Fall '11

Here's a bit of stuff that I have completed at my first semester at LCAD. First up are a few pieces from my character design project which dealt with an indie rock/hipster culture reimagining of the Wizard of Oz...

I have drawings for the other characters but I still need to color them. Next is my final for my animation 1 class. We had to use a classic character and have him or her react to a door under specific guidelines. I used Tex Avery's Wolf character and this is what I got outta him. Enjoy and Critics are welcome!

New School, New Stuff

Ay, everybody! So I transferred to the Laguna College of Art and Design since I was looking for a better school to study animation. I've made it half way through the semester and thus far, I'm real happy here and I feel like my work has reached a higher level of quality. First up are some simple animation tests for my Animation 1 class. We are supposed to use well known and animatable cartoon characters for these assignments since we will learn what makes these characters work so well. So Disney and Warner Bros., please don't sue me!

Below is a digital painting I made for my intro to photoshop class. This was a real fun assignment and I think my rendering skills really improved. I'm gonna touch it up some more later by working out more value contrasts on the space chick and by really playing up the reflected lights. Any more advice would be awesome!

Summer Stuff

It's been a while since I updated. Here are a few things from Summer. First is some germ thingy I made for fun and also to explore more photoshop painting techniques. This is another installment of my monster series.

Up next is some work from an art program I took up in Florence, Italy. I lived there for four weeks and studied drawing and painting. The next two images are some figure painting that I worked on at the same time. One is meant to be objective and analytical while the other is meant to be expressive and the goal was to figure out how working between the two could benefit each other. This is a great way to work since it's a good way to gap from working strictly from observation to a more stylistic or imaginative approach. With that said, my teacher thought that the expressive painting was more true to observation.

Pastel on brown paper for my drawing class
ink with a bamboo pen, also for my drawing class. More to come!

Character Design Final

Here is my final for my character design class. We had to design a cast of characters based off of a phrase. My phrase was "Alien Sprawl" so I came up with a narrative where a middle aged and unappreciated accountant gets abducted by an organization of endangered alien species whom are spanning the cosmos to look for specimens to cross breed with to continue their species. But these aliens are endangered for specific reasons.This next character is the accountant's ex wife followed by their troublesome daughter.

The first alien is the glamorous and arrogant leader of the organization. His species consists of aliens who are born incomplete. He is a developing fetus in a jar who moves around with a robotic body. His father is a brain with a spine which the leader uses as a cane while his brother is a flap of skin which he uses as a cape.
This is his cat. He's got a furball for a brain
Up next is a Pantaloonian. These guys are born with pants attached to their bodies so they can never take them off. As a result, they cant reproduce with others and they also always have to go to the bathroom. Most of them die by holding it in too long thus resulting in a massive, firey explosion.
This is a Machotopus. These guys are too macho to attract the opposite gender. So instead, the males just hit the bars and practice singing show tunes in the streets.
This next one belongs to a species where they cant even find their own reproductive organs due to their weight and horrible anatomical design.
Next one doesn't need much of an explanation. Personality wise though, she is basically a characterization of Sigmund Freud's idea of the Id which means she is in a constant and manic state of hunger and lust, often times confusing the two.
This last species consists of aliens who are just too socially awkward to function in society.

Some character design work and Gouache stuff

Here is a part of an assignment where I had to create 80 thumbnails around a narrative. My narrative follows the story about a giant monster who wants to be a super hero. I went a little overboard though and I created character sketches instead of thumbnails.


Here is an assignment where I went on a random situation generator and I had to illustrate a character from it. Mine dealt with gelatinous robots, nazi's and monoliths so I created this weird giant amoeba meets transformer thing that's supposed to be a nazi secret weapon.
Lastly, here is a portion of my Gouache class final. I created a series of monsters to loosen up and practice technique, each took me around 30-40 minutes to create.

It's all Mime

This is my final for my Intro to 2d animation class. This was entirely hand drawn and put together in flash. From concept to completion it was a total of 5 weeks. Due to flash being finicky and because of all the video converting, a lot of the line quality is lost so any advice to fix that would be great.

Sketch book!

Heres some stuff from my character design sketch book. First up are some character thumbnails for my final, I'll post the final pieces later as well as more thumbnails.

Next up are some characters I've done in class of students and strangers

Also, I would try to attend open model sessions each week and here are the results.

Meme Cards

For my illustration 2 final, we had to create a deck of playing cards centered around a theme. My idea was to create meme cards with medieval sensibilities to connect it with the cards already existing theme and to create the ultimate in dorky cards. This was done with pen nibs, to give it a wood cut like look, and photoshop colors to still match the aesthetic of the internetz.

Drawing from the Tablet and character designs

More work from the semester

An in class figure drawing with green and blue lights
A figure drawing of my roommate with imagined elements a.k.a unicorns
An anatomy study of a Trorgre (Troll orgre hybrid) who is giving a thumbs up to let you cross his bridge.
Character designs based off sketches of real people. The last one is my teacher and he is discussing his favorite subject.

Intro to 2D animation Demo Reel

My best work from my 2D animation class

Character Design and Zodiac illustrations

Here is a fun assignment from my character design class where we had to created characters around a narrative. I took the Todzilla comic strips from before and elaborated the ideas into a cartoon pitch.

Toddilla is a giant monster who wants to be a real superhero just like his hero Chicken man. He disguises himself as Turbo Tyrannaman and tries to impress the fellow giant monsters of "Monstropolis" and his school. Unfortunately, the other monsters have little respect for him so he is mainly ridiculed by others and does not have many friends, one of which is an anxious moth name Mojh who cant find time to sleep during the day (becuase of giant monster school) or night since he is nocturnal. Wolfboy is Chickenman's side kick and secret arch nemesis who feels as if he is in the shadow of a clown. He hopes to rid of chickenman and become a more serious and conservative hero

Here is the assignment I enjoyed most from any of my illustration classes thus far! I had to illustrate the Zodiac for a gaming magazine so I thought of a group of characters that could easily be seen in a 90's beat up game with powers and personalities based of the zodiac. Here are 5 spot illustrations

and here is a half page spread based off my astrological sign.

V days dos and donts

Our first assignment in illustration 2 was to create valentines day do and don't illustrations. I had to choose from the girl's list of do's and dont's so I tried to create something that they could relate to and I also went with a narrative aspect since thats the kind of work I like to do best. The first illustration followed "Don't break up with your boyfriend" where as the second followed "Do embrace the day with your best girlfriends."

Drawing from the Tablet

This semester Im taking a class called drawing from the tablet. Its like life drawing but instead of charcoal and graphite, we use photoshop and tablets. Here are some self portraits. They are steadily improving as Im learning how to blend better and how to work more efficiently.

The Circular Ruins

The final project for illustration 1 was to create four illustrations for a story called "The Circular Ruins." The story seemed to me like a mashup of Frankenstein, Indiana Jones and Inception. I can see the cinematic influences in these pieces. During crit, what I learned most from these pieces is that I need to learn how to better contrast my warm and cool colors and that most people seem to prefer simple flat colors than my attempts at rendering and lighting.