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.

Been painting monsters...

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

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.

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.