Category: Experiments

One thing that I love to do in my free time is recreating a scene that is appealing to me personally. My goal is to make this a daily exercise in the future. Because I believe that this activity helps me improve in my understanding of colour and composition. I noticed that the more I do this, the easier it gets for me in distinguishing colours and its relationship with another colours, lights, and shadow. For example, if I were to create a blue mood/scenery, I would use green as yellow because of their interaction. Before, I would have to do more manipulation because in my mind, the colour is still yellow. Also, this exercise helped me to push myself to pay attention to details, which I believe is important in working on animation and even beyond that. Other than the technical, I also got to familiarise myself with creating composition, my goal is also to learn how different director approach compositions and visual representation of their scene.

In my animation presentation, I got to talk about Pinot, one of Indonesian Animators that inspires me. Pinot is known to be experimental about his animation media, some of those media are old computers. What I haven’t gotten the chance to share was my experiment in code drawing with this old computer, which is Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Although in this experiment I didn’t use the real computer, but an emulator called Spectaculator. I started by going through Pinot’s social media posts that gave any clue about how he draws with the computer. I tried to watch some tutorials, but because I never code, I don’t understand the language and terms that they used. So, I just started writing based on what I saw on the posts and experimented from there.

It started with me figuring out what the numbers represent and what was the output. Then once I know that some numbers represent coordinates and some represent colours, I started making notes and creating my illustration plan.

Then, I started writing based on these plans and the coordinates that I have calculated.

I could say that almost half of the time of doing this was just me wondering what was it that I wrote. But this experiment was a great experience for me and it got me to appreciate the works of Pinot more and the time that he must give to learn and understand these media.

To understand the “beans” principle from a three-dimensional standpoint, I tried to sculpt three different poses of some rough human figures that started from this “beans” shape. After I made the beans as the sculpting base, I gave them a centreline that acted as the centre of the figure. Then, I built the rough figures from that base.

Overall, sculpting with these beans as the base gave me more clarity in the process, compared to just sculpting the pose right away. Also, I got to be more familiar with using this “beans” concept for the life drawing by approaching it three-dimensionally.

Once upon a time, I decided to learn Nomad Sculpt, a 3D sculpting software/application for iPad.

There are three main reasons why I decided to learn it:

1. It seems fun.
2. I know that it will be useful.
3. I already bought the app, so I owed myself this.

So, I started with a simple head sculpt of some imaginary girl character to familiarise myself with the interface and the procedure.

After I finished (kind of) this experiment, I challenged myself to create a more familiar character, and I decided to sculpt Gollum/Smeagol from LOTR. I have always wanted to try sculpting Gollum because of how iconic the character is in my eyes.

The conclusion is: It looked sort of like Gollum, BUT, technically speaking, I am very much aware that my procedure was messy, Thus means more learning time and a proper sculpting tutorial. But it was fun!