Computer Animation Arts

An amazing one-stop-shop resource for human anatomy and character design here - and it's updated daily!  You should bookmark this today!

In light of your OGR feedback and Photoshop classes, many of you have been encouraged to think much  more creatively about the use of colour in terms of your 'concept art for animation'.  Animation loves expressive, expressionistic colour schemes, but putting effective combinations together can be a bit daunting.  However, if you want to accomplish worlds as rich and ravishing as the examples feature below, you should make use of this very useful Online Colour Scheme Designer - from which you can export colour swatches into Photoshop ready-to-use.  Just follow the export instructions on the original post and get stuck in.  It's high time you committed to colour.  I want to see some colour wheel fireworks!  Have fun!

Episode 60 from Feng Zhu - a demonstration of digital painting-  in real time.

Something new from concept artist Feng Zhu...

Go here for a quick tutorial on building custom organic brushes in Photoshop - courtesy of Flooby Nooby .

This fantastic analysis is done by Gregory Manchess  a meber of professional group-shared blog  Muddy Colors , and given his permission I'm sharing his post on our group blog too: This is the first painting I remember that froze me in place. It’s the piece that caused me to paint the way I do. One of Frank Duveneck’s many fabulous studies, a preparation for some of the more rendered pieces made during his career. He was a virtuoso with the brush, only thirty-one when he painted it. This face dwells in my head whenever I hold the brush, whenever I lay down the paint, guiding my efforts by reminding me to stay loose and keep details to the essential elements and values. I’m taken by the deep shadows, and how he’s worked back up from there to the lights, the value range remaining quite close. Duveneck mixed his colors quickly and confidently, most likely not creating piles of pigment ahead of time, but rather mixing on the fly. The drawing is incorporated by shape and va...

Hi guys, first year Jake here and I'm having an issue with Photoshop. When I try to overlay paint on top a grayscale image, the image being my previous digital piece that I made in Photoshop, some of it works some doesn't. It doesn't seem to work on some sections where it's pure white, namely the hair of the image. I've checked the other layers, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I even tried the image as a .jpeg. The issue only occurs when I'm not linking the layers and of course if I don't it becomes a bit of a mess. Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Video The Inkling is a "digital sketch pen" that allows you to draw or sketch on any standard piece of paper (a big advantage over Livescribe, which requires special notebooks) and automatically have a digital version created. The pen looks like a regular ballpoint pen, but is much more powerful than that. As you draw, sketches, mind-maps, or brainstorms all get captured, and are available just by connecting your pen to the computer. You can even create layers as you sketch, and edit drawings even easier when you get back to the computer. Files can be accessed in applications like Photoshop and Illustrator, or just viewed on the computer. There's also a receiver that comes with the Inkling, which is likely how Wacom was able to avoid requiring special paper. The receiver clips to whatever page or notebook you're using, and requires an uninterrupted line of sight with the pen while you're working. It could be a little kludgy, as the receiver is fairly la...

When you're devising innovative colour palettes and ideas for texturing, this website might prove useful. 'The Colour Of' website creates impressionistic colour swatches from image searches resulting from a key word, i.e. 'Halloween', 'Parrot' and 'Coral Reef'. Annoyingly, the resulting swatch includes the keyword itself as part of the image, but, that aside, it's a quick way of getting ideas about colour up and running. For another useful site to assist in the design of colour schemes for effective character design etc. go here.

When I'm drawing with Wacom tablet sometimes pen just doesn't stop making a brush even though I'm not touching the tablet anymore with the nib. It is very frustrating. Anybody have any ideas what could cause this problem?