Drawing Heads: Free eBook

Need to design a character or simply get some reference for a head you want to sculpt? Here's a good place to start. It's a book by Andrew Loomis on drawing heads and from a glance it looks very well done.

Andrew Loomis - Drawing Heads - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Andrew Loomis - Drawing Heads

Book Suggestion - Creating 3-D Animation

If you have been paying attention to my blog posts, not too long ago I purchased the book Creating 3D Animation. It's a book done by Peter Lord and Brian Sibley about exactly what the title implies. The book is mainly done by an Aardman(The folks who brought us Wallace and Gromit) point of view, but it does show a couple of other examples of stop motion when it is explaining the history aspect of the subject.

Overall, I think that this book is one of the best claymation books out there(I haven't read very many, but this one I'd think is near the top of the list). It is very nicely made, well designed, has nice and large pictures to show the reader, and comes in a nice length of 224 pages. The book covers a number of different topics relating to 3D animation. If you take a look at the table of contents some of the topics you'll see are basic needs, simple techniques, models and model making set, design and making, animation and performance, making a film, and more.

So, why would you want to read this book? Well, I think that this book would be good for anybody who is remotely interested in stop motion animation whether you purchase it or get it from a local Library. It tells about some of the techniques and processes that go into making an animation. If you know nothing about the topic, this would be a very good place to start.

If you would like to view more reviews or maybe even purchase the book, go visit Amazon.com, where I purchased mine used(almost perfect condition, a lot cheaper). I've placed a link below for easy access.

Creating 3D Animation Amazon.com

Claymation Commercials

After yesterday's post, I went to You Tube and searched for even more claymation commercials. I was pretty successful and found a little more than 40, although many had the same characters in them. After watching a lot of them, you can really see the difference between claymation and CG and that claymation has a special look to it. So here's a video player off of you tube that you can watch. I'll probably add videos to it every so often in I find them on You Tube.



I also got my other book today, I'll be doing a review on that too sometime.

Style Tutorial and First Book Arrival

Finished writing up a tutorial about style yesterday. It wasn't too hard to do since I wasn't explaining how to do it, but rather trying to get the reader to think about style for themselves and try to develop their own. That makes around 15 in total now, I'm starting to run out of ideas for more.

I also got my first book in the mail today - Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie. I'll have to read through it some and get ready to give it a little review sometime in the next few weeks, so get ready to see that.

New Books and Tutorial Update

Yesterday I ordered two books from Amazon.com. I've read or flipped through both before because I've checked them out at the library, but they were nice and cheap and they're the kind of books you like to go back and look at from time to time. The books I got were Creating 3-D Animation and Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie. If I were to get only one, I'd definitely get the first one, but Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie has some good information in it as well. The books were both under $2 used, the main cost was shipping, but since I got a free $10 gift card from doing a survey online, I only paid about 46 cents for both books. It was a pretty good deal, especially since they're both hard cover. I'll be reviewing these books later on the blog.

As for the video tutorial, I haven't done any more work on it. I really should start thinking about trying to work on it again sometime, but we'll see how things go.

Until next time.

Suggested Book

Today, I'm going to give a book suggestion. This book is called "Making Doll's House Miniatures with Polymer Clay" by Sue Heaser. It's a really good book on how to learn to make props. The book goes through and teaches a variety of techniques to make different objects for doll houses in particular, but can be easily used for prop creation. All that is needed is a little boost in scale since the book demonstrates in 1/12 scale. Everything is very clearly explained and the book is very well done. It is nice quality as well. It is a very good book, if you don't have it at your local library, I suggest that you purchase it or borrow it from somebody that owns it. Right now, on Amazon.com, the book seems to be less than $15 so it's a pretty good buy. That is without shipping costs however. If you would like to learn more about the book, just click on the link below. It will direct you to Amazon.com where you can read reviews, see a little bit inside the book, and more.

Making Doll's House Miniatures with Polymer Clay