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.