Kids in Garden

Kids Playing near pond in the Garden.
Cartoon/illustration for this week illustration friday topic "Garden".

Leap in Life

Leap in life of butterfly. Leaping through four distinctive stages called Metamorphosis. The great transformation in nature.

Cartoon for this week's Illustration Friday topic "Leap".

Multiple Role of an Iron Box.

This week Illustration Friday topic is "Multiple".

For creative minds, the sky is the limit.
Touch the sky with creativity.
Give them Topic, Tell your theme, explain the concept... creative minds are ever ready to keep their creative juices are flowing.

Every word is having a pictorial face.
Multiple means consisting of more than one part.
Taking birth again and again is Multiple Birth.
An employ play multiple roles in the office to keep his boss happy.
It is difficult to judge some people having Multiple personality.
There is a need to display multiple behavior to survive in the society.

The above cartoon created on Multiple purpose of an Iron Box..

Pencil Sketches and Final Color Composition

The above pencil sketches are created for my blog Santa Cartoons. I am not posting here the final composition of colored cartoon (for the shake of avoiding repetition.). After going through the following description you can View Here the completed colored Cartoon.

Every artist has his own way of creating colored/black and white graphics/cartoons in their favorite graphic editors. Just I wanted to share the tip here.

When I feel the composition of any cartoon is going to be very complicated than I go for creating rough sketches of elements in the cartoon on separate sheet of papers.

First I created Santa cartoon character creating his own portrait on canvas. Later I thought of adding a dog, girl and boy. Drawing these characters directly in front of Santa Cartoon Character will mess new pencil lines with previously drawn lines and increase frequency of erasing process.

After inking. scanning and coloring , placed the graphics on differen layers. I tried three compositions by moving movable characters (Dog, Girl and Boy) to different locations. Those combinations are:

(1) Girl and Boy extreme right hand side both viewing at canvas board and dog in the middle.

(2) Girl and boy extreme left hand side watching canvas and dog extreme right hand side facing towards canvas.

(3) Dog extreme left hand side followed by girl (viewing canvas) and boy extreme right hand side (viewing canvas).

I also tried some other placements but I felt the third combination was the best composition. You can flip the characters and increase/decrease the character sizes to match (proportionate) with main (Santa) drawing. That is power of the graphics placed on layers.

Advantages of this process:

(1) Character modification is easy without disturbing background.
(2) Individual characters can be used in other composition.

Please click on image to view enlarged image.

Click Here to view final colored composition Here.

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Comments by Eli:

I like your characters, especially Santa and snake! I'm thinking the final composition could be a little tighter though if you moved everything to the left and then put the dog in front instead of to the side, right now it seems all the action is heavy on the right side. Just me being a composition freak, the old art teacher coming out. Thanks for your comments on my blog, if you ever have any constructive crits I'd love to hear them!

Thanks Eli for your kind suggestion about composition. I made a new post at Santa Cartoons with your suggestions implemented. Please click here to view changes.

The Universal Law of Gravitation

Illustration Friday : Weekly Topic "Theory".

Again there is a tree which is adding a lot of green to the cartoon.
Gravitation gives objects weight. Cartoon designed on this weight "Theory". Please click on cartoon for enlarged view.

Choose - Creep or Not Creep

There are plenty of concepts in mind for the topic "Choose" (Illustration Friday - Topic of the Week). First I thought of Lion or some other dangerous animal at the bottom of the tree. But finally decided to "Choose" heavy floods around. Natural Calamities are common phenomenon and are unexpected.

Finding humour from trouble situation is really great fun. Raising water levels on the ground and poisonous situation overhead which leading to "Choose" situation in the cartoon. The eagle eye view (perspectives) of drawing is not perfect. I put my best efforts to share the concept with my fellow designers/cartoonists.

Valentine's Day Greetings From India

From India..."Happy Valentine's Day" to all!
Showcasing "Valentine's Day Greeting Card" featuring "INDIAN" lovers at a Park.



Making of this Greeting Card:

Rough Sketches:



The final greeting made from different graphics drawn separately and combined them in photoshop.

Take the help of light box.
Draw the background first.
Next draw the required cartoon character on separate paper by keeping them over background layout. After inking scan all the graphics to photoshop and color them. Drag one by one on to single file. Resize and arrange them to add depths.

This is very easy way of composing scenes. Same background can be used for other drawings. Individual characters also can be utilised for some other purpose.

Blanket Illustrations/Cartoons

After a gap of one year, again here are my pencil sketches and colored illustrations created for Illustration Friday weekly topics . Illustration Friday inspired me a lot to drive away my laziness and made me to search for my art material.

The following first two cartoon/illustrations are rough sketches created on paper. Other two are after inking and coloring in photoshop.





The color images are output of my usual procedure. That is inking, scanning and coloring.





Creating children characters is great thrill. I know the body proportions are not perfect...but I could not restrict myself to post in my blog. There is lot of inspiration around. I need to practice a lot about drawing children faces.

Now there is something to blog every week. Thanks to Illustration Friday!.

Rotating Objects with Motion Guides in Flash.

Before proceeding to Motion Guide animation please also check for animating body parts of character. I do not want to repeat same tutorial here again and again which has already been explained in my new site TutorialBalcony. I want to share this with visitor of my blog here. This post is about brief discussion on animating Parts of an Object or Character.

I always go for three types of animations in simple flash projects with no action script involvement.

(1) Motion Tween.
(2) Frame-by-Frame Animation and
(3) Guide Motion.

This post is about Motion Guide.

We can create some eye catching animations with Motion tween and Motion Guides. Motion Tween can only be applied to Graphic symbols. We need to first convert all the graphics to be animated in to Graphic Symbols. At the same time we can't apply Shape Tween to Graphic Symbols. Briefly...apply Motion Tween for Graphic Symbols and Shape Tween for Non-Graphics Symbols. It means there is no need to convert a Graphic in to symbol to apply shape tween to it.

Motion Guide Animation is very useful when it comes to animate an object in certain curve or zig zag direction. It needs a path to be drawn on separate layer and Graphic Symbols/Movie Clips to be animated in particular path to be placed on another layer.

If a propeller is rotating its blades and we need to rotate the propeller in circular motion along with its blades rotation than we need to put the the propeller blades rotation in Movie Clip and again this Movie Clip to be attached to a circular Motion Guide.

Confusing?...
I explained below with rough examples:



I am not able to upload .swf files.
You can view the above propeller animation
Here.

It is a movie clip of a propeller and Attached to a circular Guide path (see below image). Propeller not only rotates on its own axis but also it follows circular guide path while rotating. Guide path can't be seen while playing movie. I added an extra layer at bottom to show the circle.
The full animation you can view
here.



















View
1. Propeller Rotation.
2. Propeller Rotating along with Circular path.

The Propeller is a Graphic symbol. Rotated 180 degree at frame 10, applied Motion Tween and converted to movie clip. Propeller movie clip attached to a circular guide path which is consisting of total 100 frames at the rate of 36 frames per second.

I very rarely go for Shape Tweens. It does not mean that I hate Shape Tweens. I use as and when I feel it is very necessary to insert. To make shape tweens perfect we need to insert "Shape Hints" which is almost time taking. Shape Hints are very useful to animate shapes in particular directions. Complex Shape Tween is possible only with shape hints.

Implementation of action script in animations will bring file size considerably down. But we need to plan logically every bit of animation. But it is important to know basics of actionscript. If we do not know how to stop an animation at the end of the frame than the animation will loop again and again.

In my next post I will write about Shape Hints and its awesome animation effects.