Merry Christmas Everyone!!!

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Perspective Drawing Adventure!

My perspective drawing adventure started this fall semester, and I am glad to say I have learned so much from my class! I have the final drawings from my projects shown below, each representing a specific learning curve in my journey :) They are all labeled so take a look! And if you would like to see the images in a larger slideshow, just click on the picture!

Final Project:  Themed Restaurant "Dino Bite"

Flintstones inspired stylization

Concept to Plan to Two-Point Perspective

50's Restaurant Exterior
TwoPoint Perspective

     

50's Restaurant Interior
One Point Perspective

                                                                                                                    

"Wayne Museum of Natural History" Exterior
Three Point Perspective

"Wayne Museum of Natural History" Interior
Background for Catwoman Burglary Scene - Group Project
Five Point Perspective

Artist Discovery! : Therese Larsson

Tonight I want to share with you an artist whose digital portfolio I ran across while on the internet! She is Therese Larsson, and I just instantly fell in love with her illustrations! I was so taken with her use of color and the playful expressions on her characters that I instantly put her digital painting "You" as my desktop background so I could admire it further :) I found the use of realistic texture on the animals in her illustrations to be astounding, a quality that makes her characters that much more endearing! So I encourage you to give her online portfolio a look (click the link below!) and I hope you enjoy her work as much as I do!

http://www.thereselarsson.se/

Pocket watch: A Work in Progress

What is a gentleman without his pocket watch? Late! So to keep Gentleman Billy Goat from missing many important goings-on, I began this model! Ultimately it will be textured and given to Billy to keep in his vest pocket.

Gentleman Billy Goat: Textures!

I am happy to bring you up to date on my Billy Goat model! I am still nowhere near finished, but I do want to share with you my texture map and textures on my goat so far! The plan is to do more texturing with bump maps next, and add more detail to the painted textures (which you see here). Check back for more new posts and progress reports soon!

Gentleman Billy Goat: Eye Detail

Hello again! In my excitement to publish the finished screenshots of the complete model of Gentleman Billy Goat, I totally forgot to unhide the detail on his eyes! So here they are! I took these screenshots in the predicted smooth render view because the eyes are made of nurbs (meaning they are very round by nature) and I wanted a consistent smooth look to the shots. A bit more of his teeth and tongue are visible in these screenshots as well, so take a look!

Gentleman Billy Goat: Modeling Complete!

The modeling phase is finished!!! I took screenshots at different angles within Maya to create a turn-around of him. I am now working on my first ever texture mapping project to give him some color. No more all grey! It is quite a process learning it so far, but you can be sure he will be a handsome goat at the end of it! Also another project update; I am currently working on modeling his house and props as well. I will be posting those here also as time permits-- enjoy!

G. Billy Goat Turn-around

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Above:  Low resolution appearance model

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Below:  Predicted high resolution/smoothed appearance model

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And as always, please leave those comments!!!

Animation: Catch of the Day

My last blast from the past! This was my very first full animation project that went from character design, to storyboard and finally to full drawings shot the old fashioned way...a regular camera! So please do enjoy!

For those who are not familiar with traditional animation, there are 24 frames (pictures) per second of animation run time, and although most of the drawings are repeated once each (shooting in doubles), you can only imagine what my desk looked like at the end of this!!! For the final piece, there are 228+ drawings!!!

My design of Rosey the Raccoon

Storyboard page 1

Storyboard page 2

Storyboard page3

Storyboard page 4/4

......and then comes the animatic......

......And finally the real animation!

 It was shot with the school set-up and camera, so my apologies on the less than ideal picture quality and lighting.

And of course as I always do at the end of my projects, I recognize the places in my work that want improvement. In this animation I recognize that my timing needs a good bit more work as it can be floaty! I will endeavor to improve upon my timing among other things in my next animation! 

A New Me!

As I was looking around on other art blogs, I began to notice that a good majority of the artists used self portraits of themselves for their profile pictures, and I thought to myself, why don't I? So last night I hopped on Corel Painter 12 and did this quick paint of me! And the result? Behold my dorky self portrait :)

Gentleman Billy Goat: Project Update

Hello there! So as I alluded to in my first post with my sketches of this guy, I have been busy building him in Maya as a 3D model. I am nowhere near finished sculpting, but I did want to include you on my progress as it stands. So I have included some screenshots I took as I worked over this past week. In that time I managed to complete turning my initial nurbs-surfaces (which are omitted from my screenshots- they were not pretty!) to a single polygon mesh (all of his body parts are made of one piece, not many), as well as started sculpting features of his face and cleaning up my geometry. I still have much cleaning and sculpting to do, and I will post another update once there is significant visual change!

early polygon mesh work

A start for the sculpting of the face

Got to have that vest!

Raccoon Run

After making "Bernard says Hello" I did many less successful exercise animation pieces. One of the more successful animation exercises is the one below, a test for a character that would appear in my first animation project with an actual storyline. This animation is meant to be played in a continuous loop, so if you have a mac, command and "L" should do the trick on quicktime, I do not know what it is for PC? I have not figured out how to coax the blogspot player to allow loops yet- if you know please comment and I will post here if I find out :) In any case this will give you an almost seamless loop (the playback hiccups at the start of the loop despite my effort). --All in all I do hope you like her!

Update: Videos Fixed!

Hello there! I heard there was a few problems when trying to view my animation video. Today I went and made sure all the formatting was fixed, so from now on I will only have reliable, better quality videos! Thanks for your patience and my apologies!

Ink: Pig in a Tree?

This was my first time working with a dip pen and ink! To get used to it, I did a copy of a work by illustrator Leslie Brooke. I hope I did her justice, although I do admit I have a more heavy and much less experienced hand (at least at this point) than she, whose line work is very delicate in places such as in the leaves of the tree seen here.

Bernard says hello!

This was seriously my very first animation, EVER! I did this about a year ago, before I started this blog, and I would like to show my animation from the beginning. So in the near future I will bring you all up to date on my animation learning journey, starting with this little guy's big grin.

Now with Tabs!!!

After a few hours of frustration at my own lack of knowledge having to do with scripting, I am happy to say that I have persevered! I bring you navigation tabs! Now it is easy to find all of one art form on my blog! Please do take notice and make use of these simple but wonderfully helpful little buttons :)

Introducing Gentleman Billy Goat

Meet Gentleman Billy Goat, otherwise know as Donnan William Goat! He is my new character in development, and will eventually be made into a 3D model and be rigged! I will be keeping you updated on my progress! I am currently in the very early stages of modeling him. These are the first rough character sketches:

The Good Sorceress

This medieval character is in possession of a wonderful and powerful gift. She is able to bring life even in the most desolate of places, as she is depicted here, bringing to life a plant in an abandoned castle garden. There is still much for me to do in this painting, so be on the lookout for a more finished version as with the Winter Lord's Castle. This digital painting is being done in Corel Painter 12, with a little help from Adobe Photoshop CS5.

Castle of a Winter Lord

This will be my first full digital painting project done in Corel Painter. It is getting close to finish, but especially now that I am posting it, I can see there are definitely some changes that need to be made! The premise of this painting is that the castle is that of a winter lord, who is shown bringing the winter weather to the landscape as he rides home.

Speed Paintings!

The two following paintings were done as 20 minute speed painting exercises. They are both based off original compositions and digital paintings by Cliff Cramp, my illustration professor and professional artist. I used Corel Painter 12 for both of these pieces as well.

Apples: Getting used to Corel Painter 12

I just began taking a digital illustration course, and I have never worked with Corel Painter before! So I "painted these apples from life to familiarize myself with the program a bunch of the available brushes. As you can tell I was more successful with some brushes than others. I must practice! If you are like me and have not picked up a digital program before now, I would very much recommend Corel Painter 12! It is very intuitive to the artist who is used to using a real pen, pencil or brush :)

Quick Sculpt: Lion

Continuing on the lion theme, I have done this quick sculpt of a lion's head. I decided to make him more fun to look at by stylizing him with more sharp features. He is pretty small in scale; nose to the back of the head is about 3 inches, otherwise I am sure I would have gotten carried away with detail!

Tattoo Concept: Lion's Head

A friend of mine asked if I could do some quick sketches of lion's heads for his future tattoo, so here is what I sent him! If he does end up using them, I hope to get the finished product posted up here too.

profile:  pen and marker

profile with color

simple front:  pencil and marker

front with color