Hnil's Buncha Stuff

[Fuzz]

I love your voice. You sound like you have a ton of fun doing this.

[Hnilmik]

Coloring/shading/lighting is weird. Hopefully I'm getting better at it since the more I give it a go, I think I'm slowly getting an idea as to how it works. This fall I'm shooting for figure drawing as an elective since I'm almost done with all my required classes.

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[lenko]

thats a neat dragon. with shading contrast is everything, unless you're doing 'muted' colours

so basically lighten your lights, and darken your darks if that makes sense. you've gotten the hang of it best on the back leg imo

also dont be afraid to dip into other colours - like instead of shading red with a dark red, try a dark red-purple kinda deal

also are you painting at your picture's standard size? i find a better thing to do is paint bigger and then resize, you get to use bigger brushes for the small details instead of being stuck with a teeny tiny one pixel brush for detail

[Hnilmik]

I'll be sure to work on those next time! Many thanks for the tips!

I was drawing on garsh-darn Tegaki, but it does let you zoom. Admittedly though, I didn't do too much zooming for this as much as I did for some Tegaki comments (with those flippin' tiny boxes) since I mostly didn't know where I was going with my drawing and I wanted to avoid being too detailed, then majorly messing up because of the limited undos, no redos, and I've yet to figure out how to fix coloring mistakes. This site is stupid for art-ing, yes, but then I see people Tegaki these things:

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But yeah, especially after checking out a bunch of entries, next time: More zooming, shading is about contrast (rather than opacity things up the wazzoo), try out shading with different colors.

I have no idea how people make backgrounds or how to plan out my colors, much less on Tegaki. Like, with enough practice, and sketching, you can eventually draw whatever you have in your head, but I'm underdeveloped in the background and coloring department.

Any suggestions on how to map out environments + subjects without making the subject look like a paper cut-out slapped onto a separate-ish background? Like, perspective tips?

Do you know what colors you're going to use in advance? And how do you figure this out?

(Suddenly, whirlwind of art-noob questions.)

[rtil]

eventually, yes, people can just start drawing from nothing and make what they're picturing in their head. at first it's only things you're comfortable with, but after a while it can expand to anything you need to do and any style you need to adapt to

still though i think most great paintings start with a sketch, even if it's just a tiny thumbnail. i think what's more important than perspective is using color or shading to express volume. a background can be completely "flat" perspective wise, but when you add the color you can add miles and miles of depth with atmospherics. a portrait can get a lot of volume with a strong light source and good use of color.

if there is a character on a background/environment, you need to figure out where you want your viewer's eyes to go. the viewer's eye will typically rest on the point of most contrast in color. this area should be subtly framed using your environment. there are a million little ways you can do this, be it with color, line, shape, anything. it's something the casual viewer would never notice, you know, when someone says, "i like this, but i don't know why." it's because the artist did something that they themselves understand, but most people don't know about. but their brains do.

[shura]

do you ever draw in any other programs besides tegaki? i dont know why you bother with it

[Hnilmik]

Aside from pen, pencil, marker, crayon, and paper, I don't really draw using much else. I admit it's very weird how I stick with Tegaki even though I complain about it so much, but it's mostly since the RPing groups I like are on Tegaki and unfortunately, they aren't on sites that actually function a lot more like Photoshop (with multiple layers and a bunch of other things, but a chunk of those sites don't let you use the "advanced features" unless you've been using the site for a while).

For lack of better words, I'm pretty intimidated by Photoshop with its billions of buttons. The good news is I'm learning what does what the more I use it and I understand that like a camera with manual settings, it can give you a lot of control if you know what you're doing. But at the same time, I don't know what features will achieve the results I want yet and there are times where I don't know what to call what I'm trying to get and it takes ages for me to find a tutorial on YouTube or Deviantart that'll help me.

Then there's that "lack of artistic foresight" deal going on, but I think I'll eventually try to doodle in Photoshop later. I'm currently teaching myself how to color in the lineart I made a while back.

[rtil]

in photoshop all you really need to learn is how to use the brush tool, layers, and the brushes tab.

free software:
http://www.gimp.org/
http://www.pixlr.com/editor/
http://wistinga.online.fr/opencanvas/

photoshop alternatives:
http://www.artrage.com/
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/...t/1166553885783

i wouldn't use tegaki unless you're going for that oekaki/pixel look.

[Hnilmik]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dql1-_a6pUg

Now you can see what I look like while I'm voice acting. Kari Wahlgren said "Record yourself voice acting" at AX '09 (during the panel with Cristina Vee) and she meant with a camera since I already do it with a mic (for the past few years)... So I did. And boy, is my mic technique inconsistent + sitting instead of standing since I don't have a floor and my room echoes (I need that portabooth).

Directing me is D-Mac: http://www.youtube.com/user/DMacDouble

It took me years of voice acting to get comfortable with showing my face, so methinks I'm getting better with this confidence-ness in spite of the personal, habitual self-loathing.

I think auditions close sometime next week, but I needed to get this video up before then for personal reasons. Otherwise, I would've posted this after auditions ended.

[dilly]

holy crap, that's an awesome idea to have the mic in the box. very inventive

but i like it how you put your energy in everything. Just hearing your voice, you can tell you're making the movements

[Hnilmik]

::hugsh hugsh~::

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64KH4wU7Hng

If only I could have black market peoples write my essays.

Download/Better Sound Quality

Did 2 tries to get the mushy out of the system and this 1 recording is for keepsies (no cutting or editing except for noise reduction, if anything).

I'm a screenwriting major and I talk to myself a lot, so monologues tend to occur when my mood decides to express itself.

D-Mac Double, my voice acting/directing/casting friend, was curious as to how I perform when I'm exhausted/tired and NOT trying to hide it by forcing my typical high energy performances (I was EXTREMELY tired today because it was very hot and couldn't bring myself to voice anything I needed to voice).

My biggest challenge has ALWAYS been "acting serious without being monotone or forced"; basically, very genuine and natural/realistic/convincing acting. Hopefully, this is evidence of improving in that area.

[Hnilmik]

HAHAHAHAHAHA EMO "ART"

Now for my doodles.



I'm currently taking a Photoshop and Flash class and our final project is a 30-60 second animation. Braaaaaainstorming.

[Hnilmik]

The things I do instead of working on my HW for class...

[Hnilmik]

"Preproduction" sketches for a possible first flash animation ever I'll be doing for my class final. I just hope I'm not overambitious, especially since I have a feeling that the most I can do in 2 weeks is JUST a lot of tweening. This fall I aim to take a figure drawing class so I can actually draw proper-like for animation...



...Guess who's the easiest character to draw.

[CVG]

[quote name='Hnilmik' date='Jun 7 2010, 01:12 AM' post='191054']
::hugsh hugsh~::

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64KH4wU7Hng


wow, this was really neat to watch. Its like getting a sneek peak behind how you get those lines down and how just a tiny difference in the words going up or down can be read as different emotions. Thanks for sharing this, it was very interesting and cool to see!  I have even MORE respect for the work that goes into VAS now. Also, that mic in a foam box is a great idea!

[BluPhoenix]

Also, that mic in a foam box is a great idea!

[Hnilmik]

::hugsh hugsh folks who like my foam box::

I'll copy-pasta what that foam box does:

My makeshift porta-booth reduces room echo~ My room is pretty spacious, so it echoes unnecessarily whenever I speak loudly and especially when I'm screaming/yelling [in the live recording with the screaming, the audio was also recorded by the camera, so you can hear the room echo yourself]. The acoustics of my room sucks because it also has a lot of reflective surfaces, especially around my desk, so while a bathroom would be a great sized room to voice act in, there're too many sound-bouncing surfaces that'll make recordings sound weird.

Some people are lucky that their rooms are small and/or soft and others resort to other means to "muffle" their sound issues, like recording under a blanket (which presents other kinds of acting challenges). Lots of people, including Ego, record their lines in their closet (but my closet has no room for me or my stuff to fit in it).

I'll upload a sound comparison sometime after Puzzmosis gets released since my auditions and the final recordings were done in a variety of different settings~
Ex:
1st audition - No booth; Lots of echo; Meh acting
2nd audition (redos) - Booth; Less echo; Workable acting
Recording w/ Ego's setup - Booth (closet); Clean recordings; Much better acting after direction

In summary, for lots of online stuff, VA's can get pretty hardcore about their recording setup if they want to sound good since we don't have sound engineers to do it for us. Tomamoto brought up the foam-box-thing years ago and quite a few VA's have them (I think GeneralIvan has one too), Ego, Rina-chan, Y. Chang, and Sapphire are really good at mixing (don't hate on me for mentioning some people; I know when people are good at something and I ain't namedropping for accolades), and Ego and Sapphire have a preamp for their microphones (it's still taking me a while to understand what it does beyond the phantom power-ing). In comparison, my recordings are in the above average, B range of sound quality.

And you have no idea how happy it makes me that you quoted the video of my "intense" performance~ I've been working on not-sounding-monotone for a while now, so it's good to see that I'm not just delusional!

[Lats, Squats, & Oates]

greatno w i am questioning the morality of my erections

[Hnilmik]

[Hnilmik]

Why is it that I draw animals many times better than when I draw humans? I tried thinking in shapes for people and it's a hit or miss and when I tried to think of relatively similar anatomies and bone structures (to an extent), I'm not sure how that works either. It puzzles me to no end.

Tempted to draw a more complete and clean Dedede.



Figuring out motion is hard!



Also, after my first venture into flash in class a day or two back, I now further appreciate all that crap you guys figured out to make your animations awesome. That said, my initial concept may be way too ambitious for someone of my current skill level, but maybe with more time and experience under my belt, I'll be able to pull off some simple animations~