Frankentoon Studio
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Posts
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Posts posted by Frankentoon Studio
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I like how the harmony of the repeated rounded-rectangles lends a certain feeling of uniformity, the vertical elements in the main character provide balance between the horizontals employed throughout the rest of the illustration, and especially the punctuation of the semi-circular curve of the arm taking the eye from sort-of centre and leading it into the character's expression. The eyes (those three that we see) really add a bit of humour and create the story. As retrograde mentioned, your use of noise provides a nice 'finish' to the colouring. Well done!
... I feel extremely grateful for your comment justwilliam, such a great and kind analysis of the illustration. Thank you for taking the time, I appreciate it a lot!
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Oh, that sounds really great, Enrique. In fact, I was in fear that you had given up the entire project, since you were so silent during the last months. But now I am really excited to see what you hatched up all this time … and your new designs look just wonderful … wow … :D
Wow, really appreciate your words, thank you! :D
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Looking forward to this, those character images are FAB! Great stylization.
Thanks a lot a my friend!
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Hello everybody, how is it going? :)
Long time with no updates on this topic. Looks like I totally gave up isn't it?… nope!, I'm still working hard on it, but -as always- it’s impossible to foresee the amount of work that takes to create several character design tutorials until you get your hands on the thing.
So... here is a list of updates that sums up (pretty much) what’s been going on with the AD character design project the last couple of months:
1. The project has an official name: Frankentoon (already registered wohoo!)
2. I have a website mockup, ready to be translated to HTML5 by a fellow programmer. The domain is already bought and a plain landing page is up: www.frankentoon.com
3. I have 4 full tutorials already written and ready to be published.
4. Still haven’t figured out the format of the premium products... but the website will be launched as a free tutorials platform.
5. I’m working on a secret vector pack for our first time visitors... ohh mystery :o (the pack will be free of course)
6. I’m already promoting the name Frankentoon in social media, you can find us at instragram and twitter as @frankentoon (lots of cool cartoon characters made with AD have been already added)
Probably I forgot something, but those are the most important points in the roadmap.
Website is planned to be up and running by the 1st of may (fingers crossed). By now I have to change the premium iOS ibook strategy entirely, because of the upcoming Windows release. This cross platform thing opens up new possibilities so I want to have the right product for both windows and mac users.
I think this is all for now... just one more thing :) attached you’ll find some instagram screenshots of the official Frankentoon account, follow it if you please (please, please! :D), some of those characters have their tutorials written already :o
If you have questions or suggestions they are always more than welcome. I want to know all of your suggestions and opinions (good or bad!)
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Brilliant!
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I might be wrong but it looks to me like the opacity is set differently on the Photoshop brush than it is on the Affinity brush.
Hi, jmac!
Nope, they both share equivalent settings. I think this feature unfortunately doesn't exists in AP yet :(
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Hi Madame!
Both examples are made with just one stroke. I've been a couple of hours trying to figure this out... but I think it is not possible to reproduce the clean build up effect.
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I just bought AP yesterday and I'm having lots of fun so far.
But I have encountered a problem when creating my own brushes from scratch. I can't find a way to make my brush non-overlapping itself when using the tablet pressure for flow control...
I know it makes little sense said that way ha,ha... but I have attached a picture to explain it better. Any idea? Is this possible in AP?
Thanks!
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-Bug Report-
For Artboard,
Transform input boxes usually cannot work, have to close the file and open it again to work with the input boxes.
This happens to me all the time as well.
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2 things so far:
- Graphics are very choppy when you zoom in-out and after doing the artboard rotation.
- I can't see the 'smart guides' anymore, don't know why.
Question:
Is there any shortcut for artboard rotation?, I think I still don't get this function right. The way I usually use the canvas or artboard rotation in other softwares is for drawing tricky angles with my wacom by pressing a key for rotation angle and then a key to reset the rotation. As far as I can see, in AD the canvas rotation thing is permanent. Am I missing something guys?
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Your style and colour palette are just great - I'm really enjoying these! :D
Great job!
Great style and colour palette.
Looking forward for more B)
Love the reptile dude, the subtle use of noise and retro feel it has. Your style seems perfect for AD.
Thank you all guys, I really appreciate your comments, they're very encouraging! :D
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Wow, these are brilliant!....
Thanks a lot my friend!
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Hi!
I'll be posting here my artwork made with Designer so far. Hope you all enjoy, I've had lots of fun doing this characters and creatures! Any comment good or bad will be welcome.
- Dale, MacGueurle, MEB and 9 others
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I seem get to a point in software where I plateau. I like what I can do with it but never really push the software or my skills further. Any help in this department would be great ...
Hi, eejits,
Your comment has been saved in my annotations Pages document!... that specific plateau thing is one of my biggest concerns indeed, I'm writing some notes on how to self-improve every time you reach your highest level. Very tought subject, but challenging at the same time!
Thanks for all your insights!
Enrique
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Enrique,
Perhaps the iBooks format’s possibilities for ‘interactivity’ are one of its strongest suits...
justwilliam, I cannot thank you enough for your feedback, that was brilliant!. I just downloaded the iBooks Author app and gonna give it a try as soon as I can. It sounds like the perfect match for the project.
I started to draw pretty early in my life, about 26 years ago (I'm 30) and since elementary school my friends have always asked me to draw for them; Looney Tunes, Marvel characters, Spongebob... you name it. So when I went to high school I decided to take the Graphic Design course. I noticed I had some advantages over other schoolmates, since fundamentals of Graphic Design are pretty much the same as drawing fundamentals.
I observed pretty close the drawing teaching methods of my teachers and always though that they were very complicated and people ended up very confused after classes. I understood very early the principles of drawing, by spending hours and hours, filling sheets and sheets of paper, alone in my room.
I know a lot very creative people that struggles to make decent drawings, I'm not talking about 'pretty' drawings, I'm talking about communicative drawings, images that would let them express their ideas more clearly. I think I can help people that already have great ideas, by making their drawing learning curve more easy, less time consuming and more effective from their fundamentals.
Because there's a lot of people better than me out there teaching the academic way of drawing, I want to focus on the more commercial and easy-to-learn side of it: cartoons. I think that everybody can learn faster within their computers, manipulating simple shapes, using libraries, color tools and such... then it will be more easy for them to scale up a bit more and learn movement, dynamics, advanced body language, colouring...all if they want. But my goal is to help people from day one, to turn their ideas into finished commercial products or simply expand their communication skills with the beauty of simple expressive cartoons.
P.S.: justwilliam, I'd love to see your book on photography, I'm an amateur one an always eager to learn some tips!
Sorry for the long post, but I feel very passionate about this subject :) Please keep commenting, I'm taking notes from each comment!
Enrique
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ikarvs,
As you mentioned in your original post that you were undecided on the format(s) for this project, I thought that I might suggest the iBook format for a number of reasons:
Those who want to learn Affinity Designer (and even Affinity Photo and the hopefully relatively soon to be Affinity Publisher) are all already using a mac...
Hi, justwilliam!
Thank you for your detailed and insightful answer, I really appreciate it!. Your point of view is very interesting. I think there can be some cool advantages using the iBook's interactivity. Definitely the way to go would be with smaller and cheaper volumes, I'd like to include downloadable content with every book (background elements, brushes, expansion sets, etc) and perhaps the premium version can have a larger collection of downloadable material or extra tips on composition, color theory, preparing your art for sale, etc.
Of course I'm working hard on building good content, without it, the idea is nothing.
Thanks again guys, I'm very grateful for your help!
Enrique
P.S.: I'd like to ask, which topics regarding character creation keeps you struggling the most?, what's the most difficult part of it? (creating variety, expressions, developing your own style...)
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Sounds a great idea. I would be interested in your books and the website. Difficult to say ...
Thanks Geordie, that was a very enlightening answer!, I'm building the thing as a whole, but your point of view is very interesting. I will strongly consider your feedback on cheaper chunks of information and premium files, it totally makes sense.
I'll be posting some previews as soon as they're available, all critiques good or bad are always welcome.
Enrique
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Hi!
My name is Enrique Figueroa, I'm a professional graphic designer.
I've started to use Affinity Designer recently and I love it!. I have some expertise in character design, mascot design and such... I began to write a book about cartoon character design in Adobe Illustrator a few months ago... but it happens that I don't use Illustrator that much anymore (I hate, hate the subscription thing).
So I thought that it would be a good idea to re-write the whole book for Affinity Designer only.
The book is oriented towards people that would like to give life to their ideas, without the pain of going all the way trough DaVinci's academy... the learning method is very simple, for beginners and advanced users alike.
The goal is to help you in the making of all kind of characters within a month or two, so you can even make money out of them (T-Shirt design, vector stock selling, freelance works, etc). Its heavy focused on styling and commercial appealing.
I still don't know in which formats will be released. For now I would really, really appreciate your feedback on this project. It appeals to you?, Would you buy it?, how much would you pay for it?, is this what you need?... any opinion is welcome, my mind is open. You can ask whatever you want too.
I have attached a couple of my drawings just to give you an example of the simplicity and look of the characters for this first module (these ones won't be in the book, but they can give you a small idea).
I love more and more AD and I think It has great potential as a learning tool.
Thanks in advance,
Enrique Figueroa
- A_B_C, anon1, MacGueurle and 9 others
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Hi!,
I plan to switch to Affinity Photo for my illustration work in the near future. I don't like Adobe's subscription business model.
I've been testing Photo with real projects and works ok. But there are some things that still need improvements to consider it in a day to day pipeline of work.
First of all I'm testing it on a 2014 27" iMac, 16 GB RAM and 2.7 GHZ processor. Iris Pro Graphics.
1. Brushes still have some lag when painting fast and in high resolution. Several strokes are drawn very delayed before drawing them with the tablet. Time is crucial in my work and this issue is a little bit frustrating.
2. I understand the color picker being precise, but again, in a day to day basis I use the color picker hundreds of times and almost automatically when I'm painting. As it is now, the delay of the color picker can be annoying when you seat for 5 straight hours painting and try to work as fluid as you can. ¿Can we have a less precise but faster color picker option?, that would be great guys.
And finally, there is this little bug in the brushes panel. When you select one brush and change its size with the keyboard, that brush in the panel is deselected automatically. Visually confuses a bit, even thought the brush itself is still selected.
Just my two cents, hope this great piece of software make it far, I really admire your work guys!
A couple of compositions I'm working on
in Share your work
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The train looks very cinematic. Like it!