AM Class 1 - Week 2

This week was pretty cool because we got our first real assignment, and I got to find out more about how AM works.

Our lecture was on the 12 principles of animation and really just touched what each of them are without diving in too heavily. We aren't required to know how to really apply them yet (since we haven't done any animation), but we should now be familiar with them and what they're talking about. And we should be keeping them in the back of our minds. We also learned a little about using silhouettes to make sure our poses aren't cluttered, and our mentor touched on line of action.

Our assignment was to go out and sketch people wherever we wanted, then to pick a pose that we drew (and liked) and to recreate it using our character, Stu. We then posted our sketches as well as our pose for our mentor to critique. The sketches didn't have to be more than stick figures, but the goal is for them to be clear. The 3D pose itself was also supposed to be clear.

So what we do is either submit our work early in the week or post it in our public review section. Either way other students will be able to drop by during the week and give you advice on your work, and it is highly encouraged for you to do the same to other student's work. After all, the student advice is like half of what makes up AM. There are also other mentors that will come by and give you some advice if you ask for it in the forums. You can then change your submitted work with the new stuff you've been working on all week, all the way up until the deadline for the assignment.

After the deadline our mentor will then come and grade the assignments as well as give his eCritique. It's then up to us to go back and change our work according to his advice in the next week (while also working on the next assignment). Any revisions we make won't change the grade, but it's always good to go make the changes anyway so you really understand them.

So I picked a coffee shop to draw in and it probably wasn't the best place to go. There are simply too many people sitting around, not doing much. It's a great place if you want to see how different people sit or pour their coffee, but if you want exciting, dramatic poses you should probably head somewhere else. So after filling 2 pages of my sketchbook I went home to figure out which I wanted to pose. I picked 3 I liked, and to make a long story short, I ended up choosing an entirely different pose to turn in because the other one's we just kind of bleh. It was good practice though and I'm looking forward to my eCritique.

One of the original 3. I almost turned this in.



Here's actually a 4th pose I did.



And here's the one I decided to turn in.