Soundtrack To My Life

I just got some soundtracks. Braveheart, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Morrowind. Needless to say, blasting all that awesomeness on my awesome speakers really gets me in the mood to draw. I might have more later on, but right now I need to take a break and get to the library before it closes...

Forth Eorlingas!

Sick and tired...

I have been sick. To top it off I had something I had been working on but I cannot find it. So you get this pseudo-Bil Keane drawing.

You roast the unborn!

Scribblings from work

Today, I thought I'd show some rough scribbles that I did on my break at work. I often think of events in comic form, with Bitter Bunny replacing myself.

Bitter Bunny features quite prominently in my doodles, probably because he is so easy and fun to draw. At the bottom of the image you can see me trying to figure out how to do a walk cycle for him that doesn't look ridiculous. Bitter Bunny exists very specifically in 2 dimensions only, and the placement of his legs make walking a little difficult to do well. His legs are also quite short, but I can get around the difficulties posed by that with selective squash and stretch. His ears are often an indication of his emotions, much like the tail of a dog. When animating him, there is a lot of fun to be had with secondary action there.

Old Skool

I unplugged my computer for about a week. It was nice. So these sketch pages are done on actual 8x11 pieces of paper. I even used an actual pencil for the first one!


This next one I revert to my more comfortable tool: a ballpoint pen. The drawing is a redesign of Matthias Malone. Mainly just a new hat. Still working on it.

That other hat was too hard to draw from various angles. There's just something about those darn Indiana Jones style hats! I remember when I first went to Vanarts for the month-long intensive, way back in '06, I asked Gerard how to draw a decent looking hat. But even he had trouble giving me an example.

And finally just some random faces:

If I'm bored or can't think of anything to draw, I usually start sketching faces. It's fun just to play with the different proportions and shapes.

3D Room Video

As promised here is my three-dee bedroom. It is good enough to turn in but I am still working on it. There is one glitch that annoys me and if anyone can notice I would be impressed!

Couple of girls and a rough tutorial.

So I figure my biggest problem in drawing is that I am pretty good at static poses where people are just standing around not really doing anything. I draw that a lot and it really doesn't help me improve at all.

So I have been trying to press myself to do more dynamic posing so I can stop being lame. In kind of a second thought, I made it into a tutorial on colouring digitally.

I start with a rough sketch as you can see and I clean it up. I am not really trying to make everything all tight and neat because I am just going to have to redo it later. It actually helps if it isn't all neat because if I go over it in black, I will be able to see what I am doing better.
I am using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro by the way. I suggest downloading the trial at least to give it a shot. It is a good and simple program. Anyway, I use a new layer and draw the line with the pencil tool. I fill them in with the marker. This gives you the solid base you need to start painting.
As you might have noticed, I didn't finish everything in the last image. Some elements I do in a separate layer for a few possible reasons. The hair I did this way because it needed a redesign and I usually screw it up (I don't like it much right now as it is.) Her left foot was done on a separate layer so I could draw the full leg without it in front.

I started to colour in this image. I eye-drop the solid colour and I select a similar darker colour. Then I shift to a more blue-ish tint. It is very important not to use the same tint. I do the same thing for the highlight but I tint it the opposite way.
My painting techniques are random and difficult to explain. I usually start with the marker, since it only adds when the colour is darker. Then I airbrush it smooth with the same colour and back again with the basecolour. Highlights are pretty much the same way.
Here is a second drawing I did. Girl checking her cellphone.
It somehow ended up being Daria. But I am okay with that.

I was going to add my video of my 3D room but Youtube is taking forever. Might update tomorrow...

Sketchbook Page

Just a sketchbook page for today...

Student Loans

This is a little one panel comic I scribbled out at work one day. I always keep a little notebook with me for when opportunity strikes.

Do You Believe in the Great Pumpkin?

So, I figured the pumpkin carving wouldn't happen tonight. We did eat some delicious chili however...

Here's some doodles and my really ruff design for the pumpkin I want to carve:

Searching pumpkin designs online really opened my eyes to the possibilities!

The Death Star looks sweet, but the directions say it takes between 8-10 hours, so I think I'll stick with Aku...

I never even thought of the 3 tone design before. I have a pretty decent wood carving set so I might have to give the technique a try.

These are screen shots from my 3D Animation project. Like I stated last week, we have to model a bedroom. We are supposed to have a video to turn in but each one of these frames took me twelve minutes to render on my laptop.

The room itself is unfortunately pretty bland. I do not know what to do to spice it up a bit. I like the bed spread (I made the material by taking a picture of my bedspread and making it into a tile-able pattern) and the fact that the TV shows "A Mammoth Undertaking" (yes, it really plays!)

No monsters here...

I've come to the conclusion that drawing monsters don't come natural to me. They all turn out too cute so the monster theme will be put off for next week.

A couple of friends were asking for costume suggestions for Halloween so for today I have a sketch of a funny (at least to me) costume idea.

A Day Late and a Dollar Short

Hi folks! I was supposed to post this yesterday, but I was waylaid by obscene amounts of turkey. Yes, Canadians had Thanksgiving yesterday. With Halloween now approaching, I scribbled a picture of a giant evil jack'o'lantern about to eat Justin Bieber.

Designs

So I guess I'm not feeling the monster theme quite yet either...

I'll give it another week or two to get in the spooky Halloween mood. In the meantime, I got some designs!

This first one goes back pretty far. It's a page I designed for my high school yearbook!
The date I have it saved under is February 1, 2007

This one is a blog header I designed for a friend.
It was made clear the van HAD to be periwinkle.

This is the cover for my first album!

And finally, Phenomenon Anomaly, which I just finished. In stores now!
(It's not in stores...)

Random stuff.

First up is a dresser I modeled for my 3Ds Max class. We have to make a bedroom setting with at least five things in it. I am a tad behind because I had to work during the previous class.
Second is my attempt to recreate the look of Asian landscape paintings. It is just a small attempt and I don't think it was very successful. It is hard to get that watercolour look and I think I need to design some brushes.
Here is a face I drew and shaded. Nothing special.
This one I like more but never finished. I was going to try to come up with a digital painting for Katrina but I need to plan it out.

Avatar the Last Airbender

On our way back from the wedding we attended in Las Vegas the in-flight movie was The Last Airbender.

It was pretty awful.

On the upside: I got curious to start watching the animated series.

On the downside: I obsessed for about 3 weeks and finished the entire 3 seasons.

Thank you Netflix!

It was pretty good. Funnier than the movie. I'm not sure if Mr. M.Night was the right director for it. Unless they wanted the movie to be completely different from the series. For me, part of the best part of the series was seeing the characters grow, especially the goofy Avatar. The movie portrayed him as a much more serious character and completely ignored that he was a young kid when he got frozen. On the other side, I don't know how that would translate into a good live-action movie without being cheesy.

Anyway, the series had some pretty decent animation. I definitely noticed multiple styles to each character. I tried to look (briefly) for model sheets for the series but I couldn't find any. I enjoyed the series so much that a part of me wants to move to Korea so I would get the chance to animate on the spin-off, even though I'm sure they've already started work on it…LOL

Instead here's my attempt at some Avatar animation. It's really rough because I was worried that I wouldn't be able to post it on time. It's already pretty late as it is. There was also supposed to be some leaves blowing to go with the Autumn theme but alas I didn't think of this early enough to make it complete. I had fun doing this so I might make finishing that my goal for the end of the month. We'll see.

Craig is taking the hobbits to Isengard!

I had intended a post featuring monsters of some sort, but the sudden onset of a cold has knocked me back a bit. So instead, here are more sketchbook doodles.

I'll try for monsters next week!

Logo a gogo...

So that's some graphic design for a start-up company I may or may not start up.

And here's a weekly sketchbook page: