Getting Ready to Rumble

I have a fantastic series I’ve been waiting to post, just you wait.  For now though, here’s a little swordsman.

 

iPad Test

Just testing out WordPress’ nifty iPad app and posting a couple quick sketches I did with the Artstudio program.

Pear Bird

Fun with acrylics!  I painted this in an hour or so as an extremely minor prop for a commercial.  I never use acrylics or paint in this style, so I had a tun of fun with it.  I used doilies as a stencil for the blue bits and threw some glitter and gold leaf on there at the very end.  My art director wanted to keep it to hang in her house.

June/July Sketchdump!

This is the sound of my sketchbook horking the contents of its overfilled pages all over the internet.  I got my iMac back from the shop today, and my hopes are high because it hasn’t yet blitzed out.  Cross your fingers for me, will ya?

First off, this is the original sketch for the Ghosts piece.  I did some thumbnails with crossed scythes in the background because I liked the overall composition, but as you’ll be able to see when I post a good picture of the final image, I ended up drawing them in her hand.

A game I’ve been playing with myself where I take a really random organic shape and make a monster out of it.

Some nouveau-style things I was playing around with…

This is what I was doodling while sitting through my interminable graduation ceremony.

A little bat, because I’ve been thinking about making my next soft sculpture as one of them.

Belatedly…

Wow, I’ve been horrible at updating this blawg since summer started.  I’m waiting for my Mac to come back from the shop to post my sketch dump, but in the meantime, here are some work-in-progress photos of a piece I did for a group show at work with the theme of “Ghosts.”

Character Portrait

This is a piece I’ve been working with off and on since classes got out. The characters are played by my friend J. Blaze Ward on the MUD Armageddon, which I’ve been playing and loving since 2006.  It’s a text-based online roleplaying game with no bells and whistles and visuals, just pure creative writing backed up by advanced DIKU code.  It blows my mind continually, you should totallytry it out.

 

Catching Up

So I’ve pretty much been walking on air lately.  My thesis is done and as of tomorrow at 6pm, I’ll be an official graduate, at long last.  I’ve had a droolworthy amount of free time over the past couple of weeks, and I decided to spend some of it doing some loose sketches just for my own pleasure, something that seems like a luxury during the school year.  Here are a few selections from my sketchbook, as well as my silkscreen final, which I gave away to my faculty panel and family during my oral defense.  Enjoy.

Watercolor Flashback!

I found out recently that my first art teacher, the incredible Satoko Motouji, completed the permanent installation of six watercolor paintings at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, one of which was mine (the green one in the middle).  The pieces were intended to celebrate the diversity of the student body at LCC and were completed during her spring 2007 Intermediate Watercolor class.  The models were fellow students.  Satoko saw this project through for three and a half years after we’d left the school, and I’m really grateful to her for her determination.  Thanks, Satoko!  They look awesome.

Caesura

WOOHOO!  I presented my thesis oral defense yesterday morning and passed with flying colors.  The audience laughed in all the right places and my family showed up wearing clown noses.  This was the most work-intensive four months of my life and I’ve never spent so much time on a single project before.  I’m glad it’s finished, but it brought me so many awesome opportunities in the animation world, I may just try it again someday.  Here’s a quote from my dissertation about the project.

What better way to illustrate the notion of the absurd than animation?  The medium affords the animator to show audiences what the camera cannot; in this case, our beloved 21^st century technology brought stumbling to its knees.  America has seen only glimpses of the chaos that could lay us low if we suddenly lost the narcotic bliss of our beloved cellphones and computers.  The flimsy promise of electronic immortality is irresistibly tempting, but at the end of the day it means nothing in the face of true survival.  I feel extremely fortunate to have seen the unprecedented rise in popularity of the internet during my lifetime.  The world has reached an amazing period of instantaneous worldwide communication through the web and more and more people come to depend on it every day.  So what would happen if it all just… stopped?

In Caesura, an anthropomorphized rabbit finds his own answers to this very question.  He symbolizes the young American tech junkies we all know, and he will take a ride through the possibilities of chaos and imagination to make a choice between a rejection of his present reality or a reinvention of it.

You can find the finished animation, with sound design by Portland sound designer Gordon Romei on YouTube and here on my portfolio website.  Enjoy!

Studio Ho!

Hurray, I finally finished editing “Caesura” today.  To celebrate, I decided to post the awesome photos that PNCA’s extremely talented photographer Matt Miller took.  My mentor Rose Bond brought him in not only to document the process for my purposes, but to use as PR for the school’s Contemporary Animated Arts department.  Look for me in next year’s catalog. 

My next step for the film is to hand it over to Gordon Romei, my sound designer, for his magical touch.  The screening is in two weeks!