CD Cover Design

Here is a CD package design I did for Birds Fled From Me. It was drawn from Rachel's concept of stylized drawings spreading outwards from the polaroid, and her love for owls. Unfortunately, the design wasn't used for the final product, but it's a fantastic album, available on myspace.

New Online Comic - 'Weird Fishes'

I've been showing you frames from my new comic lately, and now, with the power of the mighty internet, i'm publishing it on my website in weekly updates. Page 0 and 1 are now online, take a look at http://jamaicad.com/comic/ . I'll be updating with a new page every Tuesday, so please bookmark or rss the page. I have enough material to get us to summer, and there's a lot more on the way.

Thanks for looking! I'll post some 'making of' artwork in the upcoming weeks.

http://jamaicad.com/comic/

Flash Cleanup- Artemis

Working on cleaning up some animation in Flash this weekend. It's my first time cleaning up pencil tests frame-by-frame, and it's a strange combination of compelling/exciting and excruciating. To keep myself going, I colored one of the frames and composited in the background, and I'm pretty pleased:


Of course, it's at this stage in the game that I wonder: Did I design her too whorish?

It's going to be a long next couple weeks to get our whole short film cleaned up and colored, but the final product will be so worth it. It's super neat to see my character designs go through storyboards, animation, and now to get my hands dirty in the final stages.

As for now, with all the layers turned on, this is the sort of thing I'm looking at:


Wish me luck!

Redrawing old comics and NEWS

There's always that feeling when you look at your old work and imagine how different/better it would look if you redrew it now. I feel that, especially, with my old comics. Today I actually got a chance to redraw one of my old strips and wanted to share it. This is Dee and The Boy in the Bunny Suit, they appeared in my college newspaper three years ago, and they're the stars of my new book I'm working on. I wanted to start off the book with this original strip where they met, but, looking back at it, I knew I had to make it better. The kids are a little younger, and cleaned up and colored to fit in with the rest of the book. And after our brief flashback, we go to six years later...




This is a panel from a comic page that has been accepted in the Society of Illustrators 2008 Student Show. I'm extremely honored to have been accepted into the show, and I'm double-excited since the piece is a comic page. Comics as art, yeah!

Flash storyboards & cleanup

I've been working on storyboards lately, drawing them out in flash. Here are a few shots from the Beethoven-inspired ballroom scene we're doing in class.



I'm really finding a love for Flash, and I'm learning about the clean-up process. Here I have my initial sketch, line drawing in flash, and non-line.



And here, a panel from my upcoming comic. I'm thinking of making b/w stickers out of this image, eh?

Dee and The Boy in the Bunny Suit

Over winter I worked on a painting and began a new comic/graphic novel. Above you can see the painting, an image that captures the overall feeling of this new project. Dee, a girl who sees imaginary things, and The Boy in the Bunny suit, her best friend and companion. This piece is done in Photoshop, using layers of sketches, linework, painting and digital color.

The comic book pages I'm working on are in color, and it's my favorite project so far. I'll start posting frames in the upcoming weeks.

Also, for those of you in the Bay Area, the movie I helped with last winter, "Glory Boy Days", just came back from Slamdance and is going to be showing at San Jose's Cinequest in early March! I helped work on almost every set/location in the film, and /may/ make a brief appearance with my fellow art department, so definitely take a look. I'll be there Friday night March 7th, and you can buy your tickets here.

Veldt Character Sketches

   

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

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.

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!

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:

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.

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!

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...

Last Duchess __ Sketch

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.

4th of July

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

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:

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!

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.

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.