ANU

Mentorship Notes 1

(with David Heatley)

What do you already know?
Anu knows he wants to do an art and drawing project, based on his love of animated videos - often based on sprites in Mario and Kirby video games, some specifically from GameBoy Advanced. The characters he’s interested in are mostly 2D. He’d like to explore some “normal drawings,” not just creating his own sprites.

And has a Wacom drawing tablet hooked up to an Alienware laptop where he done some sporadic drawing in an app called Crita. I asked if he can share one drawing with me that he’s proud of since he got the tablet in Dec 2018.

Scale / size of the project
He would like to create his own character at the end of this 6 weeks and share a little about the world this character lives in and what their backstory is. The final project may be a nicely organized slide presentation that people can easily understand, just the right amount of detail, not too much. I’ve encouraged Anu to create one animated walk cycle for his character as part of the presentation.

Some brainstorming
The main character will likely be male. He may have the colors blue, green, and white incorporated into his design. His mission is to defeat an enemy, keep everyone safe from violence and chaos in his world. He is under threat as he traverses the world he is in. The enemies he faces are magical beings (not realistic with traditional weapons, etc) who try to use spells and other magical attacks against him.
This character wasn’t born to parents in any traditional sense. He was created at a specific moment when everything in nature aligned in a certain way to produce him.
The world is composed of a variety of areas, some are very densely populated cities, some are more natural / magical, untouched by civilization. These background worlds are very colorful and vary depending on the type of area they are. There may be some outer space elements involved, but not totally sure right now.

Assignment
Anu will look through Mario game worlds and find the characters that excite him the most. He will do some sketches of these characters in his journal. He will start thinking of some possible character designs for his own character doing very preliminary sketches.

Mentorship Notes 2

(with David Heatley)

Culture:

Anu’s personal connection to his family’s culture is mostly through the food his mother cooks based on the Nigerian cooking she learned growing up there. She cooks special sauces with rice and meat. Vegetables are broccoli and carrots. He visited in 2005 when he was very young. Mostly just remembers it was very hot. :)
The community he is involved in most is playing video games online with his friends. They chat through Discord while playing the same game together. He also watches animated videos on YouTube. He doesn’t do much social media — Instagram, etc.
His personal goal in to have a comfortable life and get really good at making drawings and animations. He can imagine some day having his own YouTube channel featuring lots of his own animated videos.

Today’s session:

He wants to know more of the fundamentals of drawing and needs to know the process of where to start to make these videos. 2 years ago he used Flash (now Adobe Animate) using sprites from websites. He already has a character design. He wants to create an animated GIF of his character morphing into different shapes. We did a quick tutorial on Krita (the drawing program he already uses). I also showed him a color palette website - colorhunt.co and ezgif.com.

NEXT STEPS:

He will work on drawing his characters with a thicker line to simplify and make his character bolder looking. He’ll play with layers for adding colors underneath. And also onion skinning for various states. I encouraged him to share his work in progress with me more frequently.

Mentorship Notes 3

(with David)

Anu has done a great job making his character bolder and more colorful with some shading added to the body and eyes. He chose a palette based on colorhunt.co and supplemented it using shades from the color wheel tool in Krita.

Concrete next steps over the next 3 weeks:

1) Practicing his line work, making sure it connects better.
2) Sketch out 3 different states for his character to morph into which make up the key frames of his animation.
3) Design a background for his character to move through —simple geometric shapes - fill the whole screen with color
4) Come up with 3 in between states to bridge between the 3 different states.

Anu already sees a transition in mind for his character. When it morphs, it shrinks down and becomes a tiny spark, then transforms into its next state.

He has the second state in mind - an animal form which he already has sketched.

He will create a few Google Slides at the end of the session. He’ll thin of a fun way to tell the story of his process. He might pull in unused sketches and illustrations across the slides to help tell the story.

Mentorship Notes 3

Progress this week: Anu has named his character TET. He’s been doing some circle drawings this week and working on some more colors / shading.

He has created a second state for Tet: The Hamster. The third state will be a small bird. The hamster and bird are about the same size as each other, but much smaller than Tet's main form.

He is imagining a background for his character - a forest in the Fall.

What does success look like?

Having the character and multiple drawings - fairly consistent with each other - all animated Slide show would include - writing text in - pics of things from his sketch book

Next steps:

- Do a reflection video today (right after the call!)
- Take some pictures of his sketchbook and share with David this week.
- Draw the bird state of Tet
- Draw a 1920x1080 pixel background - solid colors, no white.
- Sketch out some versions of how the “spark” transition animation looks

What did you think of Mr. Edwards?

I liked what he shared
- different artifacts, spoke so passionately when we asked questions
- very respectful in general of the artifacts and the people he’s met while collecting