Drawaholics: Wildebeest

Wildebeest this week.

Drawaholics - Unicorn

Quick doodle for Drawaholics; Papacorn, Mamacorn, Bebecorn - In a bit of an Adventure Time mood...

Drawaholics - Frog/Toad

it's been a really, shamefully long time... here a few quick doodles for the current Drawaholics' challenge, even managed to squeeze in one of my favorite characters from one of my favorite SNES games :3

Free Birds Trailer goes Live!

Been gone a long time.. so.. so.. busy...

But now the first trailer for the project that has been responsible for killing my life outside of work is finally out, and can be seen at apple.com for the time being! The trailer will also be released in front of Monsters U and Despicable Me 2.

This is Reel FX's first theatrical feature, done fully in house, and it has been an extremely fun (and exhausting) experience. We're still wrapping up the tail-end of the project, but the finish line is finally in sight. The movie will hit theaters November 1st.

Check out the trailer here:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/freebirds/

Turkeys!

Exciting news! Turkeys, the film I'm currently animating on at Reel FX, was officially given the green light and announced to the world yesterday. I've really been having a great experience on this film so far, and I can't wait to see it finished (though we've still got a long road ahead of us).

click the image for announcement on Cartoon Brew

Say My Name

i love me some breaking bad - after watching the mid-season finale (why the hell do they have to go on break until next year?!) i felt compelled to do a quick illustration. this moment gave me goosebumps.. but so did many others this season :P such a great show!

"You're Heisenberg."

"You're God Damn Right!"

Lesson 07 - Story

our final assignment - bittersweet, i've really enjoyed this course a lot, but man is it hard to keep up and put in the proper amount of time - exhausting :P

this week was story - we had to take our model's poses and implement the ideas of these poses in to a story. so instead of just pushing a pose, we actually had to give them context - pretty fun! makes me want to start doing some sequential art, maybe a web comic finally..

the class definitely helped me pinpoint a few areas that i could really push and work on to improve my overall posing (helps with animation too! bonus!) glad we did it, glad i'm done :P and feels good to have my drawing motor revving up again.

and here's a few reference poses that i used for the following set of gestures (pulled from one of the nifty life-drawing sites, The Drawing Script:)

 

Lesson 06 - Extrapolation

this week, we had to take the poses from our model and extrapolate the idea being shown, in to an animal. this forces you to try and convey a similar feeling with completely different anatomical limitations. you see this a lot, especially in Disney films (Lion King, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, Jungle Book, etc. which i've included a few examples of as well) - this was very a tough one, switching to a completely different creature while still trying to push for a nice gesture. my hand definitely tightened back up, but i feel like i was getting better results by the end..

Lesson 05 - Exaggeration

this week we're focusing on the idea of our poses and exaggerating to get the "feeling" across, rather than sticking to what's anatomically correct. we also had to pick an animal to do some studies with, in preparation for the next session (conveying our poses with an animal mayabe?) unfortunately i'm a bit short in terms of output again this week.. fingers crossed for a better turn out next week.

Showreels!

i finally got around to bringing my animation page up to date (with professional work at least); adding the most recent projects that i've been lucky enough to work on, with showreels for most of my shots.

Ted
this was the latest one to be released. such a fun project to work on.. though my vulgarity definitely got worse because of it ;P my older work can be seen under the Animation page.

Lesson 04 - Space

This week's lesson was focusing on space - so while we're moving in to more defined gestures, we're also having to pay attention to the figure in 3d space. a lot of these poses with the model were very flat to camera and we had to alter the angle of our gestures to give a feeling of depth. we ALSO had to spend half the time drawing with our subordinate hands (so left hand for me). this was meant to make us focus even more on the spacial value and not rely on our developed strokes with our dominant hands (which i've noticed can actually work against you at times). i have terrible line quality and control with my left hand, but there's a strange appeal to the contour-type figures that came from it..

it's a lot tougher to keep all of the ideas from previous lessons in mind as we move to more and more detailed gestures.. definitely going to take some practice. it was also a pretty busy week, i wanted to get a LOT more drawing done for this assignment, but it just didn't happen :S - next week!

Lesson 03 - Silhouettes

this week's lesson in our gesture drawing class focused on silhouettes. so now we're attempting to take the force that we capture with a distilled line or shape and express that within a full pose. you also need to keep the idea clear and not let the extra shapes get all muddied-up. it's so easy to get caught up in what i SEE once i'm adding limbs and everything, i'm really trying to force myself to keep the simplicity in mind and go for a feeling rather than recreating what's there.. i've got a LOT of pushing to do.

we're also required to get some 'cafe sketching' in each week, here are a couple pages that i scribbled down at a coffee shop, and i've picked a small handful of them to push beyond what i was able to get on the spot. good exercise!

:)

Drawing class, yay!

so Jess and i started a drawing class: gesture drawing w/ Alex Woo and Louis Gonzalez, through Schoolism. Alex and Louis are both story artists @ Pixar and the point of the class is to be able to create strong, story-telling poses. this is something i'm really excited about; being able to simplify or 'distill' a pose to it's true essence and not get caught up in all the unnecessary details. this should also help to strengthen our animation since good, clear poses are so crucial!

we just finished week 2, which focused on distilling poses in to abstract shapes. something i've found that i need to push myself on is really exaggerating the weight and direction of a pose, to get away from anything static or linear. i feel these are already pushed much further than the week 1 gestures, but there's still plenty of room for pushing.. *we also sketched quick gestures of the poses within our shapes to see how they help inform the drawing.

week 1 was the line of action - as mentioned above, these were really in need of some exaggeration, i was sticking too close to what i saw in the model and images and not pushing what we should FEEL in these gestures.

so far it's been fun, and i'm really looking forward to pushing myself through this course! yay for drawing!

Drawaholics - Raven

first illustration post since the big dallas-move - finally jumping on to the drawaholics wagon again, this week was 'favorite bird', pretty straight forward topic, didn't require much brain-power :P

it was either going to be a raven or an owl, and scribbling some lines on top of a black mass seemed appealing at the time. i tried to stay lose with the detailing and push for an interesting shape.

TED - Opening Weekend!

Ted finally opened this weekend! This is one of the last projects that Jess and I worked on back at Tippett, before leaving for Dallas. I really can't imagine that I'll work on another film quite like this one; an incredibly foul-mouthed child's toy, with Seth MacFarlane behind the comedic-wheel.. good stuff. This was honestly one of the funnest projects that I've ever worked on. The excitement for it at Tippett was tangible, the team was top-notch as usual, dailies sessions were hilarious, and Seth was a great director with the vocabulary to express what he wanted and incredibly appreciative of the work being done. Really, really fun experience.

If you're in to MacFarlane's brand of humor (Family Guy, etc) then you're sure to walk away from this one pleased. The story is straight forward, but with a lot of heart, and shit-load of laughs.