GIF: Burn-in Animation

This of all the sketches took the longest to get right. I turned it into an animated GIF. I also avoided eraser damage to paper by tweaking it in a photo editor.

Sketches: Passionate for Laura Holt

What to do with a large page? I could have drawn a big picture. But I was used to working with smaller drawing surfaces. So I compromised. Did a series of small sketches on the same subject, with varying scale. The result is my first composition. Starting from the largest portrait in the middle, I opted for images with different angles and expressions. It worked! ☺☺☺

GIMP: The Write Off

For a while now, I have been trying to make a single panel comic work for Remington Steele. I found inspiration from filing income tax. Drawing caricatures is more difficult than I thought. It's even harder to reproduce the lines with the Ink tool.

GIMP: On Location with Stephanie

It was the perfect image to try painting in GIMP with. It had light and shadows and a good posture. I used for reference The Great Elephant Escape DVD with Stephanie Zimbalist and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Near the end, she leans up against a jeep. I made up the part of her putting on Julian Sands' hat.

As much as I tried to correct the proportions in GIMP, the hat came out a bit off. Still I am satisfied with the results. The Ink Tool is really quite versatile. Now having this as reference, I can go back to the rough sketch and do up a proper pencil drawing.

GIMP: Flowers for Stephanie

I spent the weekend revisiting this drawing with the GIMP Ink Tool. The line art and the colouring is mostly done with this. I used the Airbrush Tool for some of the finer details and background, as well as the Smudge Tool for obvious reasons. It does make the composition look like comic art.

Sketches: Flowers for Stephanie

The idea for this was to do a comical drawing of the cast of Remington Steele. Not since taking that art class in cartooning, have I attempted such an endeavor. It was hard to come up with a style I haven't already seen. So I began studying the character's expressions and simplified the lines.

The sketching was the easy part. Painting presented yet another challenge. I have yet to master the controls in the tablet apps, so it is back to GIMP. Some parts of the drawing, I replaced the line art, some I kept.

Finished!

Started with thumbnails.

One of my favourite poses

The layout had a different drawing

Sketches: Steele in the Dark

This picture was born from a suggestion from a fan at the SteeleWatchers Facebook group. The challenge was to come up with the punchline. Having screened several B&E themed scenes from a dozen episodes, I saw the most potential in the season 2 "High Flying Steele".

Up until recently, I have been using my pocket sketchbook. I was hoping to use a full-sized sketch pad for this project. It ended up badly. Perhaps I was not used to texture of the drawing surface. Perhaps I had the wrong grade pencil. Anyway, I ended up using some storyboard paper I had lying around, made 4 individual drawings and did up the composition in GIMP.

I adjusted the scale for each to fit the size of the image. All the sketches were scanned to 600 dpi (very big jpeg files). When scaled down, I wouldn't lose too much detail. I used a simple colour fill for the background. As it turned out, I didn't have room to add any more details.

The Comic Strip

My first ever comic strip.

 

So here is the comic strip. All the artwork was scanned in at 75 dpi. (Not very big and without the added dimension by a directed light source.)

I found the drawing program GIMP was lacking. I used it to create the border around each individual image and then added a text layer. Then lined up each panel. I used Paint to add in free hand lines. It allowed me more control.

As for the drawings. The medium close-ups were more difficult. If I didn't get the angle of the baseball caps just right, the whole drawing would have to be scrapped.

Filters have very little affect on the scanned images. The drawings were already simplified little posters.

Although it's a free form creation, I find it more of a challenge to getting it right. I can't wait to try it on Star Trek and The X-Files, which I have also drawn in the past.

Text to Path Animation

Playing around with the Text to Path feature in GIMP. I added a paintbrush stroke and animated the letters in 6 frames. The only letter that didn't move at all was D. It had more than one part, the middle D and the outer D, which would deform if moved.

Happy Chinese New Year GIF

1) Animate the ren (people) stick figure using paths.
2) Animate the banner within the banner.
3) Animate the text on the smaller banner.
4) Combine elements.

Walk Cycle in GIMP

It is almost Chinese New Year. I had an idea for animating a character. The one that came to mind was the one for person. It even looks like a man. What would I need to make it move though? I drew the 2 strokes first. But that is still a static interpretation.

The Paths Tool in GIMP was something I had not tried yet. It lets me draw the path and paint the strokes. In time, I almost matched the shape of the strokes I made from scratch.

This gave me a skeleton to work with. It was a something that could be manipulated as desired.

Use the Stroke Path dialog box to choose a brush type to paint the strokes. I chose Ink. Make sure beforehand the brush size is what you want.

Add a new layer and change the shape of the path. Deform it. And then I created the radical symbol for person.

Lastly, after repeating the steps to deform the strokes, the walk cycle is complete.

Recreating a Stamp - Color to Alpha in GIMP

I want to go through a process of how I got...

from here...

to there.

It all started when I read an article of how to create a watermark in GIMP. For that, I used the text editor and created variations of @xindilini. I hadn't even figured out how to save the resultant paintbrush at the time. Then I remembered my chop. It is a customized stamp with my Chinese name carved in stone. The one I had in mind was the one that would produce a negative image of the characters.

I took a picture of the imprint with a webcam and started playing with the image in GIMP. After loading the image file, I created a new layer of the specific area so I could rotate it arbitrarily. Autocrop Layer. Autocrop Image.

Tried a few options from the Colors > Auto and settled for Stretch HSV. This would stretch the image contrast to cover the maximum possible range.

Now we are ready to use Color to Alpha. You can select this from the Layer > Transparency menu or directly from the Colors menu. Both will do the same thing. Other than the red inky parts are transparent because the default colour is white. If you want to change it you can click on the rectangle as shown in the following image.

I put it through one more pass to get the red to pop out some more. That is the by using Maximum RGB from the Colors menu. This will reduce the image to pure red, green, and blue. For this purpose, make sure the option "Hold the maximal channels" is selected.

You can now save the layer for later use. I took it one step further by combining it with calligraphy of my name. Since I am a bit out of practice, I traced it out by hand. Converting the image mode from RGB to Greyscale, I could use it for a watermark on dark or light images alike.

I really liked playing around with Color to Alpha. Can't wait to try it with other stamps or cutouts.

More Text GIFs

Two things I learned since yesterday. The GIMP filter I used was Animation > Waves, not Animation > Rippling. It just looked like water ripples to me.

The other thing, which was helpful in combining the elements, was the Animation > Blend filter. At least two layers and the background are needed. There doesn't seem to be a limit to that number. Running the filter will output the required number of frames in the transitions.

The banner has been redone in the same way.

Get Ready for Spring

It has been a while since I created another banner. Once again I resorted to GIMP for the animation. What I wanted to try most was the rippling filter.

The last time I used this filter, it was directly onto the image. Now I wanted to incorporate it as an element in the banner to cycle once. This I achieved by applying the filter to the layer which was the flower image you see. The resulting ripple appears over an area of the banner.

Next, the text can appear to fade in with a blend filter.

Since it was created to loop, there was more frames there than I actually needed.

The finished banner is a result of a combination of these layers. I had to erase parts of the text layers to reveal the image under it, but that was easy enough to do.

Next time, I will be attempting to add multiple ripples to an image.

Dog Walk Cycle

Dog Walk Cycle via Stop Motion Animation

Here is something I was thinking of doing with the scraps left over from making paper models. It turned out OK. The full walk cycle for dog or any quadrupeds require 8 frames, but cutting by eye resulted in too many frustrating mistakes. I captured the images upside down with my laptop webcam. This is good considering the paper and size of the model made it too difficult to stand upright. Stay tuned for more original paper creations.

Good Fortune to All

Using what I learned yesterday, I made an animated gif banner with an apt greeting for Chinese New Year. The characters and the gold ingot are place side by side on a square background. Each frame is taken from the subsequent Spinning Globe animation. I need to figure out the proper frame count to ensure the character sit in the middle of the sphere.  Enjoy.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Graduating gold fill on an auspicious red background.

In some parts of the world, it is already the Year of the Dragon. I was wondering what to create for the occasion. In the past, I could use Adobe Image Ready to simulate writing. It would take who knows how many frames to do the Chinese character for dragon. At first, I wanted to make a black banner, with a bouncing character and rolling square in one, but that would take too long. So I opted for a simple image with a calligraphy brush stroke.

Then I decided to use the Spinning Globe Animation filter in GIMP to create a gif. NEAT! I will try this again with a smaller character.

Animated Greetings

So I can make my e-gif in GIMP. I created everything with the brush and pencil tool. In hindsight, I probably should have used a real present box. Freehand is no substitute for geometry.

To my internet friends.

Happy Holidays!

Set Design: Animating the Static Image

Well, I've been putting off working on the project for a few weeks. Now after a break, I am back at it. I thought I discuss how to take a perfectly static image and turn it into animation. Surprisingly no two scenes are made using the same method.

The first example I want to illustrate is the crows where Dorothy meet Scarecrow. For this scene, I needed to have crows flying in the distance. I chose an image that had a number of birds in flight. For some of them, it looked to me like flight paths.

I cut out silhouettes of some of the birds and created four animating frames in GIMP to make the bird layers. Open the image in a new Window to see what I mean. The final animation includes the cornfield background.

Every production tries to be different. We are adding Canada geese to our cyclone sequence. There was enough variety in the birds in this image to make it look like one bird was flying. I was able to cycle the frame for each position.

Because the background is also animating, I want to scale the birds into place and add one to blow off screen. Open the image below to see the animation. I can't wait to see how it will look in Keynote.

Set Design: Wizard of Oz Scenes Made in GIMP

What is GIMP? It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. In many ways, it is similar to Adobe Photoshop and in other ways it's more like Adobe Image Ready. I wouldn't know if I could have worked on this project without it. At first, I didn't know how much I would be using this application. I only had it to have an alternative means to make my a gif from my netbook. I knew it was something Linux users had at my previous job. Before using it for this project, I was just learning how to use it to make banners with it. Since then, I have found it much more intuitive for animating and have been making elements for the slides used in some of the scenes. For those who know GIMP, this will be nothing new. I just wanted to share my progress on this project.

Starting with the flames for this chandelier, I began to understand that any layers in GIMP can be used animated. Cool! To make the candle flicker, I cut the image of a flame and applied the Animation Rippling filter. It saved me the trouble of animating it myself. I did have to ask my colleagues how to make it move. That's gave me the idea how it should look like.

4 frames, delayed on each candle for variation

How am I going to make flying monkeys with nothing but a two-dimensional image of a chimp and pasted on wings? Nothing seemed right. I couldn't push it across the Keynote slide like I did for the witch silhouette. That would be hard to do for more than one monkey. I had the idea to make a group of monkeys, but still had trouble with timing the movement. I made three layers of monkeys to use with this background. They were going to be small so you couldn't see the details too closely. I started with what ended up being the middle layer, 6 in the distant, 6 more a little closer to frame, and 4 more in front. For the second frame I scaled down and placed them where they would be in the previous frame. The third frame was the opposite. The first frame became the second frame and I had monkeys that seem to fly from the castle here.

3 frames with monkey variation

Something else I noticed with the monkeys as with the chandelier. To reduce the file size, there is an optimize filter for gif. What this does is to combined the textures. Once this is done, you can't really edit the images again. The colours are indexed. To other applications the images still appear to be full frames.

I did a test already with transparent layers so I knew making a flaming mask was possible. I just didn't know what the mask would look like at the time. This was a render. As you can see, there is very little definition, I wasn't sure how the Colour to Alpha would work for it. It looked solid, so I knew that changing the brightness and contrast would make it a little bit more transparent. I wanted to deformed the eyes, but I didn't know which tools in GIMP to make that happen. It will also have reduced opacity in Keynote so the video flames will be seen past it as well. I still need this gif to be approved for production. Looking forward, I will be exploring the drawing tools for my needs.