Monday, December 31, 2007

Veldt Character Sketches

   

For the final project last semester I did character turnarounds for the family in The Veldt.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Dada Hyena

A good friend of mine, Aidan, is creating some of the best comics you can read online on his site Dada Hyena. And to make it even better (and winning my fandom forever) I appear in the latest strip as a gender-ambiguous narwhale. Yes, he's that awesome.

Friday, November 23, 2007

Comics!

I did a short comic for Women's Review of Books, which is available now. I haven't seen a copy yet myself, butmy comic is a 1-page life story of a fictional female writer in the 20's.

While we're at it, Juicy Mother 2 is a graphic novel currently available on Amazon. I have a comic in there about comic book geek girls falling in love on the internet.

I still do comics!

Thursday, November 15, 2007



So I've been keeping busy lately. Completely reworked Artemis based on some aniamtion requirements given to me from some pros, and started doing character sketches for Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt". My first pass was a ton of crazy loose emotional sketches, and this round I played around with textures and colors for the characters. I feel like I need to do dozens of more drawings for each character, but it's a start. Learning that character design is a lot of WORK. It's not just fun and games but takes a lot of thinking and acting and posing and drawing. I might be in the wrong business.



But Seriously, what have I been up to? I've been shooting aliens with my gent:

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Greek God Character Designs

For our latest assignment, we're working in groups to design a short film based on the 2008 Olympics. My group decided on a story involving the Greek gods Zeus, Artemis and Hermes, and I've been designing the look of the characters. We're going for something graphic and simple, based on a warm color palette. Take a look:





This is one of the more accessible styles I've tried, and it's giving me a good insight into how the creative process works in a group, and how my work is received by others. Here, for example, is the initial character lineup sketch, along with the revised, lineup in color.




And lastly, this assignment started with a vegetable-based character design exercise, which gave birth to Mina Baroo, a supermodel and star pole-vaulter. She's also a great great decendant of Hermes, if'n you couldn't tell.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

The Duke's Bedroom - process




This has been one of the more intensive pieces I've done, finally utilizing every step of the process, from thumbnailing to photo referencing to scanning thumbnails, blowing up thumbnails, drawing over thumbnails, and lightboxing a finished drawing, and then doing all the coloring in photoshop, and even doing inkwork over the photoshop printouts. It never would have come this far if we hadn't been forced to re-work it every week for a month after thinking we were finished with the project. However, after showing this piece to a few pros, composition/character posing issues were brought up and now I'll probably be redrawing it. However, while this process took me over a month to complete, I think it'll go much faster and look better next time. Starting to "see" what I want and how to do it, which is exciting. And also managing to get some nice paint effects in photoshop.

So I'm considering changing the time period for the new bedroom picture.... maybe 1920's flapper fight? I could make a series!

Sunday, September 23, 2007

My Last Duchess








Here are some of the pieces I produced for our first BFA project "My Last Duchess". Experimenting with various mediums and styles, working on the final one right now...

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Two art books that came out this past month that every artist should have:



James Jean: ProcessRecess and Pulp Hope

Both are beautiful, inspiring crazy books.

It's the third week of BFA already, we're working on a project for Robert Browning's "The Last Duchess" and I'm putting together 5 environment/visual development/story illustrations for next week. Currently it's a mass of reference pictures, rapid sketches and thumbnails (see desktop). I'm studying James Jean's work and learning how to take my raw scratchy pencil drawings into fine, clean-lined illustrations. I'm not sure how to deal with color... I think I'm going to stick with gouache and acrylic for the most part, there's not quite enough time to experiment with Photoshop this week.

Yesterday I went to the premier of Glory Boy Days, the movie I worked on the art department for last winter, and it was an amazing turn-out, everyone who worked on it was there, driving from San Francisco, flying from LA, bringing our family and loved ones, and we all got to wait on the sidewalk outside the theater for three hours because of technical difficulties, and then got to see 10 minutes of the film before the audio went out completely. Still, despite the premiere being a bust, we talked about those 10 minutes for half of dinner afterwards, and it was great to see everyone all together. (optimism,optimism)

Illustrating, illustrating, more on that later.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

4th of July



A date on 4th of July... watercolor, gouache and ink.

Monday, August 13, 2007

Set Design

Over the past month I got a job designing sets and just finished the process of designing a set in Sketchup, then working with clients to get the look they want, and then seeing the set built and shot. One of the greatest, weirdest experiences I've had:




DSC01740

DSC01767

DSC01795

DSC01806

DSC01776

Saturday, June 23, 2007

The Summer Set



A follow-up to my last post, the 3-part summer beach series is finished! This was my way to get back into the swing of directing myself through a project outside of the classroom or freelance environment. It's a completely different feeling, and, I think, very fulfilling.

My website's gone through some updates, I've uploaded some new images and now four of my comics are available to read online!

Sunday, June 17, 2007

cut-out beach scenes


This summer I'm focusing on doing a series of illustrations for more of an all ages audience, dealing with innocense and curious emotions, set in beach environments reflecting my stay in santa cruz. First came a series of sketches, which then led me to start building the scenes and characters piece-by-piece, drawing and painting on different sheets of watercolor paper and then collaging them together. Here's alligator boy without his background, and the first finished piece.


Thursday, May 03, 2007

Al's Monumental World of Popsicles

Our last assignment in Visual Development was to design interesting popsicles, and I came up with a set of popsicle shapes and flavors based on monuments like the Taj Mahal, Mayan Temples, Easter Island Heads, Buddha Statues and the like. Then, we developed the character who would sell them and the cart s/he'd sell them out of. I came up with Al, a retired high school History teacher who, after his wife's death, decided he wanted to benefit the community by educating the children about the multicultural world through treats. Despite his great aspirations, the kids don't listen to his lectures and only want the ice cream, but he continues to hand-make the popsicles and sell them out of his ultra-tacky cart. He's extremely sad and lonely, and only seems to feel ebtter when selling his creations. His daughter, Gertrude, is 15, entering puberty, and mortified by her father. A daddy's girl her entire life, she still feels an obligation to him, and will sometimes run the cart during the summer, but she's dedicated herself to her social life: boys, short skirts, and stuffing her bra. Al, of course, is completely terrified of the boys she gets attention from, and usually scares them away with voodoo-popsicles. Al and Gertrude share an uncomfortable, awkard bond that I don't think we've seen the last of yet.



Wednesday, April 11, 2007



Rough sketches for the very flamboyant and wicked queen of an African-influenced fantasy story.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Viz Dev Kitchen



Our first Viz Dev project: create a kitchen for the short story "The Ordinary Son" by Ron Carlson. We took some liberties with the kitchen, seeing as the family never used the kitchen, didn't own furniture or a fridge. Here we have the younger genius brother making his mathematical ramblings on butcher paper, while the ordinary son tries to read to make himself genius. I wanted the eye to wander between the two of them. Drawn with pens, gesso and pencil. I've never felt both so happy (because I've never drawn anything like this) and unhappy (because I can't achieve the level I want to) with a piece before. And so the semester begins!

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Windows/Doors/Saltshakers




The Spring semester has begun. A lot of my work is going into Visual Development (or advanced illustration). At this point we're doing studies of windows and doors. And salt shakers. (to the left) Next we're designing a 1960's kitchen to go alongside a story.

I'm also working on a music video project, designing sets that are going to be built in the next couple weeks. Doing some more work in art direction for films, and getting a kick out of it. The documentary is moving along on the backburner. I'm making some side cash doing graphic design work. Glory Boy Days is almost completed filming.