“Wait, Mister!” - Draft Character Designs
April 30th, 2006 Ahmad Al-MahirHere’s what I came up with so far:
Animation. Sequential Art. Sketches. Visual Storytelling. E-mail me: ahmad@almahir.com.
“Cairo Sites” - Pen Sketches
April 30th, 2006 Ahmad Al-MahirHere’s another set of drawings I did while on my trip to Cairo. The two statues were done entirely in pen. The building in the bazaar and the pyramid were roughed out quickly in pencil before completing in pen. Placement of the 3 separate pieces in the same page (with some scaling involved) and titling were done digitally. I really do need to get more comfortable sketching in pen…
Sketches - Cairo Portraits
April 30th, 2006 Ahmad Al-MahirSorry people. This has been way overdue. On my trip to Cairo I did manage to do some quick portrait sketches. Not as many as I’d like, and not exactly the kind of subjects I was looking for, but it’s still good practice. Anyway, just to show you that I did stick to my plan and haven’t completely neglected to sketch. Cairo is a great place to draw. If you can afford it, just sit down somewhere, kick back and start drawing.
“Wait, Mister!” - Draft Storyboards
April 30th, 2006 Ahmad Al-MahirOK. After coming up with the story idea, the next step for me is to put it down on paper. That’s where the thumbnails and storyboards come in. As promised, here are some sample panels from my first draft. With the lack of certain standard storyboard features (e.g. text describing actions and sound effects/music), what I have at this stage looks more like a set of glorified thumbnails, or a rather pedestrian comic. Sketching out all those panels (37 in total) took me about a full day to complete. It helped that I already had most of the shots visualized in my head. I then did some minor digital tweaking and coloured some of the panels just to quickly test out a raw colour scheme. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. I’ll have to get started on the character designs next, do up more colour tests, and piece together a basic animatic to get a grasp of the timing for the short film. The target for the completion of all these components is this coming Wednesday afternoon - in time for my second tutorial. We’ll see how that plan goes…
Webcomic with Wordpress
April 29th, 2006 Ahmad Al-MahirJust when I’ve almost given up the pipe dream of creating my very own semi-regular webcomic, what do I stumble across? A free webcomic theme for Wordpress! And it looks sooo easy to set up and run too! Just waiting for me to install and tweak endlessly….. Darn these tempting distractions!…. Grrrrrr….