like underneath. I then did a couple more versions just quickly to cement the formation of the real skull in my mind a bit more. Then I finished with the drawing below, which is one from imagination, but using my own face as reference for the expression.

Sketching, Sketching and More Sketching

I need to get back to posting! I will really soon. This is just a quick one from my phone. I've been really making an effort to draw regularly and I'll post some of my drawings soon. Here's the latest page of my sketchbook. Please excuse the crappy photo, they never upload well from here!


- Posted from my iPhone

Location:Traveller's Tales

YAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!

A New Method

Here’s some drawings I drew today. I was having a go at the construction technique described on Rad’s How To blog. The first was from a photo on Flickr, but the second was from imagination.

They’re not quite right, but I think his method is something I may well adopt as it produces good results in a short time.

Flickring

Flickr is such a great resource for artists. It’s great for sparking the imagination, but I’ve recently discovered how useful it is for drawing practice. Specifically I’ve discovered a section of the site that gives a random slideshow of “interesting” images from the last seven days.

It’s great to bring the slideshow up and just start drawing, which is exactly what I did with the drawings below. I decided to forget about technique and to just generally not worry about drawing something nice. I also committed myself to draw anything that came up rather than just sticking to people.

Palming

After my previous post, I thought some concentration on hands was is order, so I did some little sketches.

I was trying to decide on a method of breaking up the hand that I felt comfortable with. Here’s what I settled on. I would normally think of the palm as being one almost solid block, but it is clearly much more flexible than that, so I found it to be quite useful to break it up into three parts, which I have given different colours for clarity. On reflection I suppose the grey section at the base of the fingers could be further subdivided as it is quite flexible.

I’m also trying to keep in mind the fact that the fingers do not extend parallel to each other, but instead curve inwards towards one another, with the ring finger being the most straight of them.

I’ve been treating the pinky as more of a separate element from the other fingers too, letting it do something a bit different to its buddies.