3D can be fun!

...but right now it's just a pain to render and create. Don't get me wrong, I'm having fun working in Maya, but man! I didn't really take much thought into why my 3D animation friends were always complaining about render times! Now I know. And I am humbled by it.

This week is crit week at my school, which is basically a long, long week from Hell for everyone to get their work finished for finals. I'm going to be very busy trying to finish the rest of my work, which I will archive on here, even if this week leaves me a horrible, crying mess. I do have more to post, so look for more updates soon!

SQUIDLY PRINTINESS

Ugh, I've been having a heck of a time trying to post this up, but here's a link to a photo album I created to document a project that I did. Involving squids. And the USPS. Valerie and Cathie (and now John McCann!) are on there... and a few other awesome people should be on there soon. So go check it out! It's awesome!

Doodles and Works In Progress or I Need To Get A Better Scanner and Camera

Ugh, see, one thing that irks me when I try to archive doodles and works in progress is 1) the quality of my crappy camera washing out details, 2) all of the white space I keep in my pictures (which I've got to stop, ergh!) and 3) my scanner being very... microscopic. It picks up the texture of the colored pencil and markers, while when you look at it with in person it's quite smooth looking. Come on, technology! Why do you have to either erase my perfections or perfect things that shouldn't be perfected in the first place?!

Anyway. As you can tell I've been doodling a lot of sea creatures lately. It's my thing these days, I don't know. Maybe it's due to me being Piscean... I have to draw my brethren! I haven't done any cartoon work in a while but I've just been trying out different shading techniques. Nothing super fancy as of late.

More important things for me to archive: printmaking class project, 3D performance updates, storyboarding, and... whatever else I come up with. Which will arrive on this very blog soon!

Progress on the Vampire Squid and Friends

Ugh, the color's kind of washed out (I guess you can blame that on my crappy camera... I wish I had my nice Canon still) and it's a little bright (again, stupid Olympus camera) BUT this is my progress on the picture. I need to continue filling up all of the white space, then I'll add an additional layer of white gel pen specks, probably build up some of the shading and tones on the figures, and... well, I'm still debating on adding watercolor. I don't know. It may end up being a bit too much. But we'll see how it goes.

The Sane Professor and her Mad Robot Dog

...that's not the official title for them, but for now I'll call them that.

I did an animation with these two for one of my first sound to image projects. I gathered a couple of random sound effects and created a 30 second story about Robot Dog snooping around the Professor's lair, much to her annoyance and to his delight. It was SUPER SUPER rough, and I really want to color and refine it (since I did it with some super crappy software to begin with). They're an interesting pair, though. I do want to work with them more.

And here're a few sketches I did before the animation. Yep. I don't know what was up with the robot bird. Apparently it was rejected for not having a robot heart. Which is mandatory.

A work in progress and some photos!

So no, no, yeah, no, yeah, I've got some pieces to share!

Here's the first... like I've said before (well, at least mentioned) I'm doing a series of "portraits" starring women and androgynous people wearing strange mask that obscure different parts of their bodies (mostly the heads, but I'm starting to hide specific mutilated limbs and organs that they may or may not have). I branched out into doing these illustrative drawings set in an oceanic area, starring a mask girl and her friend/follower/pet(?) masked octopus. At first it really was supposed to be a one-time sort of thing, but I decided that I should make more and turn the drawings into illustrations while figuring out a story for them: who IS this girl, and why is it that she's masked, able to breathe water, and always running into strange cephalopods all of the time?

The girl and the awesome cool vampire squid are in the picture so far, just not her little octo-buddy. Not sure if I'm gonna color it or what. I inked the last one that I drew, but it turned out to be so busy without any shading added to it (hence the reason I'm shading this one). We'll see what happens.

And here're some Photoshopped photos I had to do for my printing class. I, uh... Photoshopped statues. Onto pictures from Haymarket, VA. If you couldn't tell what I did. You probably can, though. I'm obviously not a master Photoshopper, but I try.

More to come soon! ...with my past for updating this blog, let's hope so, at least.

Wild Update Appeared!

Okay, well, it's been a long time since I last updated this. My last semester came and went, there was a turbulent storm of drama in my life, I'm getting over one of the worst colds I've ever had (which has made me quite sluggish and whiny and cranky for the past few weeks)... yeah, yeah, I know. Excuses, excuses! I can't really blame any of those things for the fact that I haven't put any work up here. I'm sorry, little blog. I'll try to make up for lost time.

For future reference, I just signed up for a Vimeo account. Literally about a few minutes ago. I'll probably upload videos of rough animation tests on there, but if I don't post them on the blog (which is likely... of course), you can periodically check it out here.

So what am I doing art wise? Let's take a look!

The first image is yet another one of my Peruvian Mask portraits. It's so interesting how the project's been evolving ever since my first attempt (which... actually, I'll have to post all of the pictures so everyone can see how much things have changed). You can see a little bit of the first Peruvian Mask portrait in the last image at the bottom, which I had to throw together (along with the other picture) for my printing class. The middle picture is my experiment with stereograms, which I'll probably talk more about in a later post. I honestly don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to the software, but it's something I've recently been interested in and that I'm... well, just experimenting with.

Alright, there's just a couple things. A taste, if you will, of the stuff that I've been up to. I've got storyboards, more portraits, some watercolors, some animation that I need to get done... man, I have a LOT of stuff to cover. XD! But all in due time, kids.

(Also... ha! I remembered that these posts automatically go over to my Tumblr. Sweet! Now if you follow that you can get these post updates... AND MORE! So if you really want to follow my art more... in-depth, I suppose... go subscribe to the tumblr!)