Mushroom Collie Beuraucracy

Whipped up a little illustration to give as a solstice gift this year. Inspired by a beautiful little collie dog I saw while out for a run a few weeks ago, and some photos of mushrooms I took last summer.

Fat Tail Gecko

Another derivative of the quick visit to House of Reptiles. Still kind of unsure about it as a whole - couldn't quite seem to get the colors where they needed to be. Still fun to play around with!

Sketchy sketchin'

Some life sketching from the past week!

At the amazing amazing CTN Expo they had a model posing in the foyer for anyone to draw from:


Then after I got back home I drew some people while waiting at the Portland airport for my sister:

(The lizard was not waiting with us, alas. He was hangin' in a box at the House of Reptiles, where a friend of mine was buying mice to feed her snake).

And then at last, back to Hipbone Studio!

Badgering the fam

I arrived home Sunday night after an amazing weekend at CTN Expo, and just last night my sister flew back to Portland too! Unusually enough, it's snowing a little and the light was beautiful today, so Flannery kindly sat for a speed-paint this morning :) Here's the result!

Ginger monster

That test animation of a fig warrior I posted a while ago is an outgrowth of a short film idea I'm putting together in the back of my mind while everything else is going on. Now that I'm home and have some time to spend, I'm trying to develop the rest of her little world! This here is a bit of feeling around for the design of her arch-nemesis, a Ginger Monster.

Mighty fine!

Finals are kicking my butt! In a great way that means I will hopefully come out of it a better artist :)
Here's my character animation final, using a quote from O Brother Where Art Thou and a character from Secret of Kells. This hasn't been critiqued yet, so I'm sure edits are on the way!

Layout adventures

An unexpected opportunity arose just a week or two ago to do a layout painting for Natalia's senior film, Out of Time. I don't think I ever realized just how much I love love love layout painting until working on this. It's unfinished (much work and polishing to be done over break), but in the meantime here it is so far:

I'm not dead yet!

From my Vimeo description:
"No girl wants to marry a doctor who can't tell if a man's dead or not."
Thus spoke the fine Mr. Robert Downey Jr. in the recent Sherlock Holmes movie. I built and animated this plague doctor and his corpsey friend as a dialogue exercise in Flash CS5. If you're familiar with the beautiful Secret of Kells, you can probably tell that I was heavily inspired by the aesthetics of that film. I really love that flat, illustrative style they brought to the animation, and Flash provided a good opportunity to experiment with that without having to go though the entire frame-by-frame cleanup/ink-and-paint process that would be the norm for hand drawn animation.

Inspired by...

...Nico Marlett! Last Saturday I had the wonderful opportunity to go sit at Gallery Espresso and just draw for a few hours. My friend Gui, who was there as well, had brought a Nico Marlett sketchbook which was hugely inspiring to look through. For those who don't know, Marlett was a designer on How to Train Your Dragon, and if you saw the film, those were his drawings in the credits. Amazing, amazing stuff! So after swooning over his sketches for a while, I tried to approach people-drawing in his style. It was really fun!

Look out!

WOW things are getting pretty crazy there is hardly time to think or any such nonsense but here have a new animation!

It is a reel for demonstration

So that animation expo at the end of the quarter, where we shall hopefully get a glimpse of future shenanigans in the world of employment... There's a screening process for interviews, and demo reels and portfolios were due today - here's a link to the reel I threw together for the occasion!


It's actually a little unfortunate that it's due now, because what with the classes I'm in this quarter I feel like I'll be producing a lot better animation very soon. Oh well! It is all a process :)

Mushu - The Final Cut!

It took a lot of edits, but finally I've got a finalized version of my Mushu head turn. It sort of feels like real animation now, I think! At the very least it's a huge improvement over my very first version, and I learned a lot in the process, so what more could I ask?

Gesturama

I've been doing a ton of gesture drawing lately for speed sketching, and it's been a blast! It's especially handy because at the end of the quarter, a number of other SCAD students and I will be going to Los Angeles for an animation expo, where (we hope!) we'll be able to get some portfolio reviews. These sketches are what I've thrown together so far - it'll probably get pared down for the final portfolio :P




^The sequential drawings in the upper left were from the Jackie Chan flick Wheels on Meals - Jackie takes a spectacular fall and gets up in this neat motion.


^More Jackie Chan in this one - the final battle of Snake in the Eagle's Shadow.


^A few cafe and airport drawings, and then sketches from a trip to the zoo!

Mido Mountain

Oh yes I have made some Animations in Flash! The second project for Digicel was an abstract music video, which I present for your viewing pleasure:



The music was Mido Mountain, a rendition of a traditional Chinese tune by YoYo Ma. There was just so much great movement in the music that I couldn't turn it down, even though the clip was a bit long. I definitely learned a ton about using Flash by working through this video - it was a great excuse to play around with the program!

Mushu head turn

First assignment for Character I with Webber: the Mushu head turn! Focusing on breakdowns and overlapping action.

EDIT: updated version with a few new corrections!

The repair shop

Back to SCAD... And it's a full three studio classes this quarter! Speed sketching, Character Animation 1, and Digital Cel Animation. I'm really excited about all these drawing-intensive classes - hoping I'll improve as much as I can during these ten weeks.

My first Digicel assignment was a background in Flash. It was a little tough to get a hang of thinking in vectors rather than bitmap brushes like Photoshop, but quite fun after a while! So here it is, my little bicycle repair shop by the sea :)

A few summer sketches

Just got home from my summer internship at Sony, and thought I'd upload a few sketchbook sketches from the past months!

The Los Angeles airport...

Went out to a field to see fireworks on the 4th of July, and this older Asian lady was doing this awesome bouncy little dance, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing and kicking her heels up - it was awesome :)

The Hare Krishna parade down by Venice beach was a fantastic and colorful thing!

Quintessential LA: sunglasses, yoga mat, and rollerskates.

Yum!

Fig warrior! Cross-posting this with the Vignette Gazette, a summer blog for the SCAD animation community.