Tuesday, 8 April 2014

How to draw a galaxy...

My animation design has meant that I have set myself the challenge of drawing and animating a galaxy. Having never even attempted to draw a galaxy before this was probably not the brightest idea I've had so far in this project, however it seems necessary in order to visually explain the theory of pantheism (that life on Earth originated from a single organism transported to Earth by a meteorite). In my animation it is, of course, a spiral-covered, Fibonacci-infused meteorite in order to create a planet full of life forms exhibiting the Fibonacci pattern... makes sense right? And equally logically, this meteorite needed to come from a Fibonacci galaxy.

So, how to draw a galaxy? 
I needed the design to be fairly quick and simple to reproduce, otherwise the animating would take far too long for the schedule I'm running to (approx. 24 frames a day currently). 
My original designs consisted of a few quick line in pen in a vague spiral form... not very inspiring, beautiful or scientific. 
I then began to mess around by smudging the inks, but it still wasn't achieving the magical, beautiful look I was after. I decided that in order to get the desired effect, I'd need to add some sparkle and colour, so I invested in gold, cobalt and magenta inks to experiment with. 
I kept the strong black lines though too, as I want them to be a stable feature throughout the film. 
Having not done a line test yet on the animation though, I am still to see if this technique works the way I want it to. I may, for example need to adjust the lighting so that the gold is picked up properly by the camera. At the moment though, I'm happy with the images I'm producing and think they hold the gaze. 



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