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!

Panthers and Alligators

Just a quick little update with a few things I've been working on, as I've been informed that I don't update my blog neeeeear enough. I guess I have no excuse, except for an impatience for scanning. It's 2010! My scanner should collect my art, scan it for me while I drink lemonade under the sun, and then write my blog posts for me. Psh... the future is a total letdown.

Anyway, I have utterly failed thus far in actually sharing any real animations from my animation course, so here's the latest. PINK PANTHER WALK. If I never see another Pink Panther cartoon it will be too soon. Unless it's the 90s version with Matt Frewer.



Our next animation assignment is the head rotation, and I've chosen Louis the Alligator from Disney's The Princess and the Frog (which is a freaking amazing movie, by the way, and you should spend lots of money on seeing it many times so that Disney takes the hint and keeps producing classically-animated films).

So I've been drawing many Louiseses... seses to get a feel for the character before I even attempt to rotate him. He's actually hilariously fun to draw, but since he's just a big blob for the most part, he's also kind of tricky. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting close.



I adore this gator.

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.