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Colour animation test for small dog walk cycle.

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Some sketches from Klaus webinar.

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Colour animation test for a character of a new short film about Cypriot cats.

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Movie Moment, student short film “Crime and Punishment”

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Poses for character Raskolnikov, student short film “Crime and Punishment”

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Hi! Here is my 2D Animation Showreel for 2019. In each project, I did all the character design work, paintings and animation except the project with a Boy. In this project, I did only 2D Character Animation of the Boy, and my friends Liza Chernyak (behance.net/cherliza) did character design, and paintings and Daria Pelsher (behance.net/pelsher) did 2D Animation and Compositing.

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Adjustment layers in Photoshop

I have been working in Photoshop for many years. However, it was only this week when I found out one tremendous tool to work with paintings, illustration and any images. It's adjustment layers.

To use the adjustment layers, we need to press the half black half white circle icon at the bottom of the layer's window. Choose which adjustment you want to add and make changes. Once the layer was created, it influences everything below it. Here are some advantages that I found in the approach:

We can change the values of the layer when we want or just change the opacity of the adjustment layer.

These layers include a mask, and it is the most useful thing: everything we paint white will have 100% opacity and everything we paint black - 0% opacity.  

I found this method extremely powerful for image-making: to create a nice contrast between the light and the shadow, to simplify values when I need to, to preserve image from being grey.

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Value in art

Value is a crucial topic for artists. This week I found out some new inspired tips in using value:

🎃 I was usually trying to divide values among the objects, before thinking about light. It looked something like that: the grass is going to be grey, the tree - black and the bird - white. It works to split up different objects, but it's hard to add light later. This week I have been doing speed paintings, starting with a Simple Value Structure. I chose 3 tones: the darkest, the lightest and the middle tone. It was important to include light right when I started. After finishing this simple structure, I continued to paint it over to add details and gradients. 

🎃 Not only values in themselves are essential in tone composition. Another crucial aspect is the Edges. Hard edges versus soft edges.

🎃 One more insight that I didn't realize before is Exposure. If exposure everywhere, it looks like there is no focus at all. Exposure on the light - we can see the light better - simplify the shadow. And contrariwise, if exposure is on the shadows, we can see the shadows better and we will simplify the light. 

Perhaps this information will be useful for you too:)