Anna Draws Some Garbage

This is week 10 of my internship. How fun and fulfilling my summer has become because of it. Although the transit from Markham to Toronto has been a bit of a hassle, it was quite fun - observing people who were either going to work or leaving it, and actually being part of that crowd, with the same purpose. 

This week, I have been working on my animation skills, using the characters that I created. It really made me appreciate the people who designed the Teleporting Fat Guy characters. It took a while for me to get the hang of making the character, placing everything in its proper order and getting them to look right. But not only did the character designers from Teleporting Fat Guy do that, they created them with the animators in mind. Every little bit of change was anticipated, and every little bit had a corresponding symbol to it. Although I had created mine with that in mind, I didn't put as much detail into it, and so when I was animating, I ran into obstacles. None that I couldn't jump over, but it would have made it a lot smoother had it been done with more detail in the first place. Let me just say that I have a lot of appreciation for people who create symbol characters now. Not that I didn't have any before... But now I have the knowledge to back up that claim. 

But that's not all I've done. I've also finished with the garbage that the game needed. Yes, I was drawing garbage for the first half of the week. And everyone complimented me on it. I do need to show you, because I'm quite proud of it myself.

Let me describe the process. I first had no idea what to draw for the garbage, so I researched a bit, and it didn't really tell me a thing. All it showed me were generic garbage, and I had that image in my head already anyway. So I looked around the studio (all I did was turn my head around), looking for possible trash ideas. I classified things into recyclables and trash, and made a list of what could be what. Then I drew a rough version in photoshop and imported it into Flash. And from there, I used the pencil tool and traced over my rough drawings, converted them into symbols and coloured them. I didn't really have a colour scheme in mind, but I wanted the recyclables to stand out, so I used brighter colours for those, and duller colours for the garbage. I also tried to keep in mind that the props needed to fit in with the background and the characters. So I simplified that even more and deleted the inner outlines of the objects. The result is what you see above. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied...