sartorialists

So my latest blog-related addiction is sketching different people from the Sartorialist for fun inbetween animating monsters at work. The sartorialist is a blog with pictures of interesting and unique peoples from all walks of life. Most of them in Paris, New York, London. Great site, Do check it out.

How many guys do you know can look this bad ass with yellow pants.

Oh man, You know some s**t is about to go down. Just waiting for the signal.
Photos from the Sartorialist.

Silly drawing from myself, colors in photoshop. That gun cheesball enough for ya?

A few more during the week.

GW on MSNBC

Check out this cool article on Guild Wars on MSNBC this morning!

Am-Class 1 Reel

AM-Last Q & A!

Yes,twelve weeks have already passed and we had our last q & A session with Ray ( of recent TMNT fame) tonight, it's kinda funny but you do bond with your classmates just over the course of 12 weeks. I wish them the best, and hope to meet up with some of them down in Siggraph this year! From Gregory with his frozen poses, Colin A.(from England) doin a Q&A at 5AM, Jerzy and his immaculate goatee,Tonya and her industry stories, to never ever ever seeing what Ya-Shu looks like. The quater was a fun experience. I never thought I'd have so much trouble with the bouncing ball exercise.

Unfortunately I'm going to have to be taking off from the next class coming up. I'm going to be going to the Philippines twice (4 weeks total!) and so decided it'd be best to not miss that much class in one quater. It is my fiance's first time in the Philippines and I want to be there with her, and AM will always be there when I come back. I'm signing up for the quater after. So I'll see all of you guys then! Or! I'll see you guys at Siggraph!Our mentor, Ray Chase, and Gregory Sugar Lips Jones.

GW 2!

Good news everyone! Guild Wars 2 made it to the front cover of PC Gamer this month! Check out this link for more info on the game and article.

Baby Fever

Last week one of my co-workers brought in their newborn baby. Babies are the best. At one point during the visit, over the span of about, say 2 minutes, he went from peacefully asleep, to foggy, to furious, to sleepy, to suddenly alert, to curious , back to sleepy. It was awesome.

Most of the time he slept though. Which means I got to pat his head alot.
And although tempting, I didnt go for the big sniff this time around, but I'll keep that one on the backburner for next time.

Week 11 -AM Balance

The next and final sketch n pose word for the quater is Balance. Here are some of the first few sketches I'm doin, mostly breakin poses and capoeira!

FlapTraps

Just drarwin co- workers.

Personality Walk

Week 10 AM- Exhausted

This weeks Animation Mentor assignment for sketch and pose is exhausted. Here are a few quick ideas, more to come later in the week!

Happy Birthday Aubs!

Corbis Girl

From a girl I found on Corbis today at work. Corbis is an AWESOME site for reference photos and movies!
Congratulations on the new gig Leslie!

Week 10 - AM Personality Walk!

Hey Mom! This week's AM assignment is a walk with some style! I shot some reference tonight for a fancy dancy,double bounce strut idea, should be fun. Pardon the pups.

Electric Boogaloo.

Inspired by some breakdancers we saw fighting for space at the J&M Club last Wednesday. And an excuse to play with more brushes!

I used to be HARDCORE into breakdancing, in junior high that is literally all that any of the kids did and thats all that we ever talked about. If we weren't video taping ourselves in the garage, we were watching Beat Street for the thousandth time. I could never do crazy any of the advanced power moves like headspinning or ninties. My forte was the windmill and I for a while I thought I was super cool until eventually eeeverybody in Bremerton could do it. The best guys were always those skinny 100 pound dudes because they didnt have much to work with. I kinda tapered off in high school and by college I was back to being completely uncoordinated.

For more crazy breakdancin action check out my co-worker, Rich, serving fools at work!

When I grow up...

I want to be a Spartan.

Week 9 - AM

Woo week 9 already! This week we are refining the "vanilla" walk cycle from stepped mode, and the sketch n pose emotion is Concerned. So here are just some ideas:




I also added a link to my 1st quater AM mentor, Ray Chase's blog!

Also if you havent heard, John Lasseter has officially Announced Frog Princess, which is going to be in 2D, Yeah man!

Hey Glen! Thanks buddy!

My crap drawing of Glen Keane's Tarzan I did a while back. Say what you will about this movie, but after seeing the animation on Tarzan, I knew what I wanted to do w/ my life. My aha moment. I know, pretty late in life right? What was that 99? I was a tender 18 year old.

I remember it pretty vividly, I was in intro 2 animation class and I think we were watchin, like, Mulan or something. And the trailer for Tarzan came on and I was floored. Man, look at the energy in those drawings, man look at how hes moving through that space, gahhh! Completely unlike anything I'd seen.

New YouTube of Glen doing his thing at CalArts. Thanks to Jeremy B for the find!

And they were all Yellow

Just a sketch of a random girl (promise, babe.) while playing with photoshop brushes.

Week 8- Walk Cycle

Also this week is a classic vanilla walk cycle. Here are my plans and a pass in stepped mode!! Not much to say, except for I need to find a way to come up with funds for tuition to get to the second quater of Animation Mentor. Yay stress! Ah well, we'll make something work.

Week 8 AM - Strength

The description for this weeks AM Sketch N Pose assignment is Strength. Since strength is pretty open ended, I have a lot of ideas for how to describe it but this is the first round of quick thumbnail sketches. Mostly physical martial-artsy, boxing, and yoga/pilates-y stuff, kind of obvious choices but these were fun to do. Although I doubt any of these will work with Stu. Check em!

**Update: Put up the final Stu pose for strength!

Week 7 - AM

This week we're studying arcs, path of action, and continuing with overlapping action. Here is my first of a gillion passes I'm sure! I feel like overlapping is what I'm weakest at when it comes to mechanics, I always fear animating monsters with tails and tentacles @ work. And if you've ever played our games, we love monsters w/ tails n tentacles! Having said that, I love love love doin this crazy cartoony kind of animation, so much fun.

I'm still hesitant to make the jump to Maya, I think it's just because I dont want to be in Max mentality at work and Maya at home. So I modeled and rigged up little Max versions of Tailor and Leggy Leggerson here. But! Its gonna have to happen sometime, I dont think I could pull of a whole biped on my own.

Speaking of Guild Wars, if you haven't checked out the ArenaNet Sketch Blog in a while, CHECK IT! They are posting again, link to right.->

Massive Dude.

This weeks assignment was to animate a platform with a three-joint chain to demonstrate overlapping action. As with most of these assignments, I blocked it out, as rapidly as I could, and then literally made hundreds of iterations to make it look right, or somewhat right. Tricky parts? Yeah the whole thing man. Getting it to start convincingly, settle nicely, and travel across the screen and not seem stiff all went into trying to make this believable.
Which is starting to prove to me that animation, no matter how much you animated before, never gets any easier. The more you do it and develop your eye, the more you start to pick apart anything about everything.

So here's mine:

Lunchtime Scibbly-pants.

New Braces

Suprisingly, Cheryl seems to be pretty fond of her new braces.

Smile for me daddy
(What you lookin at)
Let me see your grill
(Let you see my what)
Your, your grill your, your, your grill
(Rob the jewelry store and tell them make me a grill)

-Nelly "Grillz"

The Return of Thu Night Life Drawing...and art bloggery.

Taters managed to arrange life drawing @ ArenaNet this thursday once again ! We get great models here, I'm not used to getting so many great ones in a row. Here are some of what I could come up with tonight, for better or for worse! I think it's apparent that I've been searching way too many art blogs lately. And bloglines doesn't help the situation either. I don't care, there is too much good shizzle out there. Me and my co worker Matt Tate seriously have like, 3 to 400 art blogs bookmarked collectively. Every morning its like, "Damn you Nick Suuuuuung." or " Aw yeah HandDrawnNomad gimme the good stuff." Depending on the day, this either inspires me or makes want to cry.

The exception being Keith Lango, that guy is always inspiring.

Our model, I can't remember her name, Kendra I think. Apparently she looks like Madame Getreau, not really.

Quickies.

More Quickies.

What am I even doing with these , who knows.

That is all!

Have a great weekend!

Devastated

Week 5 of the first quater of Animation Mentor already!


These are just some ideas for this week's emotion devastated. Mostly variations on the same theme, pretty much.

And a first pass on a bouncing ball through an obstacle course! Fun stuff!

Time for work.

Nervous.

There was no sketch and pose assignment this week, but I wanted to keep the ball rolling, and continue practicing selling the idea for an emotion through body language. Just some ideas for nervous, nothing super cool. Maybe more later!

Scott Mayhew's Miraculous Self.

What I get to see everyday when I turn around from my desk.

First AM animation assignment!

Ahh the good ol ball bounce exercise. Man, this was so much harder than I remember, I got to block this pretty quickly but made about a million passes at it to get it right! And I turned it in, and still had to make revisions! Ah well, done with it for now, then I'll come back later find something else to tweak.

Another pic for Cheryl

Here is a pass at a drawing I'm making for Cheryl. Really inspired by some prints I bought recently from Chris Appelhans. I want it to be nice so I'm hopin' to tidy it up and to color it soon. Just, gotta get better at......... not sucking with color.

Daniel Dociu

A cool article about our Art Director at Arena Net, Daniel Dociu !

Seriously Biscuit.......

...This is gonna have to stop sometime.

Excited!

The assignment is to pose out Stu in an excited pose. These are some crude ideas. Hopefully I can keep comin up with better ones later.
I've been "sitting in" on some e-critiques Randy Haycock (Aladdin, Clayton from Tarzan, Kida from Atlantis) has for his students and the things he's always mentioning he wants from drawings are a sense of what the character is doing, and how he/she feels about what they're doing. Damn! I dont know why but that just completely struck a chord for me, just then. Like, why did that just completely make sense to me, only now? The hell if I know. So alright, I'm going to push TRY to get that in my drawings from here on out, wish me luck.

First AM assignment..

IN THE BAG!

So the very first assignment we had to do was to go out and sketch people, pick our favorite and pose it out to Stu. So those are the sketches I've been posting here recently. I'm having to get used to Maya again which is not as bad as I thought it was gonna be.

Ray got his critiques in early so I've gotten my first e-critique. The cool thing is that you have access to any student's critique, which is where I think you can still learn tons.

The pose the chose.


Ray goin over my work.


The Stu pose translated! Yeah it's a bit different than the sketch, while translating the pose exactly , I could get the right arm from not intersecting Stu's head, so I swung it out the other way instead.

and more...

Tai Chi

Motion Studies..

...For this week's AM assignment. B-ball and Ballet.

This reminds me of one of the few things I remember from Art School was when a student in my Anaylsis of Form class asked our teacher Bill Cumming ( who is also quite the prolific local fine artist), how to get motion in your drawings, and all he said was to throw the figure off balance. I guess I semi- agree, but hey he would know better than I.

Anyone know if Bill is still teaching @ AIS?

Simplification.

So I've been cruisin the campus alot recently, checkin out mentors critiques of students work, and by far the one thing that is brought up the most is simplification.

"You these 4 main poses, narrow them to two." "Stay in this pose and work in it." " You have too many ideas in the shot, narrow them down to two, so that you are just going from idea a to idea b." " That movement doesn't need to be there."

Something I'm completely guilty of .