walking woodcut

one of my final projects for my printmaking class is to make a two different prints with the same theme, each with an edition of four (eight total). i decided to make my theme 'animation' since that is my focus in school and i thought it would be interesting to try and combine printmaking with my major.

it all started with a piece of wood. i then created a grid on the block and drew a human walk cycle. all the space on the print that is white was carved away and i pulled four prints using the green color. after cleaning the block, i carved away the parts of the block where you see green showing up on the print and pulled four prints using the very dark purple (which just shows up as black on the computer screen).

i let the print dry for a while then captured it digitally, created cropped layers in photoshop, and then compiled everything in after effects. here is the final result:

run piggy run

i taught myself how use maya, specifically, how to rig characters in maya today. i modeled my pig character that i'm working on for a class assignment in modo and then brought it over to maya for rigging. the process of rigging and animating isn't so terribly hard... but maya really needs to work on their interface design. it's miserable being a new user. i understand how powerful the software is and how many functions are available... but holy crap. just take a look at the screen shot i took of maya. you're not even given a button label when you hover over anything. it's a complete guess. i'm sure with time i'll become familiar with everything and navigating the endless drop-down menus and tab bars will become second nature. but until then, i will continue to be hit and miss.

but i figured things out enough where i could start animating a running pig. considering that i am a maya/character-rigging virgin, i did pretty well. my pig still needs to get smoothed out, shaded, and put in an environment... but i shall leave that for another day.