Imaginary birds

Time to unleash imagination! This time some bird-like creatures. The last one is my personal favorite.

I also went to the zoo few days ago. This time I spend most of my time taking video clips of animal's movement than drawing. I got some nice footage of amur leopard walking and common dwarf mongooses running around. Let's see if I can use that material in the future.

Sweet cartoon villains, Part 2

Oh yeah! Now we are talking!

Ah, NegaDuck. What could be more evil than an archnemesis from the alternate universe? Many things, but in Darkwing Duck series there's nothing more evil than that!

Probably because he is Darkwing's greatest enemy, he is my favorite villain in the show. I'm not saying that other villains are useless and boring. Oh no, they are great and cleverly created (think about Liquidator, he's an ex-salesman who had a horrible accident and now his whole body is made of water). The thing is that because NegaDuck and Darkwing are opposites of themselves, they can bring out their best and worst in them. I'm not sure if I was clear enough but simply saying only Darkwing can make NegaDuck incredibly mad, and only NegaDuck can force Darkwing to use his greatest knowledge and skills to beat him. It is fascinating and funny at the same time.

The voice of NegaDuck has to mentioned. Even though he is a cartoon villain, he has an incredible voice. A deep, sinister and sarcastic voice. He is voiced by the same guy who voices also Darkwing Duck, Jim Cummings. Oh, and the Finnish voice also rocks! If I remember correctly, it was Antti Pääkkönen who voiced him. That guy voices everything in Finnish Disney dubs.

Everyone who is familiar with NegaDuck has probably noticed that there's a small crack in his cape in this picture. You can read an explanation for that from deviantART. Let's just say that everything started from a mistake and ended horribly.

If you are interested to read more about the DW series you can check out these great blogs:

http://tobyshelton.blogspot.com/
Toby Shelton is a story artist, working for Dreamworks. He made model sheets of Darkwing Duck and Gosalyn for the series. Beside all the DW stuff, his other work is impressive too!

http://hellboyanimated.typepad.com/just_a_tad/
Tad Stones was a writer and producer of DW. In his blog he writes about the days when he was working on DW. He's very open and even admits that not everything turned out great in the show. You can also read about his past and future projects, which are interesting and insightful.

NegaDuck © Disney
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Previously on Sweet cartoon villains project:

Part 1: Rataxes (Babar)

Some schoolwork

Oh, the insanity.

For the last two days I have been removing strings and nails frame by frame from our stop motion shots. Even though I am using After Effects, it's still very time consuming, especially when you are dealing with shots where the puppet moves and also the background. Yeah, now that's crazy.

 But the end result looks quite nice. You almost believe that the puppet moves without any support. I can't show any clips right now but here's a screenshot:

If you are familiar how moose runs (and remember the position of the legs in each frame) then you'll notice that the gallop isn't right there. I'm fully aware of that. I used bison's gallop because the puppet had so short legs. The movement works quite well but it still annoyes me that I couldn't animate the moose run like a real moose does. Okay, I'll shut up now.