Des Papillons

"They stare at me while I crave you"

Some sketches from my recent trip to Annecy :)
If you're a little bemused as to why there is someone lying at my feet on the train, our return journey to Paris happened to coincide with the railway strikes - having to get on a 7am train with a few trains-worth of people led to Jeanne-Sylvette having no seat, but ultimately looking rather comfortable in her slumber :D
At one stop-off on the journey, a lady entered the carriage announcing at the top of her voice that she was traveling with 50 children and had booked the exact seats we were sitting in.....
As you can imagine, a muffled groan slipped from 50 tired festival goers (I mean who needs a seat more, reeeeally? Kids with fresh-little-legs and yet-to-be-compromised-from-animating-all-day-backs who could more easily fit into small spaces and who probably had a good night's sleep of 8 hours instead of 6 hours of intoxicated dancing OR us?) only to turn to cheers a few seconds later when we discovered she mistook our carriage for the adjacent one :D
Eyes closed once more to welcome some much needed sleep.

Life Drawing has been a regular thing of late, though I must admit since my last Life Drawing post I feel I'm in a rut. I'm constantly trying different mediums in the hope that something will click and when I think it does, it never seems to work out the second time around :D
This past week's session (not shown here) I was back on the ol' charcoal once more and started to feel some 'clickage' so I'll stick with that for now...

And as was customary a while back for me to share stories from interesting Life Drawing sessions on this blog, I have one which you may (or may not) like :D
I feel the need to add this...

The 5 minutes it takes to walk from the animation department over to the art department on the other side of the street where Life Drawing takes place (in a tiny, not really suitable for large-amounts-of-people-with-easels room), gives you enough time to wonder whether this week's model is male or female... and also whether you should be going drawing at all as you are a bit behind with your shot :D
The moment you walk in the room you get that moment of, "Ah it's a (insert sex here)" and from then, you very quickly make a judgement on whether you think they'll be good or not.

So this one time I had a, "Ah it's a guy" and as I was setting up, noticed he seemed a little agitated as he prepared his area to pose.... kind of like one of those secondary characters in an action movie that feels something's about to go wrong and has little beads of sweat running down their forehead as they nervously rub their hands and look around in eratic fashion and you know they're gonna get it :D

With the temperature having been turned up as he deemed it a bit chilly, he de-robed and began to enchaine some quick poses.

Verrry quickly I became aware, (as I'm sure the others did but it wasn't like I could say anything at that point :D), of a sticky substance that was being secreted at a time that perhaps wasn't the most appropriate - trailing and sticking to his legs as he moved from pose to pose.
I drew, leaving out this unnecessary detail from my drawings of course, but oh my gosh how the smell was intolerable!!!! O.o

At half-time we left for a water/fresh air break in the kitchen and to have a chance to look a each other and say, "what the...?!", a couple of us deciding that we wouldn't hang around for the second part. Upon returning to the room from a place where there was clean, cool air, you realised to what extent there was a thick, humid wall of bodily fluid odeur - BLEURGH. We left and the teacher apologised at the next session saying that she had never used this model before and that he had been recommended to her. I salute the brave few that stuck out the whole session :D
In all my life sessions over the years I've never witnessed/smelt that. Though at least I got a couple of inky drawings (above) which I liked... mainly from the back ;D

On a lighter note, Minions, the film I've been on for over a year now is coming out in... a years time(!) :D We have about four months left of animation and from what I've seen of the film so far, I gotta say visually, it looks pretty stunning - I always gasp when I see newly finished composited shots *w*!!
I was pretty happy as these last couple of weeks I was working on THE shot in the film which is meant to make people go, "Aww!!!", which I felt lucky to have - I'm guessing it was a coincidence as in DM2 I had the 'Aww' shot with Agnes at the end... or maybe it's just because I'm a big softy? :D

Anyway, epic post over ;P Enjoy your holidays those of you that have some! (lucky so and sos) n.n

OH! I have a Tumblr now, so those of you who prefer to tumble can follow my work there, though, if you want more amazing bodily fluid stories, you'll find them only here ;DD

'Till the Next,
L

enchaine (from verb enchainer) in this case means, to string together. I've noticed sometimes I can't find the English word for something :D