marsisobelfielsend

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ANIMATION FINAL PROJECT

It won't let me post it I swear it is real and I have done it tumblr is just RUDE

Anyway talking about the animation. I'm very happy with the first part of it, though the second I need to remove some frames to make it smoother and not so jarring, as I'd initially added so many to try and get a clean tail flick as the creature disappeared. I had planned for this to be a loop but I ran out of time which is my own fault but still unfortunate. The animation was planned for the creature to do a lil flip, dive downwards and disappear only to pop up right at the foreground as to interact with the shape it is trapped in (the canvas acts as the square.)

I did have the last frame and planned to fill in the in-betweens but as I said, sadly I ran out of time. I really enjoyed it though even if numerous times I had to fuss over finding what specific frame needed adjusting to benefit the flow of the movement overall. This is also why I coloured the tail black, so I could have a consistent shape moving and flowing after the fact, helping with the illusion of smooth movement. I took more care in keeping it consistent than the more intricate and fussy body as a result, but I don't think that was a negative thing.

I planned the general movements of the animation with key movement frames, later going back to fill in the in-between frames that were necessary to smoothen it out. Unfortunately, with how Photoshop's animation feature is, this meant that it would often take a lot of fuss to get the right layers to show as I didn't put the effort into naming the layers after their frames, which would have helped in efficiency.

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MAYA - FINISHED PROJECT

I am rabid.

Turns out I can't try anything vaguely complex or even coloured correctly as I forget the steps it takes to get to that specific menu immediately after I do it. :)

The land and water is the correct colour but the struggle of trying and failing to colour the trees and rocks has been long and frustrating.

Nonetheless, the actual process of shaping the land wasn't one that I hated. Taking reference from artwork I'd included in my moodboards from Pinterest and blending them together to use as some kind of framework for my own ideas, I took a similar colour palette of snowy white contrasting the heavy colour of the water as a sort of reverse as to how the same landscape would look realistically, and therefore making it more catching to the eye. I used the guide provided to us for the making of the stylized land using Sculpting Tools, Retopologize etc. The trees, rocks and river itself were reliant on what we had learned previously while experimenting on Maya. I find the finishing outcome a bit plainer than I'd like, but it's alright - could have turned out a lot worse. I tried to at least add some kind of intricacy by doubling the layer of the water and making the top half raised above the lower with a thinner opacity to moreso fade into the groove it was fit into so it couldn't be mistaken for a path or something of the likes, but this ended up overlapping the disc and I was unable to find a way to fix it.

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PLUSHIE MAKING - FINISHED PROJECT

Turns out, huge surprise, sewing a perfect ball isn't easy. In fact it is hellish and I hated it sincerely. I dislike sewing to begin with, so the disaster that I ended up with isn't exactly shocking. Strips of pieces temporarily stuck together with an insane amount of pins & some random purple cloth on the interior from when I tried making a ball to curve it around, only to accidentally puncture the bunched up material. I prefer to think of this part as the experimental stage.

I didn't know what felting was prior to Kyrstie's suggestion, but once I tried it out I immediately preferred it to what I was attempting prior. Even if the process was long and very repetitive, it was easy to get absorbed into conversation to pass the time, or listen to music. Felting is a very old technique, dating from around 2000 years ago which is pretty neat. The method involves matting wool fibres together. Also the pins are part of the design I swear.

A lot of my creative process on this "plushie" was on a whim as I made it. It wasn't nearly as orderly as even my Dreadful Pie creation which also had some necessary changes during the creation of it. For example, I attempted the swirl pupil I wanted to use to somewhat "cartoonify" the eyeball and reflect it spinning around endlessly in the ball, but it turns out the black material I had access to would refuse to stay together reliably when cut that thin, which was difficult to do in the first place. So I improvised, instead just making it a distinct shape to not be a boring circle. The pins penetrating it in the design was Kyrstie's idea to be more fittingly gruesome to just a literal eyeball, and I put red thread between some of those pins to appear like veins. None of which I'd planned to do with the initial design, but I far prefer these ideas as they're less plain and ordinary. I also think the pins make the eyeball more of an individual creature or entity at least in my own logic, rather than someone's eye thrown in a sphere because who would stab an eye a bunch of times then put it on display. Logically speaking.

END PICTURES

[marsisobelfielsend]

FELTING RESEARCH

Droolwool has a cartoony style of felting that I love. They manage to include really distinct shapes in their work as well as small yet important details that really make each piece unique and adorable. Their thorough quality is impressive and consistent and I would absolutely buy some of their work.

I found this tutorial really useful given how directly they speak, it's very straight forward and easy to follow.

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Another two personal pieces this time toying with colours.

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TERRARIUMS

A closed terrarium is a closed container that houses a unique miniature ecosystem.

They work due to the WATER CYCLE and PHOTOSYNTHESIS being able to function and act as a base for the rest of the little ecosystem to thrive. Water evaporates from the soil, raises onto the edges of the glass then falls back down to rewater the soil. The plants inside can provide themselves with energy via photosynthesis as long as they are given access to sunlight. The plants can absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, which creates a self-sustaining environment.

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ARTISTS

Pieces posted on here that I especially like.

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PLUSHIES SIMILAR TO MY OWN

Since eyeballs aren't exactly cutesy nor huggable, there's very little plushies made of them that I can find. There is this design that made the face away from the iris itself so they could try and cutesify it and it's apart of a series of different organs and body parts made into plushies. It's alright, but I wouldn't be leaping to buy one, even if they were cheap.

The only other similar idea I could really think of are pokemon plushies, as that's the vague inspiration I had for my eyeball. The most similar is Cascoon plushies and honestly I would want one. They're simple and silly.

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PLUSH MAKERS

Plushies are very easy to sell. They're often used in merch for this very reason; soft, collectable and cute. They're often nostalgic and can be very hard to ignore when finding one you especially like.

I really love Mariela Marabi's work listed on here in particular. The sheer size of her creations are so impressive and must be expensive in order to get the right material, as well as requiring a whole lot of patience to get the right measurements and sew it all, etc. It really inspires admiration to see so many various designs and how high quality each of them are. Her blogs don't list the pricing of her plushes, but I can imagine they're fairly high-priced, and for good reason. It's lovely to see small company or singular artists thrive with an adequate income from what they make.

Andrea's work also has a very distinct, silly style and I really like it. The pricing listed for her works range between 30-50 generally speaking, which seems worth the quality you get in my opinion.

"Hatching Day" AKA the only time you're able to buy from Plushy Monsters is a pretty solid way of gaining attention. A unique, cute concept that limits and slows interest to something manageable (perfect for a small company) while the LIMITED TIME GET IT WHILE YOU CAN aspect rushes people into impulsive buys during these days, or for them to linger on people's minds as they wait for it to be Hatching Day again. I think the website could actually show what they sell more so you know just what you're waiting for, but from the little I have seen I absolutely understand why these would be popular. If they weren't so severely out of my price range, I'd be wanting one too.

[marsisobelfielsend]

PLUSHIES

I highly agree that plushies are beneficial to comfort and shouldn't necessarily be left behind as you say goodbye to your childhood. I have a bear that I couldn't sleep without during my early teenage years, as simply having something to hold to not feel so alone was comforting. Pets are better, but plushies are a good alternative for loneliness. It's not childish just because they work for kids too.

I find the idea of Warren really sweet. A design that you, shocker, do not have to pay for and is intentionally made simple enough to be able to be made by non-experts and given to those who would really appreciate them. The design is simple but really charming and honestly I want one.

Warren is an inspiration. I wish I made a Warren-like plushie for my design. All plushies should be Warren.

Also it's very ironic that someone with experience making plushies made a design so much simpler to pull off than I did, when I passionately hate sewing and measurements and all of it. The entire process is hell and my ambition has cursed me yet again. Help.

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Monsterifying tetris shapes; easy in concept, a little more difficult in practice at least for me. Specifically because I was not the best with keeping the designs and their silhouette loyal to the original shape, so it might be hard to decipher what is meant to be what. Otherwise I like these I find them charming and stupid.

For those who are somehow unaware of what Tetris is, it's a simple game of fitting different shapes together to form rows as they fall, with the goal being avoiding your entire screen being filled as the rows disappear once you complete them. The shapes are cubes fit together in different shapes to be able to easily understand what they are and be able to fit them with other ones quickly. Rather than slam on some eyeballs, label it as a monster and call it a day, or make it the most obvious animal on Earth, I decided to try different dinosaurs to slot into each. Dinosaurs and dragons are a huge fixation of mine ever since I was young so I was very excited to do this even if it was a very small project.

The order goes from top to bottom as:

Tyrannosaurus Rex

Dimetrodon

Anodontosaurus

Deinonychus

lizard guy

To make the animation itself, we had a clamp stand holding the camera above a sheet of paper that would act as the framing to what our tetris blocks would fall into. Individual photos would be taken as you move your shape from the top to the bottom where you want it to be, then the next person would go. Combining the photos at the end would make a smooth hand-made animation.

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Personal unfinished work toying with perspective.

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TREE

I passionately didn't like how plain and childish the tree became when using round shapes for the leaves/top of it, so I just decided to use squares and triangles completely. It's still very simplified :)

Very easy to do fortunately, as it was just smashing the same shapes together and calling it a day.

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SIMPLIFYING FLORA FOR MAYA

Circles/ovals seem to be the most common to find when simplifying trees and rocks into their more basic shapes. Rocks are less uniform and are just a combination of different shapes smushed together, whereas flora (trees in particular) demonstrate at least some form of pattern that is easy to follow, though it varies depending on the type of tree. This pattern makes trees far easier to identify than rocks given there are things to look for and recognise, but rocks are just lumps of shape without colour or texturing. Or maybe I'm just very bad at rocks.

I find trees more interesting to pick apart anyhow, as they can offer more coherent diversity.

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MOODBOARD 4 - SETTING

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MOODBOARD 3 - FOLIAGE

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MOODBOARD 2 - ROCKS