Illustration Friday: Horizon

Look who's coming over the horizon. It's Santa Claus!

Merry Christmas!

Animation!

Blocking out the timing and poses. It feels good to be animating something that is more....me. My last clip I animated was too forced. I forced the characters into a situation and the animation came out flat. This, although it may not be profound is much more natural to me. I'll post more work in progress as it comes.

Some Blogs of Friends

Time to plug some friends blogs. David Campbell and Kevin Foster write about their adventures in life as well as post some neat updates on emerging technology. You can read about Campbell's discovery of Jott or about Foster's close encounter with identity theft. Check them both out, they're quite entertaining. I miss those guys.

Christmas with the Muppets

I don't understand how there can be any Scrooges around Chirstmas time. Whatever happened to this attitude?



I grew up with John Denver and the Muppets around Christams time. We had the LP "A Christmas Together" and we wore it out until almost ever song skips at the same exact moment each time they are played. I miss Jim Henson. Although the Muppets never stopped being entertaining and funny, I think that much of the sentimental side of them got pushed to the background. Every time I hear Kermit sing a sentimental song I am moved. Jim Henson had such an awesome vision of what the world could be. That is what Christmas means to me.

So here's to the lovers and the dreamers.

Figure Drawing - colored

Figure Drawing -12/08/07

Loosening up...
All three models we've had since we started going to the sessions have been stellar.

Back at RIT it was hard to find decent models. The males were usually decently built but did very strange poses, and the women usually did not have much of a figure. It's great to be able to see the form while I'm drawing the poses.

Blue pencil treated me pretty well that day. I believe animators use them because they are magic. I want to go over some of these to darken them up or maybe try to color them.

More 20 minute variations.

Sometimes just scribbling is the way to go

Figure Drawing -12/01/07

Warming up...
Lisa did short poses incorporating her taking off her clothes. It was a good opportunity to get some balancing poses as well as gesture in some cloth.

She had some really dynamic poses

Me and the brush pen are not friends yet.

I really liked her hairClothing props

Twenty minute poses are way too long for me. I'm not interested in getting fine detail, I'm more interested in getting good weight, good gestures, and good caricature of anatomy. Instead of focusing on detail during a 10 or 20 min pose I like to do as many variations as I can with different medium.

I think the watercolor gesture drawings come out the best. I should use that feeling and get a more refined drawing off of that paint blob.

Figure Drawing -11/17/07

I was hesitant to post these because it was my first figure drawing class since junior year of college (3 years ago), but after 3 sessions I have seen improvement so I wanted to post something to compare. Warming up...

I've really been able to loosen up and experiment now that there is no collegiate pressure. I'm less concerned with making a technically perfect drawing, I like to push the poses. Trial and error.

I really need practice with hands.

She had such good poses

Problems with blogging your images?

I'm sure some of you noticed in your last couple posts, that any image you blog now tries to download the file when clicking on the thumbnail instead of opening the larger version of that image in your browser. I'm not sure if blogger is aware of this but I looked through the new image code and found the following:

Before your thumbnail image would be sourcing from something like:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cME615demG8/R1JE4D0jamI/AAAAAAAAAHY/
yeV8wRq3z6I/s400/holidayFrontweb.jpg

and linking to:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cME615demG8/R1JE4D0jamI/AAAAAAAAAHY/
yeV8wRq3z6I/s1600-h/holidayFrontweb.jpg

Now what your thumbnail links to is something like:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cME615demG8/R1JE4D0jamI/AAAAAAAAAHY/
X76i_cwk-SY/s1600-R/holidayFrontweb.jpg

notice the difference in parent directory and the difference between s1600-h and s1600-R.
So what you need to do to get it back to the normal way is this:
In your 'edit html' tab of your blog post find the link following "src=" This will give you the proper parent directory (the letters/numbers just before "/s400"). Use this path in the link following "href=". Finally make sure you replace the s1600-R with s1600-h. Save and publish.

Illustration Friday: Excess

This illustration is dedicated to the boys who constantly hop our fence and swim in our pool. This happens quite often with several neighborhood children and I am usually okay with that as long as they show respect toward the property. There are a few regulars that like to use the pool, take of their clothes and occasionally throw all the lawn chairs into the pool. I drew the line when the day before Thanksgiving one decided to pee into the pool. The kicker is, on the next day they came back and swam in that same pool and I am certain the apt. staff did not clean the pool between that time. I figured that any pee in the pool is too much so it ought to fit this weeks topic.

More Practice

I have some tweaking to do but I had to get this out of my system. This exercise has been taking me a long time to finish, mostly because I haven't been able to get into the acting so I don't end up working on it for long periods at a time.


Nearly Done from EvadCeivorus on Vimeo.

Thanksgiving

We had Thanksgiving at our place this year. It was a great time. Good food, good friends, good times. I was nervous about making the turkey. There was a lot of pressure after last year's amazing turkey cooked my our friend Tom. I had Tom's guidance while preparing mine so it turned out to be really juicy and it tasted great. We went with Tom's upside-down method of cooking. It lets the juices drip down into the breast meat. Joe and Em brought awesome deserts, Bill made some killer candied yams, Brit made her famous apple sauce, among other deliciousness and Greg entertained us with stories from his job at Laika.

I laughed until I cried

Mostly because I pictured my brother Matt doing this.

BEOWULF.....in 3d?

We went to see a free screening of Beowulf last night in San Fran and.......at least I got a free pair of glasses and a free bag of popcorn. I showed up about 15 minutes late because I was coming from work in Redwood City, and the show still hadn't started when I got there. They had been fiddling around with the projector trying to get the 3d aspect of it to work. All we ended up seeing was a double image even with the glasses on. After about 20 minutes of that they had thought they fixed it (the titles looked somewhat 3d) and they let the movie run for about 20 minutes ignoring the fact that anyone who was close up in the frame was still showing up as double imaged. After fiddling around for another 10 min or so they called it quits. There was no regular print so we didn't get to see the film at all. That was a bummer. From what I saw though it looked like it could be a decent movie if they just used the real actors. The CG was too much in the Uncanny Valley to really get into. The facial expressions were flat, and the design of Grendel was awful (it is possible to have a character be gross and ugly and still have good design). I think that if I had the chance to see this for free again I would. I don't think I'll be paying to see it. And if they ever want to make this story into live action I will be there on opening night.

jack o' Lanterns! pt. 2

Brittney's workplace had a carving contest tonight. Sorry for the lack of originality, I was looking for something quick and easy.
Brittney did a nice Madusa in a very Lou Romano style

Jack o' Lanterns!

Haven't done these since I was probalby 8 years old.

Practice

Been working on this one for a while. I've grown fond of this face rig that I built. It's really flexible yet it poses very quickly.



innocence from EvadCeivorus on Vimeo.

Illustration Friday: Emergency

I suppose that he's running to the water to save someone. Or maybe he's had a long day at work and its imperative that he gets to surf.

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More sketches

Fjorg Trip

Welp. This past week three of the Commandos (me, Joe and Jed) traveled down to San Diego to compete in the first FJORG! competition at SIGGRAPH. The objective was to complete at least 15 seconds of animation in a continuous 32-hour period. It was a great time. We had a lot of fun and made a film we are really proud of. We unfortunately didn't place but oh well. All the teams did a great job...each one of them finished on time. To watch all the films click here.

The trip there was such a blast. It was great to have Jed around after not seeing him for over a year. We had a lot of time to catch up on the way down there. here are some sketches of the trip.



Here is our final video on YouTube.

The Man Who Plays for Pigeons

I've wanted to write a children's book for quite some time now. This might be an idea to go with. There is a fantastic clarinet player named Don who plays every weekend down at the Ferry Building. He loves when people stop and listen to him.

Some Old Skethces

Weiners...

Quick sketch of wolverine.

Quick sketch from "Once"