Design Your own art project
The goal of this project was to create art in any style you're inspired by. I chose to make a rotoscope animation of a skateboarder doing a trick and was inspired by many similar animations created by Connor Smith (@dieselraptor) on Instagram. I didn't know anything about animating before I started this project so I reached out to Connor and asked for a couple tips to get me started. He surprisingly responded very quickly and sent me a couple videos of him setting up his own rotoscope animation as an example for my own. He also suggested I use Adobe Animate so I installed the program and got to work. The hardest thing about this project that I didn't really anticipate is how long it takes to trace every single frame in the video. I also accidentally chose a low resolution video which made it even harder to trace because it was very blurry in frames where the skater or the board was moving quickly. I ended up getting about half way done with the initial tracing of the skater when I broke my right arm at the skate park and was unable to finish the project. This animation is something I'm very passionate about and proud of and I intend to finish it once my arm heals and I can draw again.
Design Your own art project Update
I ended up finishing this project once my arm healed enough to allow me to draw. I posted it on Instagram (k.a.i.h) with synced music and got lots of positive feedback from Connor Smith and the skater in the clip which was awesome. I am very proud of the final product and intend to create similar animations in the future.
Digital Artist Inspiration Project: Aaron Draplin
Click the picture below to view my presentation
Photoshop Final
I chose Aaron Draplin as my artist for this project because his polished designs and logos inspired me when I first saw them during my research. I chose to create a Draplin inspired poster of Cody Cepeda who is one of my favorite professional skateboarders. To create this piece, I started in Illustrator and used the pen tool to trace objects like the skateboards and his face, and also created the designs in the background using the same tool. At first, learning how to use the pen tool was very difficult because I had never used it prior to this project. Eventually, I got used to the tool which made it much easier to create good looking lines. After I finished the initial line work, I moved the poster to Photoshop where I colored it using a specific color scheme from one of Draplin's original posters. I'm very proud of how this project turned out and I would be very interested in creating more pieces like it!