stiff's stuff

Voila...sorta

2007-07-10T18:50:00.001-07:00

Finally cleaned this up...and it's too clean. I'm pretty satisfied with the spirals, but the outer edge needs to be less even, so the rays and stars aren't confined so strictly by a circle, which was the best part about the concept sketch (see below). It made it look a little more natural/organic. Maybe if I just tell the tattoo artist to fix it...

Caduceus

2007-06-15T17:57:00.001-07:00

This'll need to be redrawn, so I half-assed the wings. Overall not bad.

Rough Concept...

2007-05-21T19:27:00.001-07:00

Jamie's tattoo...

changes to make:
drop the arm of the jagged spiral down to take the place of the round one (the outside of the main circle) on the right side, and vice-versa.
modify the shapes of the spirals so that the switch from foreground to background doesn't require breaking the shape (like about 2/3 up the image in the center).
general cleanup, better color.
tighter spirals?

Look at my dumb ass.

2007-04-25T19:45:00.000-07:00

This is what I did last night. Eyes are slightly dorked up, but it's not too bad, I think.

Approaching caricature

2007-03-15T18:47:00.000-07:00

I got a sketchbook for Christmas a long time ago, so I finally decided to do something with it, and I'm trying to teach myself to draw caricatures. I've wondered before how you can distort the hell outta someone's face and still maintain a likeness, so I figured I'd start trying to find out by drawing myself. So these are crappy drawings of my lovely mug, with an attempt to loosen up, per the advice of some friendly strangers in a previous post. The profile pose is completely boring, and the expression is nonexistent, but I'm just playing with features and this whole "caricature" concept for now--it'll be better next time around. The second profile on the right is almost amusing, though. I also drew my mouth in a few different poses. Do mouths pose? I'm more pleased with those drawings, though they don't represent a caricature in any way; however, having drawn them certainly doesn't hurt.

Jerry doodles

2007-03-01T20:10:00.000-08:00

These are the fruits of an idea session at the Ravari Room. I didn't doodle just Jerry, but saying "Jerry doodles" is fun. You should try it.

Too funny for TV:

My rendition of JP's Genghis. I like this design:

Random chubby girl. Just kinda fell outta the pencil:

Friends

2007-01-31T17:02:00.000-08:00

Not very cartoony, but a drawing nonetheless. I didn't capture the humor of Snyder's expression very well. And made the top of his head way to skinny. Oops.

Here's the original, just for reference:

Adam Stiff - Squash and Stretch 3

2007-01-23T21:24:00.000-08:00

Height proportions are great, width proportions suck balls. Oops. I'll fix it tomorrow. Gotta say, though, drawing a bunch of naked chicks makes drawing cartoons feel a lot easier.

More asses

2007-01-22T20:43:00.000-08:00

This is wrong, and kinda sloppy:

This is better:

I should use bigger paper. Or draw smaller.

Dumps like a goddamn truck

2007-01-17T20:10:00.000-08:00

This isn't quite what I had hoped for, but I thought I'd show it anyway:
The two figures in the foreground are closer to what I had envisioned. I've recently seen girls of exceptional proportions squeezing into jeans that don't quite fit, then tucking them into calf-length pointy high-heeled boots; and the contrast between the tiny points on the shoes and the massive rotundness of the ass makes me chuckle. Once I loosened up a little on these and actually started to exaggerate that difference, I got the figure in the lower right, which is almost funny. They're all perfectly vertically posed, though, which is a no-no. And over-worked.

Bare asses!

2007-01-16T21:41:00.000-08:00

I'm finding the back more difficult to draw than the front, just because there are so few reference points on which to base proportions. The second drawing here is much better than the first (I wish I had rights to publish the originals to demonstrate, but I don't), so at least that's an improvement already. In the near future, I hope to learn enough through this to illustrate a very disturbing trend I've begun to notice in women's fashion.

Naked chicks!

2007-01-15T15:31:00.001-08:00

I decided I should practice drawing some naked chicks, to learn basic proportions, posing, variability, etc. Plus I like boobs. I'm not gonna lie. So here's the first set, in which I focused on the frontparts of extra-skinny chicks. These are drawn from the "beauty of the day" section of domai.com, which is probably the best source on the internet for tasteful nudes...I've just never wanted to pay for it. Anyway, more to come -- maybe next time I'll do asses.

Adam Stiff - Squash and Stretch 2

2006-11-22T15:42:00.000-08:00

These looked halfway decent before I compared them to the originals. I think I tend to focus too much on small areas of the drawings, which leaves the proportions pretty close within a given area, but they become wrong relative to the rest of the drawing. I need to look more at the total form of the drawing.

Just for fun, here's an old lady being punched in the face. A rare cleaned-up drawing:

The more I look at those drawings of that girl I never met (below), the less I like them...the construction is fairly sloppy. As impressed as I was with her mouth, I managed to screw it up and put it in the wrong place, at least in the center. Pretty sure I dorked up the noses too. Something to work on.

El Girl

2006-11-15T18:59:00.000-08:00

I saw a girl with some sexy-ass lips on the el train when I was in Chicago this weekend, and I wanted to draw her, so yesterday I tried to see what I could conjure up from memory. Problem was, I had been drinking, so my memory was impaired. I dunno how close I got, but accuracy aside, these aren't horrible as drawings/sketches. (These have been composited after the fact, by the way.) I might possibly be learning something about construction.

This guy I know.

2006-10-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

Adam Stiff - Squash and Stretch 1

2006-10-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

All three show drawings show the same goddamn tendencies. Good thing I drew three of 'em.

Dammit.

Jerry

2006-09-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

This is Jerry:

I need to start drawing more.

How 'Bout Them Buckeyes?

2006-09-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

Here are some drawings for an animation I might finish by the end of the football season. They're roughs, so they're horribly inconsistent, but the second drawing is a standardized Brutus model. All the drawings of Brutus are probably the property of OSU somehow, so don't go copying them.
standard:

And here's a concept design I drew for a project I'm starting with a few friends:

Lemme know what you think!

You're not gonna let me know.

Portfolio update

2006-07-10T21:44:00.000-07:00

Since somebody expressed interest on John's blog today, I updated my online portfolio with a few more animations that I've made for Ohio State. I'm not entirely satisfied with anything there, but I think it shows some clear improvements, and that was before I even started to learn what the hell I was doing from John. I'll be there for one more season so hopefully what I'm learning will make my stuff that much better.

Here it is.

Adam Stiff - Head Construction 4

2006-07-08T17:09:00.000-07:00

Wow, haven't done this in a while.

Here's a few drawings from page 2. I'm going through this way too slowly. I spend too much time drinking.

I think both poses turned out okay, eventually. I was pretty pleased with the last one; compared to the other of the same pose, it looks much more refined/less clumsy. More solid, perhaps? I'm still not sure I understand what John means by that. Nose and eyes are still a little big, but the big proportions are damn near perfect. Neck's a little off.

Next time I'll see if I can put him in a couple different poses, and maybe integrate that with some squash and stretch.

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 1

Adam Stiff - Head Construction 3

2006-06-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

Lesson 1, with a little bit of 6 mixed in

Finally took some time to draw some stuff today. Here's my last attempt to copy Preston's bulldog. I made the eyes ginormous:

So everything surrounding the eyes was out of place.

Then I tried to apply what I learned about the construction of this face to a couple of different poses; I didn't do more because I thought that many other poses were really similar to ones I had already done, or dead-on positions that would have resulted in nothing but a chin, or the top of a nose and eyebrows. If this was stupid of me, let me know, and I'll do more. Anyway, I tried to make sure that I was applying the sticky-outy principles John and Katie were talking about. In that much, I think I was fairly successful, and it seems as though I was able to maintain a fairly consistent construction, but I'm probably a little biased (any feedback is still welcome). It's hard to measure without any reference. Anyway, here they are:

Next time I'll probably venture on to page 2.

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 1

NOT Drawing-Related

2006-05-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

I know I set up this whole blog for the purpose of drawing shit, but I just had to write this down somewhere that people might see it.

ABC tonight reaffirmed my utter lack of faith in television. My television viewing is generally limited to ESPN, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network (I know the animation sucks, but I'm not gonna just throw out the writing with the bath water [let that sink in a minute] -- it's still funny), but tonight I decided to watch the season finale of Lost. I've never watched an episode before tonight, but I got a synopsis from some online news (since this shit is apparently news) today, so I wasn't too "lost."

All I keep hearing about this show is how great it is; how it's so intelligent, and how such a compelling, thought-provoking format wasn't supposed to work on TV, but "oh, my gosh, it's such a success...." Here's the thought that it provoked in me: automate the fucking button. Maybe I missed something, but it seems to me that if scientists can harness some massive kind of energy like this, they can write a simple computer program to enter the goddamn lottery numbers every two hours. Leave it to the IT department to fuck up a few lives cuz they didn't feel like writing a few more lines of code. Yeah, brilliant writing. Flawless.

"No, that's why it's good, cuz it makes you ask questions, man...like, why didn't they automate the button?"

Now I'm gonna get comments from angry fans of this dumbass show who defend this oversight as a simple device to create drama, on some sort of ends justify the means pretense. These, of course, will probably be the same people who chastise me for being so careless as to not equate animation to the baby in my above analogy.

"What baby is he talking about?"

Hey TV writers: if you're trying to be smart, think shit through. The fact that this is some of the "best" shit on TV speaks volumes for the rest of the trash out there. And for our effectively lobotomized populace. I'll stick to cartoons; at least they make no pretense at being anything more than goofy, funny, entertainment.

P.S. I'm sure I've contradicted myself in some fundamental way, as my goal is to one day make cartoons, which would pretty much have to be on TV at some point. I don't care, and you shouldn't either; it's just a rant.

P.P.S. I absolve myself from any ignorance of the "facts" of the show's plot.

Adam Stiff - Head Construction 2

2006-05-24T21:44:00.000-07:00

Lesson 1, cont'd

Somehow I seem to be regressing:

So, on both of these, I had the front of the face turned too far away, even though my egg shape looked pretty good. So the actual construction looks pretty close, despite the fact that as far as copies go, both of these are trash. Except for the fact that I got the horizontal construction line dead on with the second. Too bad I blew the rest of it.

I decided to work with the bulldog, figure out that construction, and then spin him around all over the place like the book says. These are my attempts at working out the construction:

The second attempt is much closer, however, there are some significant flaws; namely, that the top of the head is stretched too high, along with the top of the ears and the eyebrow ridges. The top of the snout, however, is too low. I'll probably do another one, but I think I have a good feel for the construction, which is kind of the point. My next post will then be the rotations, which I'm sure will frustrate me to no end:

(old drawing)

This shit is like picking up a musical instrument for the first time; frustrating as hell cuz you know how it can work, and how it's supposed to work, but you just can't do it yourself for a while, until you've practiced your ass off.

Anyway...

More later.

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 1

Adam Stiff - Head Construction 1

2006-05-18T22:33:00.000-07:00

Head Construction
Lesson 1

I was gonna wait until I got my book to start, but I think John might have single-handedly kicked Walter Foster's ass last week, and I went ahead and printed stuff off of animation archive, despite the crappiness of my printer. These are my first cracks at the egg; and I'm about sick of the shit-eating grin on that egg's face. I wanted to see how close I could get before doing the overlay, so all of the notes are just based on my eyeballs. Now that I've done the overlay, though, I can see that some of them were a lot closer than I thought. Anyway, here's my stuff, followed by my stuff with Preston's overlaid in blue (I think it's blue, I'm kinda colorblind).

Overlays:

So it seems that my eyes are right, most of the time, although some of my drawings weren't as bad as I thought. A major problem seems to be that I try to fit the head to the features, rather than vice-versa, as it should be. I can also see from the overlay that I tend to drop features on the lower side of a tilted head, which I didn't notice on my own. So now I have something to work on for my next post.

*Bonus Material*

I also tried to apply these basic construction principles to drawings of a couple of my friends, although I probably shouldn't be worrying about that yet. Either way, here's Bowden and Nikki; the drawing of Nikki is based on a picture of her, but I built the two of Bowden from scratch. I think I cheated on the second one of Bowden, cuz I didn't construct his jaw/cheeks separately from his cranium like it ended up. Once again, I'm working backwards, but I'll work on that. And I'm done drawing him for a while anyway, cuz his glasses keep effing me up.

Nikki!

Bowden is loud.

Bowden is not cool enough to ever do this.

Here are photos of Nikki and Bowden, just in case you were wondering if these suck or not:

Hope to hell you can tell that Nikki's on the right.

"Mildly Inquisitive" Bowden.

So yeah, any and all feedback is welcome. By all means, rip this stuff apart, I wanna get better!

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 1

2006-05-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

I have a blog now. Cool. This isn't something I'd normally do, but I'm using this as a medium for a class, as soon as I get the book. So, subsequent posts will be a buncha drawings.