HarveyRothman

Slide Waltz Jazz

Slide whistles aren't designed for chromatic scales that's for sure. 

Hardware used: Acme slide whistle, another slide whistle, Baldwin baby grand, Dragon snare drum, Roland Meinl 10'' hi-hat, Fiddes Payne Chocoholics Delight (as a shaker)

The synth sound is a VST called Artphase.

Daft gag scribble

One of many gag doodles for one of many unnamed cartoon ideas.

Bubblebass

Tune from about 6 months ago I forgot to upload. I've been in a bit of a creative rut lately, my apologies.

Samples: Synton Syntovox demonstration record.

Hardware: Dreadbox Erebus, lemon-shaped shaker, etc.

Skipping

Little ditty made mostly out of Mellotron instruments.

Mama Luigi Scene 140 Background

There's that patch of lighter green and a darker green beneath it, not because I wanted to be the next Rothko but just to increase the contrast between the caterpillar and the background a bit.

The sun's face and foreground grass were on separate layers so that the grass can be in front of the caterpillar and so that the face and wobble around a bit.

Done in Clip Studio Paint

Drunkard Starfox

Not updated in ages 'cause I've been on holiday with David. During that time, we did a lot of drawings and the draft storyboard for the Starfox cartoon is more or less finished (not timed or anything yet though).

Here's a scan of how an idea for a sequence normally begins; a bunch of silly doodles. 

The outline script says there's a party on Fox's ship. From that we do lots of little crude scribbles to make us laugh and discuss. Soon enough ideas for compositions and gags flourish.<...

Mama Luigi Scene

 I did another very short scene for the Mama Luigi Reanimate with a bit of help from David who animated all the shoes. The first drawing was done traditionally, then becomes vector-based ToonBoom animation. Just an experiment. 

In export.swf (available in the $5 tier article) you can see the original breakdowns were traditionally done scribbles. I'm going to experiment with traditionally animated roughs more because I find vector "tradigital" animation lends itself more to clean-up a...

XP-PEN Preview script

Sometimes, to avoid distraction of any sort (even the red squiggly lines that appear under misspelled words), I get the typewriter out and just thrash out my text.

Pretty sure the preview's ready to upload.

But give it a look anyway, and let me know if I make any cockups. Thanks. I'll probably make this public some point tomorrow. How's it looking?

Trick for rectilinear perspective distortion

When dealing with ultra-wide fields of view, your typical lens will start to curve the straight lines: barrel distortion, or even fisheye distortion. Rectilinear lenses remedy this by having an opposite distortion of an equal amount going the other way (I don't know the exact science), but a consequence of that is this bizarres stretching at the edges even if the lines are straight. Spheres become skewed ellipses etc. This look ended up being adopted by the likes of Gilliam and Kubrick.

<...

XP-Pen Artist 16 Preview (W.I.P.)

I'm going to dabble in making reviews! First, it's XP-Pen's Artist 16. It's like a Cintiq only much more affordable. Right now I'm only making a short preview video, requesting suggestions for what to talk about, and questions that I can answer in the full review. 

Any if anyone's wondering, this isn't a sponsored video. But, the tablet was obligingly sent to me by XP-Pen after asking for a review sample. Rather cheeky of me, but I'm very grateful for that.

So what would you like to...

Lighting

It does the job, and I just saw another floodlight in the charity shop so I'll be getting that.

I'm mucking about with this 'cause I'm working on an XP-Pen Artist 16 tablet and Stylophone Gen X-1 review simultaneously, so you have those to look forward to!

Cheating rectilinear perspective with After Effects

A slight improvement to my last attempt in Foxy Gets Hooked. 

The difference here is that rather than have just one fixed Bezier Warp distortion applied to the whole composition, I've animated the Bezier points to constantly compensate for the barrel distortion drawn in the original layout. 

 The first clip is of a background "pan" without any post-production, typical of any 2D animated cartoon. The second clip is the same pan with additional distortion animated in post to...

Doggy pram

Piece for A-Level Art.

Sketch done on A3 paper with pencil then digitally painted with Clip Studio Paint.

Thank you for this month's donations, everyone!

Anamorphic Rostrum Take 2

The idea for putting a converging lens in front of the anamorphic lens (for closer focus) then putting a diverging lens between the anamorphic lens and camera lens (to return to the original FOV) and then compensating for the focus seemed to work alright. 

I'm having the hold the lenses, the rostums not quite on axis, and the anamorphic adapter seems to be on slightly wonky, so there's a fair but of work to do still.

Anamorphic Rostrum shoot

Here's some experimental shots where I've been struggling to get my anamorphic setup to work on a copystand. For one thing the anamorphic lens doesn't naturally focus this close. So I've had to try swapping the taking lens, and muck about with various plus-dioptre spectacle lenses to see how in focus I could get the image.

Focussing this closely caused the anamorphic lens not to squash the image as much as I would have liked. If I were to do this again, I'd have to find a way of having both th...

Acrylic and Acetate

Gave inking and painting a cel a go. I can see why they switched to digital considering this took me about an hour or so and it's just one drawing. 

Turned out a little mucky, but I'm not too bothered by that. It's as hard to make a traditional piece clean as it is to make a digital piece nicely mucky.

T4 Bus

Ink wash and pencil piece I did for A Level Art. The scan's somewhat lost the contrast. There's bits and bobs with the construction and such I could've fixed but that's a combination of lack of knowledge with this kind of style and deadlines.

Erebus and DE-1 experiments

Some audio analogue meanderings with the Dreadbox Erebus and Melos DE-1. Gets a bit loud at points so look out (shame about the clipping really).

Recent purchase

10 quid plus postage. This is probably some sort of mild paranoia, but I'm really not a fan of where this subscription software digital download business is going. It seems entirely tailored towards the companies' own comfort. By buying this, I can't be a accused of piracy, nor will I have to put up with monthly payments and nonconsensual updates. Second hand software sadly seems to be a thing of the past which I think is wrong.

PDF for Xsheet-hybrid for computer animators

If it interests anyone, I've attached a PDF for the current draft for the bizarre xsheet idea. I'm curious to hear if it works out for anyone. It's designed to work at 24fps. The final page is blank with slightly less frames for room to manually write in the frame numbers.

X-sheet for the paperless animator

Just a mockup concept of an idea. A hodgepodge of a traditional x-sheet, a bar sheet, and a timeline like you see in Flash or ToonBoom. 

The purpose is to still be able to direct timing and motion and compares more to the animation software's timeline rather than the vertically orientated traditional x-sheet. 

Usually new drawings are represented with little grey blocks that look identical to every other drawing and there's no tempo markers in sight, only a string of numbers.&n...

Stylophone Gen X-1 Preview

Just a few clips of the Gen X-1 I recorded for the demo/review that'll be coming up eventually. I'm yet to edit or narrate any of it but that'll happen eventually.

Ceefax Gen X-1 Sample

Put a beat to a bit of Ceefax music that's garbled up by the Stylophone Gen X-1. https://youtu.be/BHL7-e0I5cc?t=45m11s

Also sampled my own "Wahwah" song a bit in there.

Stylophone Gen X-1 Demo

Very early preview of a demo song using the prototype, upcoming Stylophone Gen X-1. I've recorded some footage of it before having to return it, but coming up some point will be a review of it. Lots of double-tracking here, and there's no other instruments just yet (except a kick drum) but I'll be adding acoustic instruments in just to make it a fuller song. I don't believe in demoing a piece of gear by using only that one piece of gear 'cause who ever does that?

Ink wash + pencil drawing of some hamsters

I've been getting behind in A-Level art by quite a lot lately, so I drew this with the excuse that it was inspired by photographer Peter Mitchell's way of staging.

Ha! Hm! Whoop!

Another quick lazy sample loop thing. Samples from Martian Moochers (1965), Flintstones Bedrock Bowling PS1, Mrs. Mills Piano Singalong, Great Hits Of The 70's Moog Style

Simple Jazz Sample Hip-Hop Thingy

Samples from Minor Threat - Stumped, Tin Pan Alley Cats, and Gerry Mulligan -  Five Brothers. Just a funky loop that could go on forever.

Donkeywork

Silly joke in the update/Patreon video I'm working on just for the sake of practising with traditional animation. This is an unusual case where I animated before recording the dialogue (Granny was away at the time) so there's a bit of disconnect between the poses and the way the line was said. I couldn't be arsed to inbetween it either, but does any of that really matter when it gets the joke across? I like to try and be efficient while still making every drawing entertaining.

The desk displac...

Some people

Drawn from a 60's photography book. Practising traditional shading, form, construction and all that. I've only really been drawing caricature mostly because I have no idea how proportions work or how to balance details against each other. One day!