Life drawing at the BYO gallery

Life drawing at the BYO gallery on March 03, 2010.

Thumbnails

I've been having a lot of fun lately doing thumbnails. They allow me to think compositionally and, in the case of color, do color studies. They're also very relaxing.

Kitsune

I did this for the character of the week competition on conceptart.org. Unfortunately it didn't get in due to the submission count. I had fun on it but I've noticed a few things that I'll want to fix...

Nightclubber

I've been getting more adept at the oil painting technique of painting light over a dark ground. Given, this is all done in photoshop, but the analog still applies technique-wise.

Demo Reel

This is a demo reel of some of my work. Enjoy.

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.

Speed paints suck

Can someone explain to me the point of speed paints? Just to clarify, I'm talking about sped up videos of the painting process, not the valid practice of painting a piece in an hour or less. It seems that the speed paint is solely an exercise in flaunting ones skill while making the creation of it seem effortless. Most of them are just stupid. You can sum up most youtube speed paints as "Hey, I can draw stuff in photoshop and I've got awesome music tastes too!" I can see the usefulness of time lapse in the creation of something truly arduous like the creation of a mosaic or a Tibetan sand mandala, but to post a video of you making some dude/chick/robot/monster in photoshop/painter is just lame. I'm sure it did take hours to make, but so what. Are people truly that starved for attention? I'm not trying to harsh on the artistic ability of anyone that does make these things, some of them are truly impressive, it's just that there isn't anything pedagogical about them. You can't read any text because the resolution is so low, it's difficult to follow the usage of tools because any changes made are faster than eye blinks and on top of it there is usually some crap music accompaniment. On top of all these things sometimes the video is cropped so that you can't see the toolset or the menu items being accessed. If I watch another speed paint it will be too soon. I just had to get this off my chest once and for all.

Swordgirl: Enter the Flow

This is something I did recently after I made a major discovery in photoshop. I used to change the opacity of my brushes when attempting to blend colors. The problem with lowering the opacity is that you have to make successively layered strokes, lifting the sylus off the tablet each time, in order to build the color back up to 100%. What I recently discovered is to not lower opacity but to lower the flow, all the while keeping the opacity at 100%. Using this technique I can now effortlessly blend colors in a much more naturalistic way. This is a major game changer for me. Did I say game changer? God, I'll be glad when this presidential race is over.

More Quick Sketch

Quick Sketch Class

I've been fortunate to be able to sit in on my friend/mentor/teacher Tim Decker's quick sketch class this semester. It's been a loooong time since I've sat in a live model class. So I'm milking this for as much as I can. It keeps up the pencil mileage and forces me to really look and analyze. I will try to make this a weekly post, as the class is every Friday. Here are some selections from the last two classes I sat in on.

Nekkid Eva

I'm still working on this guy. I'm having problems with the crotch area, I just thought I should post some pics since I haven't posted anything in a good while.

30 Days - Work

I meant to post images of my submissions a long time ago. The problem was that I got really busy and I forgot all about it. So here are the things I've done so far. I didn't get anything up until the sixth day due to our move.

(day 6)


(day 7)


(day 8)


(day 9)


(day 10)


(day 11)


(day 12)


(day 13)


(day 14)


(day 15)


(day 16)


(day 17)


(day 18)


(day 19)


(day 20)


(day 21)


(day 22)


(day 23)


(day 24)


(day 25)


(day 26)


(day 27)


(day 28)


(day 29)


...and that's it. I missed day 30 due to beers getting in my way. All in all I like the kooky things I did for this and I could feel myself getting more and more comfortable with my ever developing working process.