Finding rhythm

So I've been focusing on line sensitivity and finding rhythm in my gestures and essentially every line I put down. I recently realized that aside from my usual rough style of sketching, I draw my curves pretty much the same way every time, causing my drawings to not look too appealing. So I've slowed down and put more thought in creating rhythm.

Robin Owl

Super quick sketch and color. Recently got into archery. It's been a lot of fun

Bunnies

Made some bunnies for a friend's short clip to be shown at the end credits.

Nom nom nom

*Flop*

Back Home: Short film

Been storyboarding like mad for the last month. Churning out an average of 30 panels a day. But the experience is amazing and I definitely learned and improved a lot along the way. My composition and storytelling skills have gotten a lot better. Feel very happy when I feel like I captured the right emotions in each scene. Storyboarding for a live film definitely gave me different challenges as opposed to boarding for an animated film. I've learned to work with physical limitations and changing my boards to accommodate logistical problems.

Biggest problem we've had is dealing with our main protagonist, a girl. Since this is a student film and  the girl and the family are just volunteers who've never done this before, we've encountered problems with the girl's (and family's) temperament and schedule. We had to rewrite the script and cut down the shots as much as possible. I've learned to be more economical in my shot choices and cut down so that we don't have to shoot the same scene several times as we only have one camera. It works for the most part but sometimes I feel like I could have brought more emotion and storytelling by having more shots but... it's a give and take situation, and I'm adapting along the way.

Here's one short scene.

Perspective, gesture and appeal

As the post title says, I've been practicing on my perspective, gestures and appeal. Did some experimentation and made a lot of mistakes but they were good learning experiences.

Liked this guy a lot so I gave him some color

Rock on!

Fist bump

Went rock climbing with some friends

It's been cold, really cold (>v<)

Loved this guy too :) Yoga cat!

Ned Stark

After finishing the 6th book of the Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan) series, I finally decided to take a break from the series and start on A Song of Ice and Fire (George Martin), namely, Game of Thrones! Been psyched about starting on this series ever since the HBO series first came out. Love the series, especially the opening theme. I keep playing the opening theme in  my head whenever I think about Game of Thrones. Anyway, here's a drawing of Lord Eddard Stark that I drew awhile back.

Ringing in the new year with an updated demo reel

Karen Chan's Demo Reel 2012 from Karen Chan on Vimeo.

Merry Christmas!

Pirate owl wants some candy

Hoot! Gimme your candies or else!

Happy Halloween!

Cooks and masked men

And here is the last batch of drawings from my drawing class this summer. It's been a great summer and definitely it helped inspire me to draw more and be bolder in trying things I've never done before. I don't feel like such an animator lately but at least I'm still developing as an artist overall.

Hehehe I was feeling quite caricature-y that day. I just wanted to let loose and have fun, it gets boring just drawing what you see in front of you after awhile. I think I inspired all my classmates to just let their imaginations go too coz after they saw my super cartoony first drawing, everyone started doing it too and we had a pretty fun class that day, everyone's drawings that day were very different from the rest of the semester.

This one turned out pretty good. Bushy eyebrows, no eyes look :p

I'm not sure if the model brought/made her own costume but it was pretty cool. We had a space theme going on that day :)

When I saw the helmet, I couldn't help but remember this little old movie I loved when I was a kid so I just had to put that in :p I turned her into... the Rocketeer! *cue in music*