Here are some of the last sketches I did with the creative habit. More inspiration from Warframe and The Last Of Us "Clickers".

I picked two separate drawings and painted them in SAI. I really like the design of these monster beings and I'm happy that my creative habit lead me to make them.

I figured through this creative habit, I developed a specific theme, rather than drawing Lovecraft's creatures. I made abominations of my own-- humanoid monsters with distorted heads. A combination of influence of Warframes and Pacific Rim's kaijus, they are a breed of monster all their own. 

For the last post I'd like to clean up some of the sketches I've done and color them digitally.

This week I photographed my work. It's not my favorite thing to do, but I know I ought to practice and get better at it, since I won't always have a good scanner near me.

I played around with different monster types- humanoid, beastly... I tried doing different styles and having different influences from each one.

The top left figure is my favorite one on this page. Inspired by Junji Ito's "Uzumaki", a horror manga about a town obsessed with spirals. I love the look of my yellow and black mircrons, but it is not an easy way to doodle.

For these couple of pages, I wanted to experiment with the character Cthylla, the daughter of Cthuhlu. Sometimes she is depicted as a giant eight-eyed octopus with wings, or as a humanoid tentacle creature. She was said to be a possible bride for Hastur, so I imagined she was probably a beauty.

 

These pages were based off of warframes, from the video game Warframe with a combination of Pacific Rim's kaiju monsters. I love the deformed and inhuman look to their masks/faces.

I wanted to draw some cat or predator monsters, but I wasn't looking at any reference so it was difficult to get the animals to look right. I also wanted to try mixing the Lovecraftian tentacle beasts with kitties, and they turned out kind of goofy-- but I like them!

I think for my final post I will clean up some of my favorite drawings and ink them digitally. I'd like to make the best monsters shine.

I'm a little unsure of what I ought to be posting this week, but I wanted to show off what I have done so far. I spent about an hour on every page and read some reference before hand. I realized what I want to do with this creative habit is to get better at concept design, specifically for monsters in this case. I don't draw a lot of varied things, so I think this process will benefit me in the long run. 

This first page was for the Mi-Go from Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness".

These drawings are a mix of different Cthulu Mythos creatures, featuring small Nyarlathotep worshipers playing flutes.

This last page has two of Nyarlathotep's forms. I think I will draw more of him next because he is a shape-shifting creature with many forms. 

I also wanted to show off some concept sketches I did earlier. These doodles are based off of Pokemon and Kaiju from Pacific Rim.

So I was doing some research and leisurely looking up H.P. Lovecraft's creatures and I stumbled upon this blog, http://yog-blogsoth.blogspot.com/. Cleverly named, Mike Bukowski's blog features his illustrations based of H.P. Lovecraft's writings. I was so inspired by this, I decided what I'll do my creative habit project on. I'll read a different story for each week and draw/design creatures from the story. Now I'm super excited!!!

New Project: Creative Habit

I know I have a strong creative habit to draw and doodle every single day, but I usually don' follow a theme. I get bored very easily drawing the same subject over and over again, so I'm kind of worried about this project. I need to pick something that is really different and interests me...

I might as well post some of my sketchbook pages here to prove how much I draw... which is a lot.

These are only a few pages that I liked from my most recent sketchbook. I usually draw people, animals and monsters but they only follow a theme on a single page. I do a lot of emotional drawings, but I don't really want that to be my theme.

I'm thinking I'd like to do fairy tales or H.P. Lovecraft's stories and draw creatures from those. I really love making up designs for monsters from writing since the look isn't extremely defined by a visual. Right now that is my best idea but I'm sure to talk to my peers and discover other things as well.

Very relevant and meaningful work for the project...

I'm so excited for our final film to be shown. We've all worked so hard and done such great work, I know it will be a blast! I've had so much fun on this GIF making project and when I can I will post the video.

The final week is upon us, and I must say, we've had a great run. I didn't want to give too much away on the project, but I might as well discuss it briefly now.
Our project title is the "Dread Action Network" and we all have made GIFs of our personal fears. Mine, for example, is being stared at, so I've got a group of googley-eyed monsters. We have a specific blog for our group which is on wordpress. We're going to wrap up these GIFs together in a video, and I'm super excited about it!
I can't stop making GIFs now, it's addicting!

Here's my final GIF! Had to make it tiny to play on the blog, but the video one will still be 1920x1080.

Final GIFs!

Despite drawing those ghosts, I have actually been doing work! I like what I have here with both of these. I liked the original movement of Cameron and Laura, so I kept them normal. It wouldn't be too hard to make more of those creatures, but I really like them mixed in with the people. Not sure how I want the whole color to look. I like the middle one, but I'd really appreciate some feedback!

Unrelated to the current project-- but I can't stop making these wiggly ghosts!!!

Here are some test GIFs taken from video shot Tuesday.

I really like the first one, but I might keep fooling around with the video footage.

A possible color palette for our GIFS. It needs to be monochromatic with red. Various values of red would be best so shapes blocked out in red don't look flat. This definitely could use some tweaking, but it's a start.

I made some GIFs out of video footage I had and messed around a bit. The first one has a lot of frames, as many as it was in the original video clip. The second loops from beginning to end and has some color adjustments on individual frames. The only way I know how to loop it from beginning to end is to copy all the frames and arrange them in reverse order. It's very time consuming and I have yet to figure out an easier way. The last one is really funky and it flashes a lot, so don't stare at it too long!!!

GIF Tutorial

I'm going to show you step by step how to make a GIF from video.
I first saved the Mario video Heather sent out in an email, but you can use any video file. 

Open Photoshop and go to File >Import >Video Frames to Layers...

Once you select the video you'd like to use, this box will open up. Select the part of the video you'd like to use in your GIF. It is best to choose a small section as it will be a smaller size file. Also, it's a good idea to click the box for "Limit to every 2 frames". This will also make the file smaller and easier to edit.

You want to have the Timeline tab open (which you can open from Window > Timeline) to look at all your frames. From here you can readjust the duration on each frame.

You can Shift select multiple frames and click the small down arrow to change it to a set time or choose Other... and put in your own time. 1.0 is long while 0.05 is very short. I'm going to keep them at their preset delay, which is 0.04.

I'm going to make the size of the image smaller because it's rather bulky the way it is now. Go to Image >Image Size. I'm going to change the width to 600 pixels, keeping the same proportions. Now that it's smaller and easier to deal with, I'm going to save it as is.

First of all, save this as a regular Photoshop PSD file. You might want to edit some things later, and it's always good to have a back up. Next, you want to hit File >Save for Web. This window will pop up in Photoshop. It gives you a bunch of information about this file that might seem overwhelming to you right now. The most important thing here is the Animation Looping Options. Make sure it is set for "Forever". Then you can hit Save... and name it whatever you like.

This is the GIF as is. I didn't mess with the layers or add any new content.

Now it's time for part two: adding drawings on top of the GIF!

I've got my PSD file open with layers and timeline still on. I've made a new layer (which I titled "new") and drew a blue line. You can draw or add whatever you like to this GIF. I want to draw this blue line going over several of the frames so it looks like it's moving along with the GIF, so I'm going to make a new layer over every frame I want to add it to. I always make a new layer, just in case I mess up and can't fix the layer back to its original state.

As you can see, in the timeline, the new layer has shown up as it's own frame. We don't want that, but we don't need to worry about that right now. If you want to see your drawing from the previous layer, simply adjust the opacity of the image in between or click the eye to turn off visibility.

Now I've gone and drawn a bunch of blue lines and merged them to the layer I wanted them to be on. NOTE! Make sure visibility is on when you merge down, or else you might merge to the wrong layer! Now the timeline and the animation of the GIF gets a little wonky when you edit the layers like this. To fix this and to be safe, I select all the frames in the timeline with Shift + select and hit the trashcan icon. DO NOT delete your layers, only the frames in the timeline! You're going to be left with one single frame. After that, you want to go to the small drop down box in the upper right corner of the timeline tab and select "Make Frames From Layers".

Now that all those are new frames, they have been set to 0 seconds as their delay. We want to change that back to 0.04 seconds like our first GIF. Shift + select all the frames in the timeline and click the small down arrow next to the delay time. Since 0.04 seconds isn't in the preset list, you will want to click "Other..." and type in 0.04. You can preview the animation in the timeline or change the duration of the frames as you like.

It's time to get the GIF onto the web, so just like before, you want to go to File >Save for Web and hit Save. Make sure the animation loop is on Forever!

It's not even that easy to notice, but I did draw a few frames of a blue squiggly line in here. You probably want to save this file as it's own PSD as well if you want to go back and edit it again. It's never too safe to save more than one version!!!