With finals out of the way and the winter break here, I've been considering pursuing some art/animation project ideas. I've been wanting to try out some new art styles to find one that really reflects me as an artist when I produce animations or drawings.

Up to this point I have been focused more on learning techniques for making abstract, realistic and vector art on computers with a variety of programs and tools. I've also been trying my hand at building sculptures which I may end up doing a lot more of in the future. However, I have been wanting to move into the fields of drawing stylistic pictures in a style of my own and also produce Flash movies for years now.

I have already produced a few short Flash animations while learning how to use Flash and animate. Only one of said animations has ever been uploaded to the web, which is perhaps for the best. The first one of any notable quality was made by me way back when I was in junior high or high school (I don't recall which at this point). However, it was a sprite movie and due to a myriad of personal reasons that movie and any other existing ones from that point in my life will probably never be seen on the web. I'm sure there are probably some people who might actually enjoy them, but overall the quality of those first attempts at animating embarrass me to be honest. It's not so much the fact that they were sprite movies (there are plenty of instances where sprite movies are very nice), it's more because they lacked in the areas of story, character development, sound effects, voice acting, music, general animation and actionscripting.

The one Flash animation that did make the cut and end up online was done fairly recently for a beginning level college course in computer illustration. I chose to use that opportunity to experiment with a new personal style of art that blends a simplistic (nearly minimalist) style of art for the characters in the animation, with more refined vector art styles for the backgrounds and objects used by the characters. Overall it turned out decent, but since I had recently upgraded from Flash MX to Flash CS4 I had difficulty programing any working buttons/controls in the new version of Actionscript. As a result the movie lacks a working preloader (although I was able to get one to briefly work) and controls.

Now I would like to try my hand at finding a new style of art to use when animating. If I come up with anything over the winter break I may try to create a nice Flash movie to use it in and upload it if the movie is any good.