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Can’t see the video, visit Motion Art Moment: January 2012 Gorry Bug from Brian Kolm on Vimeo.

I would like to share with you something new I am doing for 2012, a Motion Art Moment. These will be short monthly videos that take a recent piece of my artwork/illustration/comics and animate them using digital tools. The first video above is from my drawing Gorry Bug in which I first showed a sample of the animation.

The term ‘Motion Art’ is a term I am basing on ‘Motion Comics’ (animated comic art such as DC’s Watchmen videos) which is Art of any sort re-purposed for animation. I might also use the term ‘Motion Illustration’ too.

I have been interested for quite a while in how you can use technology to re-purpose existing art from comic books, comic strips, illustrations and other forms into animation. In fact I have posts right here on the AtomicBearPress.com blog labeled Motion Comic Magic in which I have been sharing samples of internet videos using similar techniques and the tools artist use to create it. I hope these small videos allow me to explore new animation techniques and to share my artwork in a new way.

Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment here on the blog or on my twitter feed.

A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

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This is a drawing I did in one of my cartooning classes that I teach where I was showing the kids how I inked a drawing over blue pencil lines. For the inking I used both a brush pen and some sharpies of different widths. I also liked the art enough to give is some photoshop coloring as well.

I know it’s kinda of weird to see a redheaded white rabbit, but I thought it was funny. He has a lot of personality and I like that.

©2011 Brian Kolm

See more at www.atomicbearpress.com

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My first drawing (posted) of the new year. I drew this guy at my Parent/Child at the Cartoon Art Museum and to me it looks like it was designed by Edward Gorey.

Below is a test for something new. My hope is that at lest once a month I will take one of my drawings and use digital tools to animate it. The version below needs a bit of work still, but you get the idea of where I am going with it. If you like it, comment please and let me know.

EDIT: I have replaced the test footage with the final video, to find out more visit HERE.

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A very Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday to everyone no matter how/what/where you celebrate.

Every year I have illustrated an original Christmas card for my family to send to family and friends. The earliest Christmas cards we would make were silk screened and my father took my art and cut it by hand into the screen. Latter we would xerox the cards in black and white and hand color a few small elements to enhance them. And now I can scan, edit, color and prep the files on the computer and have them printed in vivid color, but no matter what form the cards take they are a continuing tradition I am proud to be part of. This year I decided to show you the illustrations I have created since 2000 in the video above.

I hope you enjoy the video and have a wonderful season.

note: Music “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons “Attribution 3.0″

Continue reading »]]> I just started a new workshop at the youth center I work at featuring one of my favorite applications, Adobe After Effects (as well as Photoshop and Illustrator too). I love After Effects since there is so much versatility in what you can do. The program is also great since it can accommodate huge differences in artistic styles and accepts lots of  different digital media (even flash movies) which is perfect for a wide range of young artists.

The goal is for the students to plan short scenes or sequences and work towards having them in some final form. But I feel it’s important to take on the same challenges I give the students myself, so I gave myself the goal of doing a short project in the last few weeks. It’s important to do since it can help me to understand what they are attempting better and I can trouble shoot better ways to teach different techniques.

So the first week we learned the very basics of the software and drew short sequences as storyboards. We then scanned and placed the art in After Effects as an animatic (can also be called a story reel). A lot of our techniques are very low tech in part due to the equipment is not always available to the students. For my project I decided to do a sort of an animated holiday card.

Here is the first test with some minimal animation in it. This test is the first pass to see if it will actually work as a story in real time. I could have added some sound on top of it too, but decided that could wait for now due to a tight schedule.

After letting this Animatic sit in my mind for a while, I decided to add some rough animation in the ‘Sketchbook’ style into my animatic that I experimented earlier this year. The style is really fun to do and can be very expressive and fast to do. I scanned in the drawings and timed it out, mixing it into the original Animatic to get a stronger look of what it might look like. Here is what I came up with.

Here are some of the animation drawings I used for the test in the animatic.

While the drawings are less then perfect, it’s amazing how much life you can easily throw into your project. But now I had to decided what techniques to use for the final animation. I could create sequences of drawings like classic ‘cel’ animation or I could use less art and just manipulate the drawings in more of a limited cut out style or even do a mix of both.

I decided that I would explore how I could use a fairly new feature of After Effects, the Puppet Tool. The tool allows you to take an image and add ‘pins’ to it and then bend the figures where those are placed.

Here you can see above the yellow ‘pins’ on the neck of the bear. The empty square are null objects that control each pin and allow them to be parented to each other.

Here is my first attempt with the bear character in the story, mind you I was only testing technique and not going for giving an actual animated performance. To help set-up the animation I used a great After Effects script called GG_PuppetTools, which saved me a lot of time.

The character is made up of 3 layers of art, the neck, head and arm/hand. There is also two different faces to give the bear a change in expression.

Below is my second attempt at the technique with 4 layers of art, but no changes in the bears expressions. Here I attempted to give the bear a ‘bone’ structure and set up ways for the different parts to move together. Here the body, neck and arm are all using the Puppet Tool and the head is static for now.

The head is a bit off, but I decided to leave it as-is for now.

I have a feeling that I might use the ‘sketchbook’ technique that I mentioned above since it’s actually a bit more fun for me to do and very expressive, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Stay tuned to see the final results in the next two weeks!

Continue reading »]]> As mentioned in my trip report from the Dickens Fair this past weekend I attended the Pre-Raphaelite Artist Salon at the Adventures Club at the event. Here we were transported to a period drawing session with models recreating a religious scene while live harp music was played and poetry recited. It was a pretty awesome experience that I would recommend all artist visit when at the fair. The salon was at 3:30pm and ran about 45 min.

Warm up sketches while the event was getting set-up…

My drawing from the posed models… (note: the club seal was actually on the back of the drawing paper, but I photoshoped it on front so you could see it)

And some photos from the session…

Continue reading »]]> The other night we had the second InkDrinkDraw event in San Francisco. The events are the brain child of George Webber (No Cash Comics) and myself and are monthly artist events that encourage creativity and comradery.

To find out more, visit the InkDrinkDraw page!

For this month’s meeting our theme was drawing faces. As artist it can be easy to end up drawing similar characters over and over again. These exercises were designed for us to work outside our comfort zone and try new things.

We started with a warm-up exercises where we drew a page of shapes and then passed them around and had others make them into faces/heads.

Here is the sheet that I got back after everyone had drawn on it:

Then we did a handout that George found through Deviant-Art called 25 expressions which is a popular meem. DOWNLOAD IT HERE There are other versions of the sheet on-line, but with facial expressions in more Manga (Japaneses Comics) vibe.

Here is an old west prospector characters that I drew based on the head-shape sketch by Jeff Plotkin.

Next we changed gears and did an exercises of evolving/devolving a character based on a photo. This was something I saw in How to draw comic book heroes and villains by Christopher Hart , but the samples were actually drawn by the late great comic artist Gray Morrow. See more of Gray’s work HERE.

My first attempt was using a photo of classic actor ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle which I sketched on my paper and then worked to modify it till there was still a hint of the character, but maybe not obvious unless someone was looking for similarity. I like the result, even though the drawings are kind of rough and lopsided.

Here are a few more I did…

Last I did a few more drawings based on the Shape Heads that were drawn on my sheet at the start.

These ones below were drawn riding BART home from the city.

Want to give the exercises a try? Here is what we did.

1) Shape-Heads: Each artist participating drew some basic shapes on a sheet of paper. Hearts, stars, rectangles, squares, circles, ovals, wedges, etc. Pass around the sheets of paper and have different artists make the shapes into faces. For ours artist did more then one per sheet sometimes and the artist who drew the shapes also added a few as needed.

2) 25 Facial Expressions: Next we picked a Shape-Head from (1) or had someone else pick one for us. We then filled in a pre-printed handout that was labeled with all the expressions to draw. It’s OK to draw hands and bodies in the shot too. DOWNLOAD HANDOUT HERE.

3) Face Evolution/Devolution: Take a sheet of paper and some photo reference and draw on the Left side one of the faces, trying to capture a decent likeness of the person. Moving to the Right take the head you just drew as reference and modify it into a new character by changing some details. Then draw one or more heads just using the second drawing you did and trying to make it into something new.

4) Take your Shape-Heads and try to draw them again with a body, different expression, etc.

Continue reading »]]> As you know from my previous posts, I participated in the Cartoon Art Museum’s Sketch-A-Thon at the SDCC2011.

Most of the time we created original art for a donation to the Museum for an individual, but sometimes we did drawings that were just examples while waiting for a customer. A few of mine that did not sell I was able to borrow from the Cartoon Art Museum to Scan and return.

YOU can buy a drawing if it’s still available for a donation of $10+ (plus shipping and handling if needed) and all proceeds go to the Cartoon Art Museum.

All characters are © there respective owners and these are only done as fan tributes and not for reproduction.

I did a few drawings that were “Kick Butt” version of Disney Princesses. This one is Princess Tiana from the “Princess and the Frog” who I saw as a warrior with voodoo powers. (below) To see my version of Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” visit my previous post.

Another Disney character I drew is the mysterious Hat Box Ghost which was a character in the famous Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland. The character did not last long in the ride and was removed shortly after it opened making it a mystery that the fans love. Me too.

The last piece of art is my version of DC Comics Superman as a steam punk hero.

Continue reading »]]> And the rest of the art I created at Wondercon 2011 (April 1-3), this time all original characters by me.

Octopus – click above for a bigger image

Some creature thingy – click above for a bigger image

Steam punk women – click above for a bigger image

Archer – click above for a bigger image

Fantasy women – click above for a bigger image

Batman Tiki – click above for a bigger image

Cat – click above for a bigger image

Dead pirate – click above for a bigger image

Dragon – click above for a bigger image

Continue reading »]]> Here are some more art I created at Wondercon 2011 (April 1-3).

Pokemon creature – click above for a bigger image

Etrigan the Demon from DC Comic – click above for a bigger image

Vision and Scarlet Witch from Marvel Comics – click above for a bigger image

the Might Thor from Marvel Comics – click above for a bigger image

Continue reading »]]> I will be teaching again this Summer at Chabot College in Hayward CA for the Kids on Campus summer program.

Cartooning: Monsters & Critters
Whether it’s a graceful unicorn, a slithering dragon or a more modern beast, we have been telling stories of fanciful creatures of all sorts since the beginning of time. This class will feature lessons on drawing classic beasties, the structure and construction of four- legged animals, and designing original creatures as well as a technique for presenting a final drawing.

Kids on Campus – Summer Camp 2011
Weeks of June 20-24 and June 27-July 1

Sign-up at: www.chabotcollege.edu/comed/kidsoncampus/kidsoncampus2010/

Continue reading »]]> I will be teaching again this Summer at Chabot College in Hayward CA for the Kids on Campus summer program.

Cartooning: Star Wars Art (and beyond)
This class helps you to create your own Space characters by learning to first draw characters from the Star Wars universe. The class will teach skills like constructing figures with 3D shapes, facial expressions, costumes, action poses, and how to take the knowledge and use it to create characters that are all your own.”

Kids on Campus – Summer Camp 2011
Weeks of June 20-24 and June 27-July 1

Sign-up at: www.chabotcollege.edu/comed/kidsoncampus/kidsoncampus2010/