About Sarah Anne Davis (SADCAT)

Let me tell you a little about myself. In third person, of course, so as to give the impression that someone was so floored by my genius that they decided to write about my life.

Sarah Davis has been working as a freelance artist since the age of 15. Specializing in colourful fantasy illustration, sequential art, and character design, Sarah has worked for such companies as Ponder Games, Inc., Channel M, and Coca Cola, while maintaining personal projects like SADCAT's STUDIO and The Awakened Online Comic. In 2009 she graduated Art Fundamentals with high honours from Sheridan College. She is currently enrolled in Sheridan's Bachelor of Applied Arts Animation program.

I am almost not as crazy as I look.

Commission Information

Looking for an artist for a project?
Have a vision in your head and want it brought to life?
Maybe you'd just love to see one of your original characters drawn in a different style?

I am available for hire on a freelance basis!


If you'd like to commission me for your project or for a single piece, send me an e-mail.

Please provide as much information as possible about what is required, and the time-frame for completion, and I will get back to you with a price estimate and further information.


..:: Single Piece Commissions ::..
For simple personal commissions, my prices range from $10 for clean sketches to $50 for painted works. For more complex pieces with multiple characters and intensive background work I charge more. The price for anything really depends greatly on the complexity and the style (cell-shading versus fully rendered, for example). Send me a note with what you have in mind and I can give you a price estimate.

Children love the petting zoo!

For my layout package we were required to depict a scene from the Royal Winter Fair. Who better than Crazy Mouth? The lovable alpaca! He just wants you to put some food into his crazy mouth.



For the record, I DID feed Crazy Mouth, and he was very polite, despite the frothing.

Also made an ATC of Stitch for Victoria! She's loves her some Stitch. And if there're any Sheridan students reading this who are interested in ATCs (Artist Trading Cards -- check it out), I will hopefully be starting an official ATC club at the school. First meeting after the winter break! If you're interested, drop me a note.

It's that time again...

FINAL PROJECTS! And what a very large and terrifying amount of them! Let's see here... What do we have on the menu.

• Ball and tail animation (it's a ball... with a tail! Bouncing and acting and squashing and stretching and S and C curves oh my.)
• Artist presentation (from what I gather we pick an artist to profile and give a presentation on them--sounds too simple. I suspect a trick.)
• Final storyboard project (yet to be assigned, called "Bird in the Hand". Suspecting more tricks.)
• Repeating panoramic background (with two characters included I believe).
• Two 9x12 juxtaposition background gouache paintings.
• Second life drawing portfolio!
• Bone drawings (9 views of vertebrae, 3 views of scapula, 4 views of pelvis, 4 views of skull, two views of arm and hand, two views of leg and foot--most of these are done already).
• Leica reel! 20-40 storyboard panels music, sound effects, camera moves, etc.
• Research paper on animal welfare legislation in Canada.

BRING IT ON!!

I've got my tonals finished for the dual paintings. I decided to go with Safety and Danger. I was going to go with Dead and Alive (zombies) versus Not Dead OR Alive (robots), but I had a dream last night showing these alternate environments and decided they were more interesting. Plus the first idea was kind of a joke. Kind of.

I also finished my expression sheet, which will be handed in tomorrow. Character Design is definitely my favourite class, and this was my favourite project so far. We had to do an animal character, and it had to be a gender I hadn't drawn yet, so it could have been annoying (not a fan of anthro characters, and I always prefer to draw guys), but I made it FUN, by making the most hideous pig lady ever. Well okay, she could easily have been more hideous. She's mildly hideous. Still fun.



And finally, I figured I would post this here, as I had requests for a copy. I wrote this Sheridan Ghost Story for my English presentation with Chelsea on whether or not hauntings were real. Everybody who screamed on cue was hilarious and amazing and made the whole thing go over really well. It was delightful.

A Sheridan Ghost Story
By Sarah Anne Davis

This story was told to us by faculty members who have requested to remain anonymous, for this story is so horrible—so gruesome—that it may in fact scare away any future students wishing to attend this once thought to be happy, peaceful school.

But Sheridan College has a dark past. A bloody past. A dark and bloody past full of darkness. And blood.

It was a long time ago. Too long now for most to recall, except perhaps Mark Thurman. A sweet young girl with massive aspirations wanted only to attend Sheridan College’s world-renowned animation program. Little did she know… her aspirations would end in tears. Bloody… scream-filled tears…

She worked on her portfolio into each and every dark and stormy night. Rotations and storyboards. Expression sheets and layouts. White piles of copy paper ran red with the blood of her endless devotion…

And then, Portfolio Day.

Her rotations wouldn’t rotate! Inconsistent lines and weights!

Her characters were emotionless and dull! Not enough angles!

Her compositions were generic!

Life drawing lifeless!

What happened to the second action pose!? Pose… pose…

…
…
…

Transfer to Art Fundamentals.

(EVERYONE SCREAMS.)

Dreams crushed, the girl went insane. Picking up a deadly camera tripod, a murderous rampage ensued. She destroyed her competition, one by one, until she made it to the top of the waiting list. But it was too late.

In her madness and despair, the girl staggered to the nearest Trafalgar crosswalk and was killed by the unstoppable force of fifty old people in Buicks.

It is said that the girl’s tortured spirit plummeted to the farthest depths of hell, wherein she pleaded with the devil himself to spare her… to send her back to the school she so longed for.

A deal with the devil was made, and in the midst of cackling laughter her spirit was sent back. But her fate was sealed. Her punishment far more gruesome than her crime. Each day, every day, her spirit would cling to the halls… repeating Art Fundamentals for all eternity.

(EVERYBODY SCREAMS.)

To this day she can still be seen drifting through the A wing, withholding vending machine snacks, knocking over stools, and leaving unwanted invitations to pub nights in every locker. If you listen carefully, you can still hear her pencil tearing away at each new sheet of paper, so desperately trying to break free of her cruel purgatory, to one day see the light boxes at the end of the tunnel and pass into the next world…

Those damn, dirty swines.

Well the last few weeks sure have been an exciting ride. Albeit, exciting in the "Dear God help me I'm dying of swine flu" sort of way. First was reading week. Ahh, reading week. A time to relax, a time to head home and see family and ignore whatever homework you're supposed to be doing while you nap on the couch in your PJs, or something like that. Welp, I made the very silly mistake of walking in the freezing rain wearing only a sweater (okay, well, I probably had pants and shoes too) on the Friday my mother came to pick me up. I promptly got sick on the Saturday with a sore throat, which turned into a runny nose, which turned into a cough and runny nose, which turned into a sensation of breathing dust, which turned into a migraine, which turned into puking, which turned into a tiny single-celled organism, which turned into a fish with legs, which turned into a frog on the bump on the branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea--

It wasn't H1N1, just a cold brought about by depraved Canadian weather, and I was feeling slightly better when I came back to school, though I was clearly not better in the not-still-spreading-my-various-bacteriums-around sense, because Annie promptly caught it.

Sooooo another week passes. Annie's had the worst of it and is on the mend when we all go to the Royal Winter Fair to draw animals. It's a fun day, with the exception of the 95,000 children running everywhere, most of whom were screaming and crying and pushing and shoving and coughing and spitting and leaking far worse than most of the livestock. It was inevitable, and delightfully ironic, that one of the little buggers coughed all over me in the "swine area", just a few feet away from a sign about swine flu, in the province of Swine, in the township of Swineshire.

You can see where this is headed.

By the time I got on the train that night, I could feel it. Sore throat was back, as well as the cough. The next day the cough was worse, and I was aching allover, I was hot and cold and tired as hell. Then the stomach issues hit me very hard and very suddenly and the less said about that the better. On Sunday a thermometer was acquired, which showed I had a fever. Congestion followed, ear clogged up and was in serious pain. I had an exam on Tuesday, so I staggered off to school to get that over with. I barely made it through with all of my stupid embarrassing coughing fits, (and I'm pretty sure I wrote a one-page essay about logical fallacies being, er, uh, really false and illogical and full of... fallaciousness) after which I continued my stagger to the clinic.

I was forced to don the MASK OF SHAME, was proclaimed diseased with H1N1 (red stamp on the forehead), and banished from the school. The wide birth everyone accorded me on the way out was both hilarious and mightily humiliating.

So I have been sleeping all week, feeling very restless and wanting to return to school, but for this damn cough that would surely give my secret away.



Feeling slightly better now, though still hacking up sputum every colour of the rainbow (if that rainbow were green, yellow, and brown). I feel desperate to leave the house and get back to work! But I think there is a very important lesson to be learned in all of this...

KEEP YOUR KID AT HOME IF THEY'RE SICK HOLY MOTHER OF CHEESE. Who the crap takes their child out of school for an agricultural fair anyway? $20 admission and they're amused by llama hairdos and pooping sheep for all of half an hour (pooping sheep definitely moreso). Try as you might, your kid is going to realize quickly that this new cow looks exactly like the last cow, which looks suspiciously similar to the last fifty lethargic, motionless cows, and you're the one who's going to have to pry all of that caked-on leftover cow from his little shoe treads at the end of the day.

In short: Royal Winter Fair! Hooray! I had an awesome time and I highly recommend it! 8D

No complaints here.

OMFG ANIMATION FIRST YEAR WTFBBQ!!!1ONE

Yeah okay, so it's once again blatantly obvious that not only were the last two months of my summer fairly eventful, but I am back in school! AND I'M FREAKING LOVING IT. So far Sheridan's animation program is everything I hoped it would be. I'm learning lots already, the teachers are incredible, I've made friends, and am generally ecstatic with my classes and the amount of art I now end up producing on any given day.

That said, I can't post ALL of it. Not only would I be spending hours of my days scanning pages of copy paper, but a lot of the stuff that shows up in my sketchbook is probably only interesting/funny to those who were present when it was initially drawn. Not to say I won't share some seriously random drawings, however.

And hey! Speaking of random drawings! What a convenient opening...

Okay, so... Hm. Most of this is from the first two weeks of school. Zombies and monster thingies... Then we've got some Garretts drawn for Character Design (will be using him for my posing assignment), and... an arm, drawn by nobody!

Oh, and Blimey, who is better than everyone.

And now we journey even further into the realm of randomness... Apparently all the cool kids in our class are playing Pet Society these days, so the other day we were all drawing each others' Pet Society pets. And I guess they were supposed to be cute or something, but what's the fun in that? I drew my own pet, Doug, Chelsea's mentally special pet, Dillan, and Annie's pet, Shuffle, who hasn't been checked on in six months.

And a random boar for Annie...



What else do we have here... oh, yeah.



This is the character I used for my rotation assignment. Earl was just sort of randomly created in the caf one day, and he followed me to Character Design, infiltrating my project. For these pictures I was asked to mimic a pose the teacher had drawn, using Earl, and then show Earl running, walking, and jumping.

The next assignment is posing, for which I'm using Garrett! I spent last class playing with pose ideas... now it's just a matter of making them all larger and inking them. I do this sort of stuff for fun anyway, so this assignment is one I will enjoy muchly. Character Design is definitely my favourite class. I can't quite get over how unreal it is to be told by a teacher to do something I love to do, and something that would have gotten me in trouble if caught doing it in any other school.



Promised to post this one for Annie. Her characters, Ainmire and Kara! This is usually hanging on her bedroom wall but I had to steal it back in order to scan. :B

And lastly, some concept art for Animation. We have to animate a marine animal, and I'm either going to do an eel or a stingray. More likely the stingray, but I didn't have a ref. handy in class today, so I drew the eel instead.

And speaking of animation, I'll try and post a video of something I've done. Most likely my balloon or pendulum, buuuuut I think that's enough for this particular post...

Cheers!

Eventful and Creepy.

Well so far this summer has been very wet, very cold, and rather uneventful (lots of art and lots of writing but not so much actual... EVENTS). BUT, I took last week off and invited Annie down, and we wandered allover the city, watched many movies, and I actually got some time for random sketching. In other words, I actually have something to post here. SHOCK AND SURPRISE.

First little collection is a mix of the completely random, and then an exercise where we opened a dictionary, pointed to a word, and had to interpret it somehow. It worked... for the most part.

The second collection of sketches I've been having a lot of fun with. My mother loves to write and it was recommended that she go to a cafe at least a couple times a week to write on her laptop and listen to the people around her (not so much as an excuse to be creepy, but rather to get an idea of how different people talk). I thought this would be an excellent chance to draw a nice assortment of people and start a collection of different faces in my sketchbook (though my major excuse is that I am, in fact, pretty creepy). I'll hopefully be posting many more William's Coffee Pub Face Dumps in the future.




Oh, and a belated HAPPY CANADA DAY! And a happy 4th of July to those across the border. :B

We don't need no stinkin' surprises!

Wow! You'd think I was suddenly on vacation or something from the lack of updates...

I have been super uber ridiculously crazy-busy since getting home, but I'm really enjoying myself. The Awakened updating again has been REALLY refreshing. I can't tell you how happy I am to be able to devote time to that project again, and the practice with digital painting is paying off and I am learning oodles (yes, OODLES).

I'm also working on several business endeavors, as the summer job hunt is turning up absolutely nothing so far, and freelancing is really all that's left. I'm not quiiiiite ready for new commissions yet, as I have a couple that NEED to be finished before I can in good conscience spend time on anything new. But I'm working my tail off daily on those, so it shant be long.

I think my major problem with freelancing in the past was that I allowed too many personal commissions to come in without deadlines, and then new, larger jobs would come in WITH strict deadlines, and I had no choice but to push back the other commissions again and again until a painful amount of time had passed and though I knew there was nothing I could really do about it, I felt like a jerk. SO, as of now, ALL commissions MUST come with due dates. Even if you're of the mind: "Oh, take your time! No rush!" just... make something up! "Take your time" could mean years of I have a steady stream of work with deadlines always on the table. Come up with a number, and it will be done on that date. Eeeeeverybody wins!


All right, enough of that for now. Got a couple things to share, starting with the raffins (Gadzooks and Blimey for those who don't know me personally). I haven't taken nearly enough photos of the girls since they were babies, so I grabbed the camera the other night and photographed playtime. Unfortunately they got overly preoccupied with half of a Kinder Surprise casing and didn't want to do anything but fight over that... still cute though!

Aaaaand, finally, one of the commissions I've finished since coming home. This is the client's original character, Pasibor (kind of Cthulu like, and therefore awesome), who is looking after his ancient city.

Already?

I'm finding it incredibly hard to believe that today is already the last day of school! This year has been amazing. A year ago I never would have guessed that I'd be here, going into animation, leasing a house with three friends!

I have no idea what's going to happen this summer. I'm looking for work, obviously, but finding slim pickings so far. I'll be freelancing in the meantime. Contact me to get on my commission list (though I will be finishing up a few outstanding commissions first).

Finished my last project of the year yesterday, in the form of a chair design for Imaging Systems. I of course chose a chair designed to kill people, because... well why wouldn't I choose that? Behold, The Perforator!

Whatever looks good...

In my quest to conquer the elusive digital painting skill, I decided to pick from the 100 Themes list that floats allover the Interwebz and paint a little scene. I ended up just starting from the beginning with "Introduction" and stuck Nenua and Fray in there. This is vaguely how I imagine they might have first met one another.


And because some friends have been asking me, here's a little collection of progress images. I know it's not really typical to chunk the painting in bit by bit, and usually I'll lay down general colours and light sources when I first get started... but for one reason or another, this one ended up being mostly layered in. Oh well... at least it worked!

I'll probably continue using the themes list whenever I'm lacking inspiration. Plus I still feel like I could spend more time learning about the Ghost of Man characters before I jump into the comic. Not to say you shouldn't expect *something* soon!

Goat Sucker

Well I never intended for this much time to pass between posts, but we're in the midst of portfolio days at Sheridan and I, like just about everyone else in my course, have been busy trying to meet that deadly deadline! Today I took a bit of a breather to really give my new tablet (his name is Julio Intuez) a proper workout. I wanted to draw/paint something completely using Julio, rather than rely on previously-sketched or inked creations.

I decided to draw a little dude I found in my sketchbook, who was born from a mask design for my 3D class (the mask is supposed to protect against a human frailty, so I chose my social anxiety; the mask completely obscures my identity and feelings and is covered in quills for that extra little bit of "NO TOUCHIE").

In the end I decided to use him as a species for Ghost of Man. One of my favourite cryptids, El Chupacabra!

I have a few sketches here and there that I need to scan and will hopefully have something unique for you all soon!

Sneaky Peeks and Fun Linkage

Test #1 was a success! And because it was a success, I will actually post a sneak peek (if it had been a disaster, well... I would have just kicked it under the beg, folded my arms behind my back, and wandered off whistling).

This is a page from the Prologue of Ghost of Man. The character featured isn't anyone super important (though certainly significant), so don't attempt to locate him hiding somewhere in the line-up below. I did a few things aside from painting the backgrounds that *should* cut comic creation time considerably, including the shrinkage of the page size from 8.5x11 to a more standard comic side of (roughly) 7x10. I also got rid of those coloured lines. Now, I'm a big fan of the coloured lines and I really think they look better in a finished piece of art, BUT, I can't be super picky. Pages can't take forever, so I'll keep the nice lines for other pieces.

So! There you have it. I enjoyed that experiment and am looking forward to painting again.


Now for something I found this past week...

Little People - A tiny street art project
http://little-people.blogspot.com/

I thought this was really cool, and suddenly I find myself searching for teeny tiny people on the street as I'm walking, just in case I miss something cool or accidentally smush them to death. The artist known as Slinkachu has set up ridiculously tiny people in ridiculously tiny scenes on the streets of London in a really unique and rather bizarre art experiment. Bizarre simply because... how many people have actually spotted them?

Check out the photos! And then be wary of teeny tiny people forever more.