Warming-up:  Medientreff der FDP-Bundestagsfraktion /Postfuhramt, Berlin

We were hired to “storyboard” the event. Here are my favourite drawings:

And here some pencil test drawings of my colleagues…

picklet.net

I met him at the Berlin Illustrators regulars’ table, where he introduced his “Picklet Builder” web application that is made to enable independent authors to create and publish digital picture books to readers on iPhone and iPad.

Although Picklets offer only very limited animation options (simple layer motions, no sound) and primary are based on the user browsing through stacks of panels, I wanted to give it a try and see if – by dealing with these limitations – I possibly could develop some interesting content.

Here are some screenshots of my first approach with some educational “Learning Muscles” content. I designed the muscles in singular moveable layers.

The Motion is driven by the reader who moves a visible (or invisible) slider at the bottom of the iPhone’s (or iPad’s) screen:

As I was not quite satisfied with my muscles Picklet test, next I wanted to give telling a simple story a try.

Here’s a filmed version showing the “Chicken” Picklet’s animation:

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

Last but not least I edited and prepared my first “Berlin XX” Comic for a more ambitious kind of Picklet story.

My plan was to let follow two more episodes and thus produce a real sales value.

Here’s another filmed documentation of the final Comic Picklet in the testing environment:

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

Conclusion:

But after having tested all these Picklets, I found both the workflow of the Picklet Builder and the results I could produce much too limited – compared to the Flash features I’m used to.

And as there is an interesting new progression towards new Flash-Apps possibilities going on, I stopped any further Picklet activities…

16 pupils (10 girls, 6 boys) were attending the workshop, for which they had applied in teams of two (writer and drawer) with self-created comic art works.

Day 1
The first day – when all pupils were gathered round a big table in the German Library of Skopje – we started with a little warm-up exercise: telling a simple comic story with 3 frames only – the shortest way of telling a story with beginning, middle and ending.
For getting started the theme was “The big table” and both, writers and drawers, had to talk over their story ideas. Then the illustrators started drawing the pictures and the writers wrote down the german texts for the description text and the speech bubbles.

It soon turned out that the kids’ german skills varied strongly – from very little speech comprehension to quite advanced language skills.
So Karen and I had to respond very flexible to the german language conditions that were given, for example with a lot of play-acting the figures and scenes the kids had been drawing.

For me the main focus was on conveying the basics of Storytelling with the pupil’s own three-frame-story examples. Which in fact turned out to work very well with the help of our play-acting method. They all got the point quite fast, namely that a real story needs a real ending. Especially if it has only three frames.

Like in the little Ukulele song we sang just for fun with the kids:

“Es fraß ein Huhn, man glaubt es kaum,
das Blatt von einem Gummibaum.
Und legte dann im Hühnerstall
‘nen rosaroten Gummiball.”

(A chicken ate, past all belief,
an Indian gum tree’s fleshy leaf
And then went to the hen house stall
to lay a rosy rubber ball.)

Day 2
The next day the real comic work began.
Based on their prefered themes we offered the kids two themes to work on:
“A funny (resp. curious) Date” and secondly “A funny (resp. curious) Noise”.

The latter we choose to avoid that all kids would tell the more or less same story – like we had experienced the day before with the “Table” theme, when a lot of the kids had come up with well-laid dinner table stories.

So to capture the kids’ imagination we choose to present them a totally non-visual theme as well. (Also as an offer for those who couldn’t really deal with the “Date” theme.)

Now the condition for the writer/drawer teams was to conceive a one page b&w comic story with at least 5 frames.

Of course all of the drawers wanted to jump into image drawing right away – even with apparently having no clue in which direction the story should go. So Karen and I had a hard piece of work explaining how to make rough drafts and how to plan a comic story frame by frame.
But after all the morning actually ended with 8 rough drafts for the comics, whose drawing I was going to supervise in the afternoon.

So while Karen was improving the comic text with the writers, I started to work on the comic images with the drawers.
For that purpose I had brought some professional comic art materials and tools (by courtesy of Goethe Institute):

- an erasable “Col-Erase” Non-Photo Blue Pencil for the first rough sketching (with a blue that would not show up in copies),
– a black Prismacolor pen for the final inking and
– two further Prismacolor Markers with different grey tones for the “coloring”.

In addition to their professional pencils the drawers also got good 185g DIN A 3 Paper sheets to work on.
And of course a trial paper for getting familiar with the new tools.

But again it was important to control the drawers impulse to rush ahead and instead instruct them to begin their art work with the setting of the frames, which ranged from 5-7 panels. So, with the help of their rough drafts and written plans, the comic artists had to draw the panel frames at first – always keeping in mind to leave space for the comic’s title, explanatory text parts and speech bubbles.
After that was done they started sketching the sceneries, which kept them busy for the rest of the afternoon…

Day 3
The third and last day of the workshop passed with finalizing the drawings and doing the “lettering” of the comics.
That is to say: both, writers and drawers, hand-lettered their comics by adding the final title, explanatory texts and speech bubble texts.

This was followed by a final rehearsal for the official presentation in front of a home crowd, due to take place in the late afternoon.

Photo: Lisa Robert

Unfortunately I was too involved playing the Ukulele and hanging the comics during that event, so that I was not able to shoot any photos from the presentation of the comics. But I got this photo from Lisa Robert and look forward to receiving some more photos from Thomas Diekhaus, the head of Goethe Centre Skopje, who – in cooperation with Biljana Kortoseva – initiated that great workshop event in Skopje.

Thanks to both of you for having me and Karen-Susan as teachers!

And also thanks to Lisa Robert for your photos and the promise to send me the images of the kids’ final comics. I will hand them in later to this blog…

And here are the photos of the kids’ comics Lisa sent:

“Super-Siera” by Annika and Aleksandra

“Ein nasses Date” (A Wet Date) by Sara and Maria

“Das Eichhörnchen” (The Squirrel) by Elvis and Elmin

“Ein komisches Geräusch” (A Strange Noise) by Kaja and Andre

“Besuch aus dem All” (A Visit from Outer Space) by Biséra and Filipa

“Am Ende kommt sie doch” (After all she comes, though) by Michelle and Jana

“Ein Berg-Adventure” (A Mountain Adventure) by Allen and Albin

Up to the present I never displayed my own drawings – just because the office never had this much been a place where potential clients come by.
And a bit – I have to admit – I preferred to stay in the background and not having to explain too much questions like: What does this all mean?

But a new year has come and well… I changed my mind and decided to give it a try and put my own work in the window display.
To keep everything fresh and easily replacable, a friend of mine came up with a great “pin board’” idea: So we hung up selections of drawings with magnets…

It’s about two months now that I am working with Fatma on improving her drawing skills. Most of the time we spent on drawing people (especially faces). The main focus of my lessons is on proportion and the need of graphic perception.
Some day when I was looking through her home work I noticed something very interesting:
there was a persisting “quirk” that turned up in each of her face drawings: all right sides of them had a strong rightwards up distortion.

As she couldn’t make out the mistake herself I made a photo of her drawing and re-distorted the right half downwards like this:

As this quirk wasn’t the result of a wrong posture during drawing but seemed to be some however natured brain thing, I said: okay, let’s stop with drawing faces right here and do a little line exercise instead.
So I asked her to draw a straight horizontal line – and the same effect appeared: it went straight righwards up.
Next I did a straight line with ruler myself and she had to draw a set of ten, twelve lines close-by and parallel to it.
The rightwards-up effect remained the same: the whole block of horizontal lines became smaller on the right side of the paper.

We worked a lot on this – with a lot of boring line drawing sessions. But it was worth it, because it really got better, nearly faded totally.

We ended the year with a more satisfactory result by finishing a drawing based on a photography transferred on paper…

But when my visitor, Fatma, talked about her great desire to improve her drawing skills, I agreed to give her a trial lesson to see further.
Well, what shall I say, we got further and since that trial lesson day Fatma is my regular drawing pupil.

A lot of the drawing principles I’m teaching her are based on Betty Edwards (mainly for the perception of reality and and the ability to reproduce it on paper) and Andrew Loomis (mostly for drawing from mind).

And sometimes we do little little drawing games I made up to improve her skills to approach the basic forms of a model: I set up a pane of glass and either I’m the model myself or have a friend to pose in front of the glass pane and my pupil has to draw the model on the glass.

One nice bonus of this technique: if you use a non permanent felt pen you can do a print of the drawing by spraying a little water on the glass and then pressing a piece of paper on it for a mono print like this:

Unfortunately the scene wasn’t approved by the director – in addition he decided a major overhaul of the scene’s design.

I had started this whole SFX animation attempt as a test phase and at this point I had to realize that it took me to much time to be worth my while.
So I decided to quit my dabbling in SFX Animation for now and concentrate on illustration again.
Which – at the moment and broke as I am – is the better option to earn money.

Here is my first pencil test for a necklace falling down with stinking fume…

I was searching for an easy-to-use and cheap (or freeware) mac animation software. Especially I searched for features to capture (or import) camera shots and get full control over the single frames in the animation’s timeline.

My usual application for this is iStopMotion 2.
But I dislike the way it handles the single frames: You can’t drag a single frame in the timeline to expand it’s duration. You have to copy/paste it to get this result which makes it hard to keep the overview over the animation timeline.

I tested a lot of small applications and found “Pencil”, an animation (and drawing) software with the purpose to make traditional animation.
It’s pretty simple and as far as my first experience: it’s a really great and easy-to-use animation software that in fact provides the control over the single frames I wished to get . And besides it’s freeware!

I made this “Bottle Opener” Animation Test with it:

As you can see in the Screenshot it is possible to drag the key frames in the timeline and assign their duration (to show a long part of the timeline I downsized the “frame size in pixels”).
Also it’s easy to delete a keyframe and replace it with another key frame image.
It really worked fine.

The software is open source and yet will be developped further. So some bugs might still be found: like the “timeline size in frames” where it is important to determine a sufficient movie’s frame length from the beginning on. It’s difficult to change that later…
Also the camera import seemed not to work. But the reason for this might also be due to my old digital camera (which means a plus factor for iStopmotion: it can read my camera!).
But instead the drag&drop of the images worked just perfect.
And the Movie Output is quite simple, too.

The version I worked with was 4.04. I read that for version 4.5 further improvements are planned – like copy & paste of multiple key frames, which I really missed…