End of the Semester + Catastrosea

Just one more day until my last semester of school ends! I'm downing coffee and trying to get some more animation inking finished (and continuing to try and frantically find some animation that got destroyed by my computer's hard drive and backup disk) and also rendering my final stop-motion animation to put it up on Vimeo.

The working title of it is Catastrosea, and it's not exactly finished yet. I think I might fix up some of the set pieces based on the feedback I got at my critique, but... yeah, right now it ends at a cliffhanger. And I do not like that. So finish it later I shall!

Anyway, wish me luck! I have two more critiques tomorrow and I'm crossing my fingers that they'll go well. If you could cross your own fingers for me, dear reader, I'd appreciate it.

Plants and Animals

More sketches and painting! The pencil drawings/half-watercolored sheets are all studies that I did at Lincoln Park Zoo of some of the animals. Man! It is so tough to draw these guys while they're all moving around, especially the monkeys and the birds because they keep jumping and flying around all over the place (the monkeys don't fly... they don't have that sort of species at the zoo). I can't remember what the name of that plant is, but that painting is from the Garfield Park Conservatory, which is absolutely gorgeous inside. Drawing plants is pretty easy compared to the animals, but you still have to get in just as much detail and form.

This is only a test!

If you are seeing this post, then congratulations. You're either reading this on Blogger or Livejournal (or Tumblr... or Facebook!)! Here is a picture of a puppy as your reward (if this works, anyway!).

EDIT: It actually didn't work. Darn. Oh well. You can keep the puppy, anyway!

BFA Show Photos

Today is the last day of my BFA Show. I'm so happy that it went well and I received some great, constructive feedback on my work. Here are some photos from the exhibition and some pictures of the prints I exhibited.

Lady Amherst's Pheasant

I still have to finish it, but here's the beginnings of a beautiful pheasant painting. His little head cape totally makes me think of an Egyptian pharaoh or god. Perhaps he is one of their incarnations. If you ever see one unleashing curses and scarabs, report it!

Happy November! Figure Drawing + A Beautiful Raptor

It's November! Hooray! These figure drawings that I chose to show are actually from last month, but of course... it's still cool to show them! I mean, there's no law against posting pictures from October in November. Psh.

And here's a color/inking guide that I made for the animation that I'm making. I might mess around with his coloring a little more... but you never know! The little guy may just turn out to be deliciously green forever.

Also, have this quick little doodle I did... just 'cause.

Undergrad Exhibition + Other Fun!

First order of business (which I will probably repeat again somewhere else like Facebook or via a bullhorn on a busy Chicago intersection): if you are in the Chicago area, why not take a trip downtown to my BFA show? The SAIC Fall Undergraduate Exhibition runs from October 30th to November 20th, from 11am to 6pm Tuesday through Saturday at the Sullivan Galleries right in the heart of the Chicago loop. Like you've probably read in these past blog entries, I'm showing three of my digital prints. They're so super awesome. You should go see them in person!

Second order of business... things I have been doing other than the BFA stuff! Here are some simple animation backgrounds that may or may not be complete due to me being fickle and wondering whether or not I should add some more details.

Painting "Did"

I'm putting the final touches on my last piece for my BFA entitled "Did". It's a sort of artistic representation of (or, uh, just an attempt to represent) dissociative identity disorder and, at the same time, represent multiple identities that everyone accumulates for their every day lives. All of the mask pieces touch this subject in some way or another, and this one just happens to show another danger to not being true to oneself: being bombarded with so many personalities and false representational images that one can't keep track of.

I really love this one, though. I really do. I don't like working large... I really like keeping my drawings very tiny and detailed. When I work big I feel like I loose the ability to make everything tight and crisp and perfect and sometimes end up losing track of the big picture because I'm always catering to the tiny little details in sections. With something like this (this picture is around 11x14, I believe...) I can focus on the whole thing but still be able to work on it in sections and make something that I feel a lot closer to. And... oh, man, I love the texture. It just makes the mood of the picture, it really does.

Printin' Tests!

Today I went to check out how my print will look once it's completely printed. The test strip colors seem okay, and since I chose to have the print made on canvas the actual print-out of it feels so much more organic than it would if I had opted to use satin or just plain old matte paper.

So far so good! I'm really excited. I can't wait to get the completed project.

Skeletal Fun!

Finally I figured out a color scheme that I like for this project I'm working on. It's kind of Toulouse-Lautrec/art nouveau inspired in a way, as you can kind of see in the following two pictures.

Voila! Another piece of it for you to see! I've got to soften out the graphics a little bit... just looking at this my skeledude obviously needs more shading but I'm not digging the brightness of his bones against the crimson background. This will be eventually changed.

Espresso! My only friend (other than art)!

So it's that time of the year again where I get reacquainted with my good buddy, Caffeine. Oh, the joy of knowing that fifteen or twenty shots of espresso are surging through my veins and making my heart pained and unhealthy while keeping me bouncy and productive! It's times like these that I love being a student. Oh yes. Yes indeed. Man, it's hard to type while I'm so jittery lik ethisoaicjoasidjoisjdflakcj

I've been up and about working on a really super big project for the end of the month. It's going to be so super great. It's a continuation of my mask projects but this time it's a LOT bigger. So far for the mask portraits I've been keeping my size limitation to around 10X14 at the most. This time it's around 24X36. And I'm working digital. The file size is HUGE and my laptop is lagging and crying and screaming at me to stop abusing it's technological limitations, but it's working out so far. Below is a sliver of the whole piece which is probably going to drastically change color-wise in the next 24 hours.

Well, it's back to espresso and jittery painting for me now, kids! Excelsior! And anon!

Forrest Lives! (Also, old storyboards!)

Sorry, folks, my lack of posts has been from a lack of a workable camera to document my work (plus I've been frantically trying to put together stuff for my BFA show), but I figure I should at least put something up in my spare time. If you haven't seen them (i.e., if you aren't subscribed to my Vimeo or friends with me on Facebook) I've been doing tests for my puppet animation class with my totally awesome puppet Forrest. This one is the most recent so far:

[Stop Motion Animation]-[04] from Maz Zolp on Vimeo.

If you want to see the rest, just click here or click the link to the right on the blog.

Also, I thought these would be interesting to post. I took animation history one semester and we had to reboard a scene from What's Opera, Doc?. I found these hidden underneath the billions upon billions of doodles and school papers and thought that they were pretty neat. Knowing what I know now about storyboarding I would have done these a WHOLE lot differently, but I have to tell you... as much as I dislike Chuck Jones, you gotta give the man total props for laying out his shorts. You can see that there's good stuff going on here.

Figure Drawing Week Two + Animation and Processing

My camera died halfway into taking pictures of my newer figure drawings, so for the meantime I'll just document half of the drawings I did. I really like the top and bottom-most figures... both are done in charcoal, and I think I was using an HB graphite stick for the other three. Which. Uh. Yeah. I don't think the material suits me well. I guess from drawing cartoons so much I have a habit of making my outer lines thicker than they should be (something my instructor has called me out on a lot) but... I don't know. I like the charcoal lines a lot.

These are a couple of screenshots from exercises I've done in Processing. We're using that program and Unity in my gaming design class, and it's been about two years since I last programmed anything with it. Yipes. Once I figure out how to put them on the internets, I'll link to the actual programs so anyone who feels adventurous can fiddle around with them.

Faceless, skinless puppet armature boy says hi! Earlier this week I started building the skeleton for the puppet I'll be animating for some stop-motion exercises (and quite possibly for a short film I'll be creating). He's not exactly done yet (meaning I still haven't filled him out completely) but later this weekend I'm going to be animating a few tests with him.

Last but not least, here's a WIP of one of the backgrounds I'm using for my animation. And I say WIP because I might go back and paint some of the bushes and mess around with the foreground later after I animate.

Phew! Wow, that's a lot of stuff. There's more to show, but I suppose this post is filled to the brim with work already. So yeah! Back to drinking gallons of coffee and getting more things done!

Figure Drawing Week One

Phew! I made it through my first figure drawing class of the semester. I'm a little rusty but hopefully I'll get back into the swing of things. Top one is gestures, bottom is various poses.

Three Drawings!

Hello, friends! Here are some drawings I have created as of late!

These are some plants I drew the other day at the Field Museum (it's for an assignment for my natural history illustration class... so I've got three more plants to draw)...
Here's another mask drawing that I should probably paint sometime soon...

And. Uh. Yeah. Doodles. From some obscure television show that I'm sure none of you know about.

So there, I gave you all three drawings. ARE YOU HAPPY? Of course you are! And you'll be happy to know that I'm drawing more, so that means even more things will be posted on here. Get excited if you aren't already!

So where has Maz been?

"Hello Maz! We can't see to find you! Where have you gone?"

Fear not! I'm alive. I'm here. Well, when I say here I mean back in Chicago. Today is actually the start of my last semester of art school and I am full of excitement and happiness. I am finally all unpacked and settled and ready to post more stuff on this blog. Hopefully there should be more activity on here as the next few months go by, because not only am I starting new work, I have a lot of old work to post up that had been away in storage. Be on the lookout for new and delightful posts!

Two More Inky-Type Drawings

Still messing around with that drawing website. Definitely not the type of style that I'm used to, but I love how you can shade with this thing.

A WINNER IS ME

Hey, remember that entry about the button I made a while ago? I know, it was so far back that you probably don't remember it. Anyway. I won. I won the cookies. I won the cookies and the contest like a boss. So in addition to the cookies and contest I get a bunch of buttons with my design on them! Awesome! I'm excited.

I've been messing around with this lately and drew two pictures so far that I deem worthy enough to be shown on the global system of IP networks. So here. Eh. Check 'em out.