New – demos and tutorials

September 29, 2021September 29, 2021 | Aldwyn

Just lately, I’ve ventured into making tutorials and demos. So far, I’ve made 5 of them. My personal favorite is “Create a Fairy” – a conventional tutorial devolves into a heated confrontation between creator (me) and creation (fairy). The first two videos demonstrate what you can do with digital painting in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Character Animator CC. The last 3 are strictly digital painting – all screen recordings of digital painting are sped up to hyper-warp speed.

I’m still working on some long-term animation projects, but these short projects were a welcome, temporary diversion, and I do hope some people might find them useful. I know I learned a lot from the process, for sure.

Create your own fairy, but be very careful. Keep some glitter on hand for self defense. I created a bunch of stop animation clips for use here with the “Cycle Layers” behavior.

This boy loves his goat, and so do I. Learn about how to organize your folders in Photoshop so they can be imported into Character Animator with minimal complications, learn about when to hinge and when to weld, and a different way to rig face and arms.

These 3 videos are strictly digital painting. Each one took around 4 hours to create in real time, but I greatly sped them up so that each is compressed to 4 or 5 minutes.

Hemingway is a wonderful writer, but don’t get sucked into the storm that surrounds him.

I admire Robert Downey, Jr. as an actor AND as a person who has faced great personal challenges and is still “A Work In Progress.”

Simply fan art of Dame Maggie Smith, the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey. I want to be her when I grow up.

Humus erectus: Mulch Man

October 9, 2014October 9, 2014 | Aldwyn

Missing link found in my back yard!

Looks mean and creepy, but he’s the champion and caretaker of all green living things, and very warm at heart. In future posts, I’ll bring him to life in an animation.

If you remember my earlier post, which could have been more aptly titled “Mulch Ado About Nothing”, I featured a monstrous but benign mulch pile. This is an example of what could happen if you leave a mulch pile lying there long enough. Evolution!

Kitty mind control illustration

October 4, 2014October 9, 2014 | Aldwyn

I looked down from my desk the other morning to see this:

Now I know that she is lying next to me because she likes to be with me, but when she is staring at me like that it means she expects something, and if I choose to disregard the thoughts she is beaming telepathically at me and reach down to pet her, she will grab my hand, hold it and bite it while scratching me with her back legs, then jump up and run down the stairs and demand to be let outside, which is what she was expecting of me, pre-attack.

I did test this out, always hoping that someday she will learn gratitude and not bite the hand that feeds her, reaching down to pet her and sure enough, she grabbed my hand, bit and scratched me then ran down the stairs. This time, however, I was not seriously wounded – just washed my hand and I was fine.

This morning I did an illustration using that grainy closeup of her staring eyes as a start. Took about three hours, with interruptions.