It Begins (Continues)...

PORTFOLIO-ING CONTINUES.

Fell quite a bit behind, unfortunately. We had been expecting it to happen for a while, but my grandma passed away on the 30th, and art has been the furthest thing from my mind. I am forcing myself to really jump back into it this weekend, however, and so far so good. The creativity is coming back to me, so I'm exploiting it as much as possible.

I have a few big pieces in the works, but I managed to finish this smaller one tonight. I'm trying the 100 Themes Challenge at long last, and this was for #1. Introduction.

Little kid Chase and Sue! Pretty sure it was all downhill from there.

Merry Christmas?

Just posted a placeholder on The Awakened website. I plan to install ComicPress over the Christmas break, and then with luck some actual comic-making will be initiated.


And speaking of Christmas, I have a piece of lovely, wholesome holiday art to share. This was done for our English class, of all things. The theme was "Capitalist Scrooge". Simple explanation is that by the end of the story, Scrooge is still a capitalist, regardless of how generous he may have become with his money. Lots of meaning forced into every corner, which may or may not have been lost as I went on, just trying to make the thing look nice.

No, I don't believe the argument this illustration is trying to make, but it made for something interesting to draw.


Finally, I wanted to share this... I'm sure every animation student under the sun has already seen it (I believe no less than 20 people posted it on my Facebook over the past couple days), but it really does deserve all the attention it's getting. Absolutely beautiful little film.

School + The Awakened = ??? (Profit?)

And the race to catch up on missed posts continues.

Today, more "Floating Head Syndrome" sketches. This time of Asher and Montague. Both of them benefited from a nose job, and I would apparently make a rather shoddy plastic surgeon, because crooked hooks and gigantism abound.

I've heard a bit of feedback on both of these re-designs already, and I had to laugh at how many people thought I'd made Asher "ugly". It made me smile for the fact that Asher was *always* supposed to be a very ugly, ugly man. He's one of those so-ugly-he's-charming characters. So if anything, this update has taught me that I really have learned something about character variation. If the old Asher appeared "hot" to people, then I fell far short of my goal. So, as Asher is properly ugly now, I am quite pleased!

Received a mostly positive response for Monty, except maybe a little dislike for his new nose, but we can't all have beautiful, identical noses, people!


Aaaaaand in the world of school, I have... more Awakened stuff!

The assignment was a walk and run. We had to use contrasting characters, so I chose to animate Plague and Famine. I was juggling a fair number of projects alongside this one, so it's not as elaborate as I would have liked (particularly the interaction), but it did give me a chance to update their character designs a little.

(Apologies for the awful white BLOB in the corner. For whatever reason, whenever I put this clip online, the compression murders everything. If you squint, you might have some vague idea of what's happening.)

Definitely enjoying the chance to bring my established characters to life (though I can't do it for each assignment... as, well, the idea is to create new characters).

Floating heads and boards.

I continue to get back into the Awakened groove with a multitude of little Chase and Sue heads. Chase seems to be pretty much settled in his new design, but I think Sue could still use some work. Asher and the other Hunters are probably up next.




Also got a couple school-related images. Well, technically EIGHT school-related images, but they... kind of go together... so it's like... two, really. *cough*

STORYBOOOOOOOOOAAAAARDS!

I'm really enjoying this class, because I adore sequential art and acting through characters, and Nancy Beiman has a wonderfully twisted sense of humour. Our first assignment was to come up with beat boards for two separate poems, after which we choose one to create a proper storyboard for.






I clearly enjoyed the second one more, so that's the one I'll be boarding out in full.

AND NOW I MUST RUN, for Chelsea is going to demonstrate to me how she achieves such amazing lineart on Photoshop.

Cheers!

Oh hey we're back!

Second year of animation has begun and I really didn't realize how freaking much I missed this place. I'm back with my little second family, meeting a lot of people I haven't met before thanks to the second year studio, and all of my teachers seem pretty damn rad.

Already swamped with homework, but as always it can hardly even be called that. Too much fun to be lumped into that dangerous category.

A few weeks ago was Fan Expo, and that was amazing as always. I met a whole slew of awesome people, did some commishes, sold some prints and buttons, and was thrilled beyond measure once again to be reminded that this world is literally teeming with wonderful geeky people whose passion and opinions and obsessive random knowledge of everything keeps life perpetually interesting.




Above is the print I sold at the con (also sold bookmarks of each sin).

For the past month I've also been working hard on The Awakened, which I have very big plans for. Aside from a refined script, the characters are undergoing re-designs. Today I was working out Tristan's design, and I threw in a random Asher for good measure.





Will be going through all of the characters as I finish re-scripting Chapter 1. I'll be roughing pages and overhauling the website after that. Haven't decided yet whether I'll be updating on a page-by-page schedule or if I'll put whole chapters up at once. Depends on how much interest is still out there, haha.

Until next time!

The same ol'.

Well what's new? Mostly the same ol', same ol'. Lots of stuff happening all of the time, so I generally forget to mention each and every little thing. I guess the coolest new announcement is the Artist Trading Card Club that Annie and I started at Sheridan. We've been big into ATCs for a long time now, and have always kind of wondered how much interest an ATC club would get at the school. After several of my animation classmates urged me to go ahead with the idea, we discovered that, wow, in fact LOTS of people are interested! We've got about 30 members now and we had our first meeting last week, which consisted of art jamming, video watching, and junkfood-eating. It was really a lot of fun. We managed to fill four swap groups (5 people in each group) for February, and I'm pretty sure Sheridan's bookstore is going to be consistently selling out of their blank ATC card packs henceforth.

REALLY looking forward to seeing everybody's finished cards at our next meeting!

The painted doodle above is of creepy pervert, Fray. Just one of a lot of random drawings I've done for myself lately but can't find time to colour. I'm also hugely in the comic mood right now and desperate to work on some Awakened, but will have to wait for school to finish. It's like an itch I can't scratch. Especially with our story and film classes, which are really opening my mind to new ways of telling this story and better methods of getting around old obstacles. Maybe I'll get some time to at least sketch/ink some pages on break week.

COMICS. I'm reading a lot of them right now too. Currently I'm in the midst of:

• The Sandman #4: Seasons of Mists (I was really excited to start this one because it involves so much of the Endless, who I think are the bestest ever.)
• Fables #1: Legends in Exile (This one was recommended to me by my brother a day before I randomly found it in the Labyrinth and picked it up. REALLY enjoying the concept and the writing and even the art is sweet--gonna grab the next one as soon as I can)
• The Walking Dead: Compendium #1 (I have to start this one, though I'm excited to do so; it's just so damn enormous that I can't easily bring it to school to read on breaks)
• Batman: Scarecrow Tales (This was bought for no other reason than I like the Scarecrow and think he's the lamest villain ever, and therefore the coolest; and it turned out that the comics in this collection from 1941 through to about 1980 were seriously hilarious with the bad writing and terrible, terrible innuendos. Robin is a "playground instructor", riiiight. )

There are a bunch more I want to buy, but it has come to my attention that comics cost... MONEY!? The horror. I want to start Y: The Last Man and get the next Hellboy, and continue with Sandman and Fables and I want The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One and, and--stupid cheap student lifestyle. It does not play well with my need for good stories and pretty pictures. Oh well. My conversation with the dude at the comic book store might be worth a cheap giggle:

Me: "I'm looking for a comic, I think it's called "The Last Man"?"
Guy: "Y: The Last Man?"
Me: "... Because I want to read it?"

Yeah it might have been clever if I wasn't completely serious. Oh well. Have another video of the Pink Panther! This is the same panther animation from before, cleaned up and placed on a proper background, done for Digital Tools:



Cheers!

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!