Everyone out of the pool!

Alrighty! This blog is officially CLOSED CLOSED CLOSED
It's been great, but I'm moving to a one-stop-shop business model.
All new posts will be over at www.heathermcnabb.com


Finger Blisters will remain open until I finish that project (which I haven't been working on recently but plan to pick up again at the end of the month)

Nuked

Today was supposed to be the day I closed this blog and unveiled my new Wordpress powered, all-in-one website. Until I accidentally nuked the database while trying to back it up. Uh, whoops. I am very angry right now...

In the meantime, the old website can be found here:
www.heathermcnabb.com/archive/index.html

This blog is not dead, plus I'm a little famous!

I know it looks like a dead blog.
Really it's not though.
I am currently redesigning it to integrate with my all new shiny content managed website. Which has been designed and will go online as soon as I figure out this shiny web content do-hicky, i.e. don't hold your breath or nothin' but it will go online sometime this lifetime.

In the meantime...
I have accomplished something as an Animation Mentor student that I was never able to as a professional dancer. Namely I have had a nicely photoshopped picture of myself printed in a trade magazine! See me shill for my school:



Go AM!
Now I must get back to work at learning animation. Hopefully the next time my picture is in Animation Magazine it will be for animating something amazing.

Now I have been animating for 6 months

Here are my (almost finished) assignments from class 2 of Animation Mentor.
I'm very happy with how the class went; my lack of ability with Maya was much more of an issue for me this class but my learning curve is definitely, er...steepening ^_^.
I'm in Class 3 now and moving on to acting, but I'm going to keep working on my body mechanics until all of these shots look at least as good as the baseball pitch.

Tom Gately saved my life (premptively)

I took gesture drawing classes from Tom Gately ( who teaches the Walt S. method)before becoming an animation student, and boy am I glad I did. It was painful sometimes because I was so far behind the other students, but that early practice of drawing quickly from life has made getting my ideas down on paper so much easier now that I'm drawing from reference footage, making scene thumbnail drawings, and sketching out shot ideas all the time.

Since these are about the only drawings I am doing regularly, other than the PBlair project I have going on in my other blog of course, I've decided to start posting them here lest this blog wither away to nothing...

These are my thumbnails for next week's assignment.

Trying to draw like a fashion designer

Dragging out the old marker set again for a bit of a go-round...maybe I'll get around to drawing her something to sit on soon, but my Animation Mentor studies are keeping me quite busy!

And some of my Animation Mentor sketches:

The last three months, right here

So here is my first reel from Animation Mentor.
There are a bunch of technical issues - including frames dropping all over the place in the encoding- no smoothing at all between clips, and some highly amateurish animation but still I'm proud to have gotten it this far in 3 months. Animation Mentor is an amazing school and I'm learning so much so fast.

''


Now go see Rataouille and bask in it's amazing-ness!
Oh and maybe Transformers too.