site seeing

I made this website about a year ago.  It's birds, because birds are neat.  Not only were birds featured on this website but so was my work.  It's gone now though, a new one will be up later this month when I can get my domain back.  Everything + sub pages were hand drawn/written because I came to the realization that there were no internet rules saying I couldn't and this simply made more sense (it was also more fun).  But back to the topic at hand, websiiite.

As a side note, I had a bunch more sketchbook bits edited and ready to go but my macbook up and died.  Those scans are going to stay where they are until I can perform an autopsy.  In the meantime, funeral services will still be held next Friday as planned.  I hope to see you all there.

strawberry

It wasn't any kind of plot point, but when we were working on our film we came to choose a pie type for each of the characters.  Pete was apple - the quintessential American classic - even the stunt pie standing in for him in the live action scene was an actual apple pie.  Sheriff, we decided, was a meat pie.  Narrator came to be a strawberry pie.  Of course, by that point, it only seemed proper to outfit him with an appropriate bandanna.

airplane drawings

tiny squares

making drawings move.

dress-up

Key Lime was such a minor character in our film, really she was just a background character who played into a couple of gags.  Since she wasn't all that important and never got much screen time, not a whole lot of time and concern went into her design beyond the initial phases.  Upon entering 3D though it quickly became apparent that we had some issues to resolve and decisions to make.  Since Key Lime is a "flat top" pie she is very close to Quiche structurally and the structural problems were consequently solved through Quiche.  Her dress however wasn't.  We were stuck with the simple short hand we had used for her in prepro, but that simply wasn't translating into the world we were building, so it was back to the drawing board.  These are my notes from that whole bit of trying to fix her and how to adapt a showgirl's dress from a person to a pie.

jest

Guess which one I own.

don't cry over spilt milk

Not everyone catches this little gag in our film, it goes by pretty fast, but you can catch it at 1:14.  I did the lighting in this shot, Uri did the comp, and then I painted the milk residue and drop animation in photoshop to layer back on top and finish off the shot.  Since Blue is really the only thing that moves in the shot we were able to simply layer it on instead of having to map it or anything.  For consistency, the drop residue was painted in and then duplicated and erased as I animated.  Also, her refraction in the mug is a total cheat, which let us get it to look the way we wanted.

red bull kluge

Recently I had the pleasure of working with the fine fellows of Syyn Labs on the Red Bull Kluge, a giant Rube Goldberg Machine combined with some wonderfully talented athletes (check it out, it's an awesome video!)  My main role in this was creating storyboards to help communicate what was going to happen and help plan the path of the main camera capturing it all (which by the way was an ultimate arm, the sickest camera rig I've ever seen)  There were lots and lots of other cameras on set too, including a small army of go pros.  When I wasn't doing drawings I was helping out however I could with the machine.  A lot of people worked really hard to make this all happen and it was great to be able to be a part of it.  On shoot day I didn't have a fancy camera phone like these guys, but I did enough foresight to bring along my sketchbook. (:

Drew Bezanson on BMX

The Skaters, Ryan Sheckler and Joey Brezinski, were tougher to catch in action but I was able to get a couple of decent sketches of them and some of the other guys around set.

Danny MacAskill up on Fowler's green.  You couldn't stop that guy, he was a true artist with a bike.  He rode on just about everything around the site including Brezinski's manual path, the skate/BMX ramps, and even the forklift.

Danny & Clay, chatting on bikes.

Things that fly!

(Red Bull helicopter and a Black Phoebe who I caught darting around our corner of the air hangar.)

We did this shoot out in Irvine and had some really beautiful scenery around us.  On shoot day there was a 40% chance of rain for the morning but fortunately not a drop fell.  Instead we got the great combination of lots of fluffy white clouds and bright sun.

And at the end of the day when we could all finally breathe and had dinner under the light of the jennys.

around town

e pieribus omnom

So you know how in our film we had that coin?

 

 

Well, it was one of my favorite props to work on!  I came up with the basic design and painted the displacement maps for it.  This is the only shot where you get a good look at it, and the only side you really see - but thanks to the internet you can now look at both sides!  At the same time!  Try doing that with your Susan B!

 

beaches are the best

Beaches are the best.  They've got all the best things, like little girls with afros and footballs

birds!

folding chairs

and lots and lots and lots of water - even waves!

relic

I was poking around some zdrive backups and found this.  I'm not sure, but I've come to think it's a really angry cat.  Timestamp reads 1/6/2012 12:44 AM and my foggy memory tells me that I was in the 24 hour labs using ms paint.

Now that I've got my desktop back up and working, things scanned, and pictures dumped there will probably be some updates on here as I start sifting through things.

orange shirt, blue sky

Looking at books by Lois Ehlert and working outside under the bright sun of Irvine.

dragons

d is for dragons all up in dis manuscript.

35%

 

In the first semester of my senior year I took Serigraphy (screen printing).  I'm glad I managed to hit three out of the four major printmaking classes (lithography will have to wait), but it was a bit of a strain trying to manage this along with thesis.  Thesis of course was paramount, especially since I was on a team, so unfortunately whenever I encountered a hitch in my work I did not have the time resources to go back, redo, fix, or properly test ideas I was trying out - time was so limited as it was.  As result, I wasn't technically satisfied with most of these projects in the end and not all of the them will make it to the blog.  My first print went of without a hitch though!  It was a three color print on paper, edition of 10.  Below is a bit of explanation of the elements.

 

 Being in senior year where everything is about polished 3D work I was really dying to use 3D in a "wrong" way.  It was one part me not wanting to follow the conventions of that department for once and part sheer fascination with how 3D programs are set up to operate.  The starting point here was a poly plane that I skewed around the insides of and edited in an straight view.

 

I've also been fascinated with dither patterns, especially more recently.  They're very simple, but their occasional irregularities produce interesting patterns when tiled that in a way become a recognizable alphabet of gray scale.  There's also a kind of fondness associated with them thanks to computer graphics of the 90s.  This is the pattern for 35% black.

 

yeah, tiled.

 

The next step for me was to apply the dither as an image texture to my poly plane.  Normally that would be boring - but I didn't touch the UVs on it so they were still all messed up from me dragging verts around and screwing up the topology.  Consequently, I ended up with a pretty interesting landscape of pattern.

 

Running with those elements I came up with this mock-up in photoshop from which I made my transparencies.  The rest is process!

bushtits

Now that I'm in California I'm going to have to start learning the birds.  These are Bushtits.  They're wicked small and super cute.  Kind of like dust bunnies, but you know, birds.  The other morning there was a small flock of them foraging in the mulberry tree outside my 2nd story kitchen window and I was able to get a pretty great look at a few who got near.  This may become a monoprint/screenprint in the future.

where I'm working

This place! (aka Syyn Labs!)  I'm interning there for the time being, doing a mix of pre-viz art and helping around the shop with fabrication, electrical, etc.  It's really cool to be here but also a little unsettling to have jumped out of the animation world which I have become so entrenched in.  Work is often out of my comfort zone, but it's a great experience, and it's pretty amazing how much the lessons of animated filmmaking and storytelling transfer into this world of experience building.  We've got some pretty neat stuff on the horizon too (:  This is the officy hangout lobby area.  The other half of the warehouse (through the double doors on the left) is the workshop/fabrication place where things get made.

friends

beck & nappi

Some stuff from the last days of school.  April after thesis was a nice month.  If you're from Ringling you probably know these guys.  If not, you can look at their art and then pretend that you know them.

time

So, I was going through all my stuff before I moved and came upon the dilemma of what to do with all my sketchbooks that had accumulated.  Part of me really wanted to just throw them all out for clarity of mind while the other couldn't see their destruction.  These things were great when they were getting drawn in but quite frankly they're useless now.  Most anything worthwhile has been digitized too (one of the great things about putting things on the internet is it makes you build up a sort of archive!)  Although there are quite a lot of good notes from lectures, etc in these as well, which would be a shame to lose - although, let's be honest, who really looks back at those?  Anyways, while mulling all that over I decided to mark them all in time range as best I could and then lay them out on the floor.  I ran out of room...  There are also 5-10 other partially used books that still have enough useful paper in them to be sparred the fate of permanent storage for the time being, which are not pictured.

I find it pretty interesting how drawing volume ended up getting distributed through these...  High school was pretty light since drawing was only a fraction of my obligations, however there were a significant higher number of separate art projects than later, and this is before I got into people watching.  12th grade was high gear year, well the fall at least, which I think both books are from.  That was when I flipped out trying to get good enough at figure drawing to get into CalArts, I even made a sketchbook just to send off for them.  That rapid period of growth really changed how I worked, thought, and saw things (I was kind of scared out of my mind about getting in to be honest - but resulted in this period of really serious and productive focus that I haven't fully seen since).  I think I kind of crashed for a few months after that until starting at Ringling.  Even in freshman year though there's not a high amount of volume.  I think that's due to most of my drawing work being done for class and outside of sketchbooks.  Sophomore year class work started to integrate more into my sketchbooks, and I was just plain drawing more, oh, and taking notes (not class notes, but more-so stuff from special lectures and visiting artists).  And then junior year hit.  A fair chunk of the junior books are words and small doodles brainstorming story stuff for prepro.  Oh an more notes, I think that was a good year for notes.  At JibJab we'd go cafe sketching a lot after work (: there's a tag for that stuff if you want to isolate it.  And then senior year hit.  Sad, sad senior year.  Actually it wasn't that bad, I'm a little surprised how little I drew, but I guess I shouldn't considering most of it was just going to the labs to work like it was your day job.  And your night job.  I think that stuff ended up being far more words and to do lists than pictures, although sometimes I'd take a break and sketch a little outside.  And that concludes 8 years of school.  (My online electronics class just started this week though!)

tldr, what a waste of paper!

things that are on the internet now

The Ballad of Poisonberry Pete! (made by Adam Campbell, Uri Lotan, and myself!) (It's our thesis!)


My demo reel! (!)


My 24-hour film! (It's really stupid, sorry!) (I made it for Ashlyn Anstee's annual film fest MANIMATE!) (Check out the other films!)

blue hour

Outside is the best side.

SPACE

I realized while doing this that this is the only way I've ever really seen space and probably the only way I ever will.  That's ok though, because it's still crazy beautiful.

For Illustration Friday, topic: "space".

And while we're on the topic, do yourself a favor and download Stellarium if you haven't already.

gator

 

I started sending postcards via postcrossing earlier this year.  This one went to Russia, so I made it extra Florida-y.  Gouache on ink on bristol.  It took a lot of ink to get that bristol black but it was worth it - better surface finish.

!!!THRASHER!!! >:[ !!!

 I noticed a new bird in my yard today which I hadn't seen before.  Did a super quick sketch of the guy before trying to figure out what he was.  Turns out he's a Brown Thrasher -but was first misidentified as a Wood Thrush.

*edit: I just realized how many miscelaneous things I do relate to birds (and there are no signs of that letting up) so now there's a tag for that!  It's at rank #11 in size, right behind "stupid".

summer weather

It rained today!  And then it rained some more!