Saturday, June 20, 2009

Eagle Girl

This is a character design I did that was inspired by my daughter and her cousin's pretending in the next room. I overheard "I'm eagle girl!" and I thought that it was a cool sounding character name, if not terribly original. I think I will do more with this character in the future.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Been painting monsters...

Mostly these are experiments in technique. I'm constantly adjusting and adapting what I know to get what I want.



Sunday, May 17, 2009

Color treatment

This is a drawing done by my brother. I simply colored it. I was most interested in all the pencil "noise" from the original scan and how it added texture, like the effect in some of Keith Thompson's work.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Animation!

I know I haven't posted anything in a long time. I've been busy though, that's for sure. The Lightning Rod Studios gig didn't really pan out but I did get a really awesome opportunity to do animations for the Poetry Foundation. I did an animated short for the poem 'Those Winter Sundays' by one of my favorite poets Robert Hayden. Eventually I was hired to help co-teach a class wherein some students of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee made animations of their own and I assisted with the technical aspects. I'm also doing the post-production of all the pieces. For the class I did an animation of the poem 'Assault to Abjury' by the poet Raymond McDaniels. It seems that I've discovered a niche as a "poem animator". Who knew? The poet Major Jackson had seen my 'Sundays' poem and contacted me through teh facebook and asked me to do an animation to his poem 'Zucchini'. I was quite stoked to do so. I had a lot of fun doing it even if I did have a half dozen other things coming at me at the same time. But, who's complaining about having work these days? Not me. So, below are the animations. I hope you enjoy and if you're a poet with a poem feel free to contact me!


This first poem was animated using Flash. It was a great learning experience.



This piece here was done using a combination of Photoshop and After Effects. I'd never used After Effects before so I had a lot of fun learning the ins and outs of it and how to realize the images I had rolling around in my mind. I really like using AE and I think you will be seeing a lot more of it in my future work.



This is a commissioned animation I did for the poet Major Jackson. It was created by using a combination of Adobe photoshop and after effects. It first debuted at the exhibition titled "More Than Biligual: Major Jackson & William Cordova." at the Fleming Museum located on the campus of the University of Vermont on January 27th, 2009.