sheesh!

I can't believe that I haven't posted in over a month! How careless of me! Well here we go - late night drawing that I had to get out or I was going to s'plode!!



Basically, if I wasn't so fickle, I would totally have all these piercings and the Sagittarius archer tattoo - and that awesome hair cut. But since I'm totally lame and indecisive I get stuck at boring, normal me. Oh well.

Les Filles #3

Undercover.





Oooh double meaning! I'm so clever.

Les Filles #2

The Great Outdoors.





Oh how great it is.

Les Filles #1

I've decided to go forward with a project I started in September. I'm calling it Les Filles, french for The Girls. It's a style and medium that I don't use as much as I'd like. The first in the series that I have finished is Lizze Borden.

We'll see how the next few go from here. I've added a showcase of some studies of other characters I'll be doing soon hopefully.

Who says Crumple-Horned Snorkacks aren't real??

Luna is such a fun character. I love her because she never really cares about what is logical, because sometimes logic is just someone's opinion backed up by the fact that they never found anything. She might take it too far sometimes, but that's what makes her character so funny. Here's to the weird girls who will always believe in the unbelievable!

Mr. Longbottom.

Neville is another of my favorite characters. Now, as it might look, in my drawing he doesn't seem to be the fat little kid that most people picture. So first, I should have probably digressed this earlier, that these are portraits of the characters as I see them in the 7th book. It's the image in my mind that is most clear to me. They've grown with me as I've read their stories and now picturing them as 11 year-olds is very strange. So in my mind, as Neville grew older, he may not have grown a whole lot taller, but he grew enough to lose his baby fat, which I would think would attribute to some of his newfound confidence as well.

The only strange part about Neville that I didn't really think about was his hair color; I had always pictured him with medium brown hair. While researching the appearancs of all the characters I'm working on (remember, this is an excercise in creating other people's character ideas) I found that JK had him as a short, tubby, blonde boy! Well... I suppose Neville could have blonde hair, and well, if she says so, then that's what I gots to make it.

Ginny for Ginerva!

Ginny is probably my favorite female character in the whole Harry Potter world. Though there are tons of fantastic females in the stories, I always thought there was something extra poignant about Ginny. She had to stand up for herself a lot because she was the only girl in a family of boys, and it definitely made her a tough cookie. While I love her name, I had the misfortune of knowing someone who went by the name "Ginny" and her egocentric, obsessive, and often snobby attitude sort of gave a taint to the name "Ginny"... until I realized that her name was short for "Virginia" and the other was short for nothing even close - Ginerva.

A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. The same goes for rotten cabbage.

My favorite ginger lad.

No, not Prince Harry, but Ronald Weasley. Even though I don't think he and Hermione were the best match, I still think that they are cute together.

Potted.

I'm finally getting my arse back to working - honestly, I'm not taking the piss! I did some character drawings of Harry Potter and his mates and I just started today with Hermione. As always these copyrights belong to JK Rowling. And just like Ally, she doesn't really have a middle name, so she stole the "K" from her grandmother.

Kitty.

So, I'm allowed to post awesome photos I take, right? That's still considered art, right?? This kitten is just friggin' ridiculously adorably adorable, right???

Not David Bowie.

It's nearly impossible to mention an owl to a twentysomething and not have them reminded of David Bowie in Labyrinth.

Alas, this has nothing to do with David Bowie. But I still thought of him.

Sagitta is turquoise for a reason.

Turquoise is a bittersweet color. It's not quite blue, but it's still sort of sad. There's a hint of yellow in the tint that brings a small sparkle of joy.

Dance for Cupcakes!

At Dolores Park today there were people who had a big sign that said "Dance for Cupcakes" and there were a bunch of cupcakes on a table about ten people dancing around with music from a stereo somewhere. It was super rad. Yay for dancing and cupcakes!

Scarlet's Walk

Inspired by Tori Amos's 'A Sorta Fairytale'.

Nirvana through pencil and paper.

You know when out of no where, when it's super late at night, and you just get this crazy urge and you HAVE to draw. The gods will not allow another moment to pass without your creativity venturing out through your pencil and you must concede to their will.

Yeah, it was kinda like that. And this is why I prefer, and will always prefer, drawing with paper and pencil, to drawing with a wacom.

someone's got a CRUU-USH!

That sounds a lot nerdlier than I meant it to. But either way - just some character idea sketches for a school of monstery-kids. He's a vampire and she's a witch - a match made in hell! (that's a perfect match in this case!)

color study sketch

Just a color sketch I'm working on, it's not finished, but ya know, I think it's important to show progress sometimes. I need to get me an Intuos soon... probably tomorrow if anything at all. I've got lots of work to do!

So noir...

"She was pretty, for a dame, but there was something sad about the way she sat at the bar. It was the way she stared across at her reflection in the mirror not even taking one sip of the mahogany glass of guinness before her that caught my intrigue..."

sketchin'

whoo

So here's a character design sketch I did yesterday at The Grove and colored today. I just really need to build up my portfolio. Anyways, not really much to say about this girl - she's an archaeologist and she's on a dig in Peru. Whoo.

in the background

So I've been doing a lot of concept and pre-production work for my short and it's going pretty well. I took some old sketches and I'm working on rendering them into colored backgrounds. I'm doing them in shades of color first so I can de-saturate them later. I want the whole thing to be black and white or very, very muted colors. Anyways, this is what I've worked on recently. More to come soon... very soon. Like so soon you won't even have time to take a bathroom break. Okay maybe not that soon.

peter pan or super man?

Wow, I hadn't realized it was a month since I last posted something. Time goes by much too quickly when you're busy every day.

Today I took some time to get accustomed to drawing and coloring in photoshop with a tablet. I think I'm getting pretty good :)

New sketches, concept art.

I'm usually very creative with blog titles, but when it comes to art posts, I really fall flat - sorry guys.

Anyways, I've been working on filling up the new sketchbook and decided to post a few things from it. The first is just something I drew last night because I wanted to work on more coloring in photoshop, so this is a rough coloring, basically just alying down the colors and shadows. Hopefully this will finish into a nice illustration.



The next is some sketching I did trying to work on more backgrounds for The Lamp Post story. Just brown ink pen.



And last but not least, I am trying to work on my charicatures, so I drew a picture of Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead. It's the picture that's on my desktop, so that made it easier hehe.



I love you Simon Pegg.

le cahier est fin!

so i finished up my sketchbook last week at some point, which is truly a first for me. usually i just get about ten pages away from the end and buy a new one because the new semester is starting, but obviously i'm not in school anymore, and i somehow ended up drawing 10 times as much as i ever drew in my sketchbook before. so i bought a new one today and did some sketches. not many, but it's a promising start. i don't feel like scanning right now, so i'll just post the progress on the concept art i'm coloring in photoshop.

indie future girl! or something...

some concept art

Just doing some concept art coloring. Not a lot of time lately to do much besides the crawdaddy illustrations - which there are new ones up of by the way. crawdaddy.com, if you're interested.

Mini job.

I'm now officially the illustrator for Crawdaddy.com - an online rock magazine. Whoo!

It launches tomorrow. Check it out.

bjork poster nearly done?

blorp.



or blorp?

Help?

Okay, so I finished the first poster.

So.

Here it is.



Now, honestly, I don't know what to do for the part of her hair that reads "Bjork". Is the background good?

Is it appealing like that? I don't know. I'm kinda lost. Help?

It was yesterday, but...

Happy Birthday Ally! I know I already posted this on your Myspace page, but it really wouldn't be fair of me not to post it here!

Bjork Poster Rough 1

This is an unfinished rough of the second poster. The linework is obviously not finished yet, but I wanted to post my progress and mess around with the colors, as I'm a total geek for coloring.

Anyhoo, that's all.

Poster by the Poster (har har)

I'm doing a design for a Bjork concert poster contest (mostly just cuz I want to make myself FINISH something!). So here are the two designs I'm working on. I'm going to outline them and clean them up in Illustrator. Both are drawings of Bjork. It'll be easier to tell once her hair is super dark and her skin is super pale. And I thought it'd be funny if she had a feather in her mouth in the first one. (Anyone remember the swan dress? perhaps?).

It's not mail, it's post.

I think that I finally got the legs right. The only thing to fix now is the popping in the head, neck and shoulders, and fix the floaty backside, and there seems to be a bit of a float in the middle of the run.

Anyways, I know mostly what I need to fix, and I'm just posting cuz... I need to post.

Yay.

Post.

Blargh.

Sorrow drips into your heart through a pin-hole.

I was trying to finish the wolf animation today. I don't have a new clip to post, (not that it seems to matter for you Ally lol Youtube doesn't want you to see my wolf run!) So I've been drawing the last few hours. Here's two sketches. One is a sketch for the comic book and the other is a self-portrait of how I'm feeling right now.

Happy Halloween! Err... Birthday!

This is a birthday card I made for one of my best friends back home. She was born in April but she loves fall. And she's got really lovely red hair, and she likes paganism, so I figured this was a good birthday card with a pumpkin cake hehe.

Also, I like drawing hugs... so this drawing came out. And it's really very, very tiny.



Also, I did some sketches for ideas for the comic book thing. (The Roman looking one isn't a comic book sketch).



Here's another version of the wolf run. Still not finished, but I'm looking at some live action reference.

Wolf? Dog? I don't know.

Well that was amusing. My so-called "tomorrow" is actually like ten days later. Oh well.

So this is a dog run I just started working on tonight. There's a bit of a pop with the rear, and the tail is eluding me on how it should look, but I'm sure there are a multitude of other things wrong with it.

Rip it apart, s'il vous plait!



Oh yes, and just because I never posted it, here is the finished female cultist walk. Yippy skippy.



::EDIT:: - UGH! Leave it to me to notice a pop in the leg AFTER I've posted stuff up. Well, whatever. Sorry female cultist, we'll fix you tomorrow.

Coming out of hiding.

A lot of stuff has gone on since I last posted. I went to a nearly impromptu interview with Stormfront Studios at the school, which went rather well, but I don't believe I'll be hired. Either way, it was a good experience, and they did like my reel. Apparently my jump isn't very good, so I'm going to redo it with a better model (most likely Norman). I'm also working on a giraffe walk. It's not the best model either for some things, so it's taking some time.

Also, I've started working on some 2D VFX for an independent feature film called Half-Life. The only thing is I'm basically doing digital inking, which requires the use of a wacom tablet, a tool I've used only briefly before, so I'm basically just getting used to it now. Unfortunately I can't post any of the work here, so you'll all just have to wait till it comes out by the end of the year.

That's about it for now... I'll try and post some work up tomorrow.

Jump attempt #2.

Because YOUTUBE is a piece of crap, I uploaded my videos to my xanga site. It seems to be much friendlier and prettier quality as well. Anyhow, here's my jump (not finished with the landing poses) and the timing hasn't been set. Basically all it is so far is me putting the poses in. Whoo hoo. The reason there is no end yet is because that was the end of my reference footage haha, so I have to figure out how the rest will be.



I also have some sketches of Gabrielle, but I'm too tired to scan them right now. That's for tomorrow morning.

Good night and good luck.

-ERM err... TLC

Human Jump.

So, as I feel the quickest way to improve my reel at the moment is to continue doing what I started doing the other week when Paige and I filmed me jumping off some cement wall at one of the Squares in San Francisco.

I only worked on this for about 2 hours, and haven't even finished the key poses yet. The timing is by no means settled. It's just me putting the poses in the timeline.

This is also a test of a rigged model that I got from Cindy. It's kinda weird... actually makes me miss Norman in a way. This character has a lot less options for animating him such as you only have the options to "curl" and "separate" the fingers in the rig. I think you may be able to rotate them joint by joint if you have the joints showing, but that's a pain in the butt. The worst, by far though, is the arms. They don't make any sense!

Blah... anyways, enjoy, but I'm not really looking for much of a critique yet because well, the whole thing is needing improving and basically I'm just copying my footage. I'll be looking for critiques once I have the timing and and poses finished, but feel free to mention anything you think might just be a big fat mistake!



Also, I have just been sketching weird stuff lately. Weird stuff. I don't know why. Sort of stream of conscious sketching, (i.e. doodling). I drew weird shapes without looking, and then turned them into faces, no matter what shape I got. It's a fun excercise if you need help figuring out how to exaggerated faces.



Also, I drew some face sketches of Gabrielle, and needless to say, I still have to really figure out her shapes. It's tough trying to draw something from different angles before you know what they look like. Most of the faces turned out to be crap, but a few, like this one were pretty good. I think the eyes are just a little too big. And I also did the redesign of the Baroness. It's not a finished sketch yet, because clothes takes a while to design, but that's the basics of her.

Too many men to choose from.

So, since I'm feeling malevolent towards FLASH, I will curse it here first before my sketches.

*ahem*

Why must you close on me for no reason twice when I try to run you, and THEN after being open for nearly 45 minutes, you choose to close before I've saved anything?!?!?!

I was working on creating a flash character to animate, and I hadn't gotten very far (I was doing the line work) and then *poof* like a fuckin' faery, Flash disappears on me. Little bastard!! UGH.

So, I didn't feel like opening flash back up.

- - - - - - -

GET ON WITH IT. Sketch time.

I was truly unhappy with the first version I drew of Bastien, because his pose lacked rhythm, and his face was slightly too cartoony compared with Gabrielle's, so I did a lot of, um "research", i.e. looked at hot guys on GQ's website, and drew a bunch of sketches of those poses, and shortly after, did a new, much more rhythmic drawing of Bastien with some changes. So, I've decided to put the three of them up together, so you can see whose STYLE more closely resembles Gabrielle, and who fits the better description of her Bastien: he is a silly guy, though fairly quiet; he's sometimes intimidated by the fact that Gabrielle loves driving him around on her motorcycle, but that's just because he's afraid they'll crash and die; he loves her tres beaucoup (very much) and is kind of the pillar of calm to her bubbly, adventurous personality.



I think I've figured out what I think, but I want everyone else's opinions first. Or should I just scrap them both and try again??

And first, a detail of the new (and debatably improved) Bastien.






::EDIT::

So, guess what... after posting this and deciding to go to bed, my brain was so annoyed at the fact that I had two versions of a character that I liked certain things about, and yet it still wasn't right. So, here I am one hour later posting the new sketch I did of the "hybrid". Don't mind his expression, it's sort of how I feel right now as it's almost 5am, and I can't stop DRAWING. Oh, and don't mind his legs either, I know they're a little funky, but again, 5am = not so perfect lines. Anyways, continue on with the discussion of who fits the bill best of "Bastien".