mans

mystery man

old man

Drawrings

Here are some drawings, of which the most recent is probably two months old or so. 2-4 months after the drawing seems to be the time where I look back at it and like it enough. Just before the drawings are old enough for me to think of them as examples of how bad I used to be. That period is what I'm going to say is the ...."maybe I'll post this on my blog" period.

Bad Seeds

Some shady characters and a pirate. I think I'm coming to the realization that 90% of what I draw seems to be male characters who are most likely involved in some kind of illegal operation or nerdy professors in suits. I do draw other things (I do!) but these always seem to end up being the ones I like enough to post.

bla bla paintings & drawings

I've been trying to get back into painting and drawing slowly after having stopped working as an animator about two months ago. Primarily, trying to finally learn how to paint digitally and doing some more finished work rather than just drawings. Here is some stuff I did in the last 2 weeks or so.

Hunter Killer


The Student


The Passenger


The Girlfriend

These were all quick sketches done as part of a daily sketch group forum. Most taking about 40-50 minutes. Its surprisingly relaxing to have a time limit, kind of takes the pressure off to know if the piece sucks in the end you can just blame it on not having enough time.




Two old drawings from maybe a year ago that I had scanned sitting on my computer that I applied some "colour" to last week.



Two studies of frames from this piece I saw on motionographer. I thought it was a really cool example of how much can be done with getting people to wear a bunch of random fallout looking crap and walking around the desert, pulling the entire thing off with sweet ass photography and design. hmm inspiring.



This one was kind of a breakthrough for me in that I think I found a technique for drawing digitally that I feel comfortable with. This almost looks like a pencil drawing, which is what I like drawing with the most so it was nice to finally find a way of replicating that feeling digitally. As for the subject, I was intending it to be more about the background but after I got through rendering the guy I felt it could hold its own with just the character....and I'm really lazy about backgrounds.

And before you go and question his validity as a viking, keep in mind that there is no actual historical proof that vikings wore helmets with horns on them. Many historians agree that the horn helmet thing was just a propaganda fabrication to portray the vikings as more barbaric than they actually were.

Oscar Sanchez, Attorney at Law

Yes, first update in a while. While I've been away I have noticed that there's this thing called 3D animation, apparently it's pretty big right now.
Ya so, I've decided to dedicate myself to learning some of these 3d things. Primarily I've been working on stuff in ZBrush. This is my second attempt at a model zbrush. I call him Oscar Sanchez, he's a lawyer, he's Mexican, he's not very tall...at all.

Head Model in Zbrush

Concept Sketch

I have the ambition to actually rig this guy and animate him, but considering that Zbrush meshes as detailed as this one are typically not easy to rig its going to be quite the challenge. Currently I'm going to stick to working on his head and seeing if I can get that move before I get into the rest. It's a big challenge considering I've never rigged anything this complex before but I figure even if it fails I'll have a completed model and had learned something. We'll see...we'll see.

Here's a jungle man and some drawings I did on a cough syrup bottle when I was sick a few weeks ago.

A Newie

So this is it, the finished 4th year film, in its two minute 44 second entirety. Really I probably spent maybe the last three or four months of the eight we had working on this, the first semester being spent juggling with different ideas of which none seemed right. I never did come up with something that I stuck with that first semester. Instead I decided to go the route of building the film more or less scene by scene, doing rough thumbnail boards and taking out scenes and adding new ones in all throughout the process. I even managed to squeeze in a few changes after my scene timings were locked for the music and the clean animation was done.
Did this work? Maybe, sort of...in a way. In other words... I don't really know, it resulted in a different sort of film than what would have come out if I had a solid board that I stuck to from the start. This way of working was more satisfying to myself, I could see the film unfold and new things come out as I was making it. There wasn't any issues with looking at the same idea for too long and loosing sight of the focus because the idea would change in whichever way I would decide that day. It was definately a more interesting way for the creator but how was it for the viewer... maybe not as interesting. It's kind of the equivalent of animating straight ahead vs. keyframed and planned. One is more fun to do for the animator but usually results in incosistencies, the character becomes half the size and completely off model by the end of the scene. On the other hand, planning and keyframing is kind of boring, you know exactly what's going to happen before you draw the bulk of the drawings but the animation is more likely to look whole and consistent, it is more likely to convey the meaning it originally intented to with greater precision.
Maybe the last year of school was the wrong time to experiment, it seems like the smart move to take all the knowledge you gained and do something tried and tested. That seems like a good idea, but when does that stop? How do you stop yourself from repeatedly doing the things you already know you can do? A failed attempt is better than no attempt at all, that's all it really comes down to.

Film is up at youtube here