Short

I'm finally posting the short I worked on during the summer. It was for a contest in Mexico, encouraging people to recycle.

The animation was done in After Effects by me (as I had no previous knowledge of Toon Boom or Flash). The designs were done by Julian, painted in watercolour and exported to Photoshop. The bgs were also done in photoshop using textures.

Unfortunately we didn't win the contest, but it was a great experience to actually work on the whole process of a short. It really helped me understand better how things work in the industry.

Really liked working on a short, definitely not my last one!

I apologize in advice that the video doesn't have subtitles, but I think the message is pretty clear :D So, no more words, here it is! Enjoy and comment!

Don Polo Malos Modos from Andrea Alcaraz on Vimeo.

Experimenting with pastels

So, I bought this box of pastels a while ago, but didnt really use them. This Sunday went to TSA for some Life Drawing and decided to take them with me and experiment a bit. To be honest, I had no idea of what I was doing. Pretty much, I was just testing and trying to figure out how to use them. I'm not 100% happy with the results, but I think it's a good start.

And a portrait we did in Life Drawing today. Again, trying to experiment more with pastels and colored paper. I want to go over this one and push it further, but I'm afraid I might put a little too much and make it worse. (Sorry for the quiality of the pic)

Any feedback would be really appreciated!

Toon Boom

Toon Boom is awesome!

First assignment with lip sync (kinda hard) and some acting.

Particulary love the male voice of my girly character, good stuff.

Teaser

It's been a while since my last post. I'm back to school again, I must say I'm really excited with this new semester, seems like its gonna be tons of fun!

I've been working on a project about recycling during the summer. Here's a test I did for one of the scenes. It was made using after effects.

More info about the project coming soon!

Color Studies

My injured sister has been getting tons of flowers lately. Flowers are beautiful, but hard to draw. After messing up a little the colors in my first attempt, I forced my self to do some color studies and pay attention to the different shadows, hues, values, etc. Still trying to get better at watercolors, and I also experimented a little with pastels. I noticed that as I kept going I started to get a little bit more the idea of how to use the different mediums. Gotta do more studies to get better!

Sketching places

I haven't had the time to go sketching some buildings and places here in Mexico this summer, but I'm looking forward on going this coming weekend! 

Didn't really finish these drawings but I kinda like them. I pretty much tried to experiment with watercolours (which didn't turned out that great).

First drawing: Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts), Mexico City

Second drawing: Antiguo Colegio de Minería, Mexico City

Last drawing: Riverdale, Toronto

Old Sketchbook Drawings

Here are some sketchbook drawings from my first year as an animation student.

Life drawings:

Random sketches:

Playing around with colors. I loved these giraffes until I put some sparkles on it and closed my sketchbook without letting it dry :(