I went to CTNx on Saturday with my grandmother, a veteran animator. Before we left, I had one last tour of the exhibit hall and left my tablet with her to draw on. Here are her sketches. I hope you don’t mind me posting them here, Omama. I really enjoy them.

I don’t often get into color, and given how slowly my work progresses in these monthly challenges, I probably should leave it out entirely.

However, along with my strategy for designing the characters before I figure out a story for the month’s sound clip, today I felt like I should try to peg the atmosphere a bit. Here’s a color sketch that’s supposed to be…well maybe I’ll save the description and see how many of you can figure it out.

Here’s a non-hint: he’s neither vampire nor covered in blood. It just kinda turned out that way.

Trying to put faces/bods to voices for this month’s 11 Second Club competition. I’m starting with the characters, and then I’ll figure out the story. I still don’t have a workflow ironed out for this kind of work. I should probably look up Aardman’s “overheard” series, or whatever those were called, like the police station and the magazine editor’s office.

These were drawn in MyPaint a free paint application for Linux, on a Lenovo X230 tablet running Ubuntu. The whole experience was pretty fun. I picked up the machine from UPS on my way to work this morning, and went to the figure drawing session on my way home. I hadn’t installed any paint applications yet, so I downloaded MyPaint over wi-fi at the studio and started drawing. I spent about half of the shorter poses figuring out a system to change brushes & save my work without leaving tablet mode.

In the end, I’m pretty happy with it as a drawing tool, and this is without much customization or any paid software.