I wish I had a scanner...

Some stereotypes from a town in Australia I lived in

 Because I can't really show anything of what I've been doing unless it's digital. And the digital bits are mostly boring photo manipulation or web design type stuff. This was the last couple things I managed to scan, and now with my camera completely broken I can't even manage to take photos. Hopefully, I can fix my electronics in the New Year and get back to more regular updates!

First of three paintings for a competition which I managed to win! (in the watercolor departments that is). The theme was Past, Present, and Future, relative to the surroundings of the town I was living in. I decided to focus on the degradation of nature that so many people have been talking about, due to a boom in the oil industry. My amazing partner helped me out with the concept for these three pieces and made all the frames from scratch and reclaimed materials.

Present, shiny clean, progressive

Future, a bit of an apocalyptic outlook..

Sorry for the lack of updates or explanations, but I figure you'd rather enjoy some eye candy instead. Hope to be able to put up heaps of cool stuff in the upcoming year. This year has been an incredibly well traveled one for me, and the inspiration and new things I've seen should keep me plenty occupied!

Shy

 

 

I was going to type a long rant about this one....but sit back, and enjoy this endless amount of work. Working on it over the course of the year, I'd say it took about two months of "full time hours" to finish. I hope this brings a little smile to your face. : )

Happy Easter everyone!

After hours

The juggler had an interesting choice of words if you can read my notes

 

What better time to post than at 3 AM in the morning! These are quick live sketches from Wizard World, which I was working at last week. The first few days were kind of slow business, so I observed people. But then it got busy and I had to work...so unfortunately not a lot of time to draw. Carnie people are interesting and depressing folk I have to say.  I'll have to draw a whole character lineup some time...

In other news....

I'm about to fall asleep on my keyboard, but can proudly say I finished my target projects for the day! Unfortunately, I can't quite show you yet what I'm working on (telling people what I'm doing jinxes me), but my pre-trip update is going to be GRAND. Like, I'm happier with it than my portfolio, though that's just me. And it will be one of the first, if not the first, biggie projects I actually completed.

I've been listening to an excellent podcast while working called "Making Comics" by the amazing Jason Brubaker, who is both an animator and a comic artist. And he interviews a lot of independent comics artists/animators. Kind of my dream. But listening to all the hard work these people put in to get to their niche and fame really pushes me to work for...12 or 14 hours or whatever it's been this last week. I highly recommend it! A lot of useful business advice for artists too. 

So..sorry for the crummy update, but I hope you like what's coming at you next week!

Life Drawing Watercolors and Stuff

Can a pose be any more boring? Geh..I have no patience for hour long poses.

So...one month of not going to life drawing consistently (or at all) and you're right back at ground 0, dammit. I have recently made the analogy that life drawing and drawing in general is just like working out (two things I love): you stop for too long and all your nice tone and muscle goes away and you get stiff and weak. Same applies to drawing. But life drawing is more like deciding to skip exercising one part of your body for a while, so everything goes out of balance as a result. Geh..I can only imagine the downhill my life drawing will take starting in April. Anyhow...enough complaining. Lots of work to do!

Also, every person needs to watch this film: L'Illusioniste (that's the trailer and you can easily find the movie online) The neat thing is, there is no dialogue in the whole movie, and the whole story is told through action and expression. I haven't seen human emotion animated this well, so even if you're not too hot on the story, do yourself a favor and watch a few clips and just learn from them. This is precisely why I want to work in the European animation industry. Oldschool 2d still lives!

Have a good weekend everyone!

Poetry Illustration

A few of the illustrations I did for some close friends of mine to accompany a poem written by one of them.

Quelques croquis en aquarelle que j'ai fait pour mes amis. Ils accompagnent une petit poème qu'ils ont écrit.

Balls in Motion

My bigass french exam is coming up on thursday, so all I've really been doing is studying..and when I'm not studying french, I'm reading animation books or watching After Effects tutorials...geek. Anyhow, I tried to do a walk cycle a while back which will never see the light of day. However, I did realize I need to backtrack and start at the beginning before I can animate a solid scene I want to show Gobs.

So there are 4 mini animation in the video. The first two I did the whole dope-sheet procedure which was helpful in timing at first, but when I composited all the frames I still needed to adjust the timing and add/remove drawings. They also took oddly long considering I was just drawing circles.

The next two videos however, even though a more difficult task as I'm using perspective, took about a quarter of the time using a totally different approach. I'm sure someone out there does it I just don't know what it's called. Basically I set up my perspective grid and drew more or less all the frames on one sheet of paper like this:

 

And then I just traced each cell over top, already in order. Didn't have to waste time looking for cells to put inbetweens, and could gauge better how the animation was going to turn out. The timing was a little different as I just had to use common sense, watch a few actual videos of things moving in space and so forth. But I'm much happier with the last two as they don't feel so technical (irony) and the time saving....brilliant. 

Beards and Tidbits

When a parent is too busy to hold their child's hand

One day this kid and his mini doc martens are gonna be famous. Kudos for his super tattooed and pierced parents

Beards. Just cause I wanted to exploit the "caption" button.

Heya! 

You know what hasn't happened on this blog in a while? Good old ranting!

So this past weekend, my lovely country of Canada celebrated a holiday which we invented a few years ago (never thought one could do that) called Family Day, conveniently following Valentine's Day. Hmmmmmm...I'll leave that one alone this time. 

Anyhow, instead of spending time with the good old family as I'm assuming most people do, I finally got to venture out into the big wide world after basically not having human contact for a few weeks. (technically english contact, since my french classes are more or less my social life these days...I should probably start writing some of these blog entries in both to practice..hmm) My best buddy and I got to see each other and work together at a Kid's Festival. (big bouncy castles, too much cotton candy and all that stuff) Neither of us is particularly fond of kids, or I guess such huge quantities of really poorly raised kids. But hell, we had some fun selling random crap for insane amounts of money to poor parents. (think lots of flashing swords and bubbles) A dad even told me "You guys are a kid's dream and a parent's nightmare". Was tempted to give him my two cents on that one buuuuuut. Gotta be a nice canadian eh?

However, I did get to see plenty of interesting families, especially the mixed race kids. I swear the world population is getting more and more beautiful with this globalizing stuff. Dark skin, bright blue eyes, or cute little afro with eastern eyes..so awesome! However, of course no day was complete without the obese 4 year olds shoveling bags of cookies in their mouth, with their extravagantly generous-figured parents munching down on a xl pizza. What surprised me the most though about this whole "Kid's Festival" and festivals in general is the moral code of the parents. Every time I work one of these carnie events, sure, someone steals. But you would think it's mostly teenagers, right? Nope. The sweetest old ladies and the nicest moms. You stand there, shocked to see a cute grandma casually stuff a $5 glowing wand into her purse, that by the time you snap out of it, she happily walks away. And the worst part of this? Their kids are watching the whole time! What kind of morals are we setting for younger generations?? Like there aren't enough problems already!

Anyhow, hence a few sketches I expanded on when I got home. Society is a fun thing to observe. Kind of wish I had like 5 years of life where I didn't have to think about responsibility, projects or money and just be free to watch observe and sketch, soaking up different cultures like a sponge. I'll keep on scratching those cash for life lottery cards I guess...

And the beards were just something I wanted to play around with. Test some color combos with my good old watercolors. Who doesn't love beards?

Anywho....got lots more to say, but I think I've spammed my own blog enough for a day. Will need to make this up with a heavy art dump soon. Have a good weekend everyone!

Animation Portfolio/Book 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After updating and re-updating, the time has finally come to just accept the portfolio as it is, and leave it alone. So voila the 38 page fruit of my toil! This portfolio will be sent to Georges Mélies, La Poudierre and most importantly, Gobelins. There will be a few changes regarding Gobs...but it's 2 in the morning and I'm not much for coherent thoughts right now.

I am super excited to get back to actual projects though, even though I only have one month left before