Elizabeth McMahill

in the furture...

2012-01-24T23:37:00.002-05:00

January 24th, 2012: Josh and I strike gold with an idea.

portrait night!

2012-01-22T02:01:00.004-05:00

I've missed watercolors <3

resolution

2012-01-06T00:18:00.003-05:00

Fitness is for squares, literally.

the seventh ice princess and the sacred salve

2011-12-15T06:26:00.004-05:00

At 4am it's either do this or play video games.
I blame Sishir and his recent doings.

sick tissues

2011-12-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

The third card I worked on at JibJab was Sick Tissues. The animatic and original sound design was done by my mentor Jeff Gill and the end card was designed by Will Staehle.

This project was a ton of fun all the way through. I was the given the animatic and the option to do it in stop motion. From there I spent several days building the puppets and doing some simple tests to figure out how to approach animation and better understand how the puppets would function. I shot all the final animation in one day (quite a long day it was), and then spent a few more to composite the footage and finalize it.

The original drawings in the animatic were basically cubes with stick limbs and three fingers. They were simple and had a lot of appeal. I decided I wanted to keep that best I could and so made simple wire limbs to be coated with plasti-dip (a black rubbery plastic much like you find on tool handles) (special thanks to Jeremy Fisher for telling me about the stuff in the first place!) The arms were made with braided floral wire and the legs with galvanized wire twisted 2 ply. I then wrapped them in duct tape to bulk them out before dipping. In hindsight I would look for an alternative to duct tape. It ended up stiffening the limbs too much in places, making it harder to bend and harder for it to hold its posed shape. Something a little less resilient like cosmetic foam might have been more forgiving and uniform. Each limb got about 3 coats of plasti-dip and between coats got to chill out on my makshift drying rack of styrofoam with t-pins stuck into it.

The tissue boxes I opened on one side and gutted. I got some scrap wood from a local hardware store and they even cut it down for me. These pieces of wood I epoxied to the inside of the box where the legs and arms would attach. The cardboard wasn't that strong and I didn't want to risk over-stressing it by bending the limbs directly against it - so I brought the wood in as reinforcement. Once dried to the box I drilled holes through them for the arms and legs, cut away the extra plastic on the limbs, untwisted the wires, cut them down, threaded them through the holes in the box, and epoxy puttied them onto the wood reinforcements. They held up quite well during animation.

For the feet we decided against tie downs and went for the simpler approach of building nails into the feet of the puppet to hold it to a block of dense styrofoam. Since the tissue boxes wouldn't be walking all over the place I could foresee no obvious limitations in using nails, and they really worked out great. They were long enough and the foam was strong enough to avoid any torquing issues with puppets falling over when the weight was at an angle.

Animating these guys was super fun. They're basically just a cog with arms and legs, which really simplifies things and helps you stay clear. As I said above though, it was difficult to keep the arms to maintain more extreme curves. This made it almost impossible for the tissue box to put his hands on his face or hold his head. You could bend them there no problem, but they would always bend back some and you'd lose contact. I found this out very quickly in my short animation test. The impromptu solution of clear tape, however, turned out to work rather well for getting hands to stay and was barely visible in the photographed frames. Though, whenever you introduce a fix somewhere other things tend to happen.... In this case the tape, while it was largely fine during the test, started to pull off small bits of the box coating during animation. I would paint fix certain areas as necessary. Another limitation that I ran into was not being able to rotate the box back far enough while it was on its knees. Physical space just didn't allow for it, but thankfully compositing did, and it really helped to boost the impact of the end.

The card was animated on twos with Dragon Stop Motion. A word for the wise though, the twos setting in dragon will still play back as if it were shot on ones, even though it's numbering as twos. I didn't realize this until after doing the final animation, which made things rather difficult along the way. For this card I was to stick to the timing in the animatic as much as possible. In my test I animated a portion of the animatic and I noticed very quickly that the motion was just too fast and started adjusting the timing while I was animating. The test was still fast, and when later corrected, too slow. I tried to hold strong anticipations and important contacts as much as possible to keep things reading. It was when I was finished animating and tried to sync it with audio that I realized that all along it had been playing back at the wrong frame rate. Setting it to the correct rate finally made a world of difference. And, since I had stuck to the timing of the animatic and my x-sheets (x-sheet are so awesome when you're doing stop motion) everything played quite well. Overall I think the mismatch worked out in the end. It made me animate snappier and clearer out of necessity, and the final was better for it.

If you like boring progression reels, check this out! (20mb, 2:40ish) It's a compilation of quick tests and few progression renders of the final. You can see some of the stuff I was talking about here.

cray

2011-11-22T00:21:00.005-05:00

Don Brandes and Kim Elam from a career services workshop. Preset 12 box palette from a 96 big box. Standard restaurant crayons below. Trying to figure things out.

white out

2011-10-28T23:13:00.005-04:00

Recently my screen printing class put on a show where we printed directly onto the floor in the crossley gallery. I had a whole section with these guys.

don't lose a kidney

2011-10-04T12:18:00.004-04:00

Don't Lose a Kidney is another card I worked on at JibJab. There's not a lot of process to show for this one, just some words. For this card I did everything past the animatic stage. It was shot with a camera as video and then completely time remapped to give it a stop motion feel and control the timing of it. The animation was done on post-it notes and composited in. For more cards in this style check out the newest in the birthday section of the site, there's as small series of them.

dearly departed denim

2011-09-28T01:35:00.002-04:00

I may have lost a pair of pants, but I've gained a friend.

tie the knot

2011-09-24T01:09:00.012-04:00

The first ecard I worked on this summer was "Tie the Knot".
It was animated about a year ago, and already had a working edit with some keying and effects. Initially I was just brought on to the card just to do some rotoscoping in areas like the clamps holding the shoes. That didn't take too long, and I was given the choice to work on the backgrounds for it too, which I jumped on. From there I kept doing more stuff like keying, some motion tracking, sound editing, and the end cards until the piece was done.

These are what the raw shots looked like.

And here are the backgrounds I made. Shot three has all the elements separated to create a multiplane effect in after effects. That second row of shoes in the shot is just the first row of shoes duplicated and moved around.

Props that needed repeating I would make as assets and then skew as needed. I Dug through some psds and made these gifs. It's so much the actual progression, just turning layers on/off, but you get the idea. (click them to see them not cut off)

For the end cards I made the lettering out of shoe laces! I pinned them to a template (printed backwards to keep the backside of the letters as the working surface) and super glued them to hold their shape.

shrimp jockey

2011-09-12T01:58:00.002-04:00

This week's DIPSY. Topic: tide rider.
Had a bit of a rough start on this, so maybe 40 minutes went into it?
Painter X.

24 hour film

2011-09-12T01:33:00.002-04:00

I finally made one.

This actually happened to my friend Eddie on his first day in LA. It was so completely absurd we ended up quoting it all summer long and I eventually made this too. This was done in photoshop then timed and jittered up in After Effects. I had never done anything like this before and it was a lot of fun. I'm a touch ashamed that this is on the internet, but it seems that's pretty common for 24 hour films...

Done for the Ashlyn's first Manimate.

fgurs

2011-09-12T01:19:00.003-04:00

sketchwall

2011-09-11T02:51:00.006-04:00

More cafe sketching. A few of us from JibJab would go cafe sketching almost every Thursday after work. Often times there wouldn't be enough other people around so we would just end up drawing each other. Then we created a wall of drawings of everyone from work.

Here are some of mine.

Check out their blogs in JibJab section of links. They're cool dudes (:

snowflakes

2011-08-26T00:11:00.003-04:00

I want to see them. I bet they're pretty, even if they're too small to really see. Water is always pretty.

crayonology

2011-08-01T01:26:00.002-04:00

Crayons are pretty transparent stuff.... and they don't build up well at all. The first layer holds fast to the paper and subsequent layers don't want to go on. Crayons characteristics translate pretty closely to oil pastels too... Below is a drawing I did of my duplex leading out to the alley (I have an alley!!), but I did it at night! in the dark! It was pretty interesting... It's incredibly hard to tell what color's you're using beyond hints of the cast, so you end up relying on value a lot more. Below that is a gouache painting from one weekend afternoon. They were each about an hour.

the structure of things

2011-08-01T01:00:00.002-04:00

trying to figure stuff out.

things I have drawn

2011-07-28T01:56:00.003-04:00

I'm sorry.

people both real and fictional

2011-07-21T03:49:00.000-04:00

spring sketchbook,

figure it out

2011-07-21T03:25:00.005-04:00

Some figure drawings from work. Nothing over 3 minutes, ever.

Otto Lowenstein

2011-06-29T03:55:00.002-04:00

Did one of those random wikipedia article / make a band things. Got a little carried away... (:

cafe sketching

2011-06-29T03:49:00.005-04:00

I went cafe sketching with some guys from work. Lots of fun, especially drawing people as the opposite sex.

also, a true story:

pinecone

2011-06-24T03:11:00.002-04:00

video studies

2011-06-24T02:59:00.003-04:00

So, I decided to do some studies from video. Sure, it's essentially drawing from photos, but why not? At the end of the day most stuff is 2d. I think it makes a little easier to see angles, proportion, and color, things which I really need to heighten my awareness of...

plus they're fun! :D

I'm trying to get into oil pastels too. They're so tricky. I did a quick landscape with them on the way to work the other day, but that ended up just being a complete disaster. I figure some of this kind of stuff might be good practice for color mixing. Gotta get gouache painting too!

if - launch

2011-06-20T02:18:00.004-04:00

Illustration Friday, topic: launch.

Growing up in Florida I've had the opportunity to watch a lot of shuttle launches. I've seen them on tv, at home, at the beach, and even as far away as Sarasota. It's not all that exciting as a sight itself. It's really just a dot in the east going up and leaving a short lived plume of smoke in its wake. But when you remember that there are people on that dot, and it's going to space AND coming back, it's just way cool. The final flight of the space shuttle program will be made by the shuttle Atlantis as mission STS-135 and is tentatively scheduled for July 8th. If you're in Florida don't you dare miss it.

littles 2

2011-06-20T02:03:00.002-04:00

Some quick digital paintings from outside the window at home (:

littles 1

2011-06-20T01:50:00.005-04:00

Some little things I did before leaving home. I wanted to color stuff but not actually draw anything. I then realized that I had a whole year's worth of sketchbook drawings. Very convenient.

for those who don't know

2011-05-26T21:36:00.002-04:00

I am making a short film with Adam Campbell and Uri Lotan!
It's a western, with pies!
It will be out in a year or so!

In other news, I will be out by LA at JibJab for the summer!

final painting

2011-05-19T09:07:00.001-04:00

take2 + reel

2011-05-13T16:59:00.004-04:00

Take two! The last assignment of the year! Special thanks to Alberto Beguerie for his super model/rig.

Oh, and a demo reel:

portraits

2011-05-13T14:20:00.002-04:00

Some portraits for painting. First was 2 class sessions, second was just one class (but smaller canvas!)

hand acting

2011-04-27T16:18:00.005-04:00

So, I meant to post this last month when I scanned it but didn't get to it in those crazy weeks of putting together a portfolio/reel/website. I completely forgot about this until today when we had presentations in Albritton's class again.

These were done at the end of last semester during art history. Everyone had to present on an artist. I decided to sketch peoples hands as they presented and found out some interesting things. Of course people all act differently and thus use their hands in different ways, but it's pretty amazing once you actually start to actively pay attention to it. Most people had very distinct patterns of convention that emerged. The drawings aren't pretty and they weren't supposed to be, they were mostly just to denote things. Here are those sketches and transcribed/added notes.

Vani frequently opened and closed her hands. When making a particular point she'd have her hands open, often with the fingers tensed, splayed, and pointing out with the wrists tensed and bent as well.

Jen was next and much quieter with her hands. She tended to keep her fingers together and hands half closed in a cup like fashion. When she did open her hands, she'd have weak hand poses with the fingers relaxed, partially bent, and still mostly together.

Sean tended to keep his fingers together too. When he would spread his fingers apart they would rarely stay apart for very long at all and even then tended to cluster together in small groups, or "stack" as I wrote. Even when his hands were open the would usually face inward, and his hands remained "cupped" like this for most of the time, returning back to that type of position after any broad gesture. Watching his cupped hands and closeness of fingers reminded me of webbed feet or fins. Also, sometimes before he made a point he would tensely tap his fingers together as a unit. It was a pretty interesting anticipation.

Rob's sole defining gesture what that whenever he would step back from the computer to say something he would spread his arms and open his hands. Every time he made any sort of gesture it was that, with only the slightest variations. His hand/arm gesture very clearly and loudly stated "I am talking", just in case you failed to hear him.

Rocky pretty much kept his hand glued to the laptop track pad while the other stayed at his side. If he did gesture with that hand it stayed in the same space, the wrist barely moving. His presentation was also on an artist from the New Leipzig School of Painting, a group of artists definitely worth checking out.

Jeffry had one of the most interesting acting patterns. He would do a fair amount of hand gestures and stuff but in between those he was always holding or touching something. He's hold his other hand, his necklace, the edge of the table, mess with his pocket, etc. His hands always had to be somewhere.

Lastly, here's a little bit of a revelation I had during one of the presentations (replace screen with painting, and you have the original gist of it). Sure it sounds kind of cheesy, but it's pretty true. Everything is about audience participation in one way or another - otherwise they wouldn't care.

if - bicycle

2011-04-22T21:47:00.005-04:00

Steep hills are scary.

No mailroom inventory => find stuff and put it together time.

This particular incident features a torn discarded priority mail box, discarded bubble wrap (rain cloud), a used pink package slip, gouache, a paper clip, and an animal cracker (horse, pony, or similar ungulate). Oh, and photoshop too.

For Ilustration Friday, topic: bicycle.

some figure

2011-04-15T18:30:00.005-04:00

I realized I didn't have much "structural" figure drawing for my portfolio, except for stuff from freshman year. To remedy this situation I headed over to fews for the night. I got the model's back a lot and finished poses quickly and ended up drawing the other guys there quite a bit. Those mega copic markers are serious fun.

if - bottled

2011-04-10T03:35:00.007-04:00

diptych on scrap wood. Left is acrylic gouache on transparencies, glued. Right is silver spray paint, ink, acrylic gouache, photographs that were taken and then lacquer transfered onto paper, and a picture of a wolf from a children's book.

For Illustration Friday, topic: bottled.

lipsync!

2011-04-05T16:38:00.007-04:00

Turned this in just the other day after working on it since January.
Maya/Renderman for Maya/Photoshop/Nuke.
Responsible for Everything.
(:

back lots

2011-04-02T00:54:00.002-04:00

Two paintings from the back lot behind whole foods. It was surprisingly nice painting back there. It was so stark in places but the lines of the place were never really straight and it was a really nice place to observe light. I like the turn these took. I used only the palette knife on them and was able to keep my colors a lot cleaner and edges sharper as a result. They were painted in the morning hours, one class session each.

mask: origins

2011-03-26T12:33:00.004-04:00

Once upon a time, in a department far far away, there was a sheet of paper. Now this piece of paper was not like any of the others. This sheet had something extra special (or something missing, depending on who you talk to). He did look like all the other papers from the ream, clean, super bright, 20lb, but from his tippy top there had been cut a triangle, and this is what made him special.

Most people say a dark gic wizard cursed him to be this way. Others claim is was a band of the ill natives who cut out his heart but left his soul that sad day in february. Whatever truly happened to him will probably never be known, and it matters little to the events that happened next.

It was the dead of night, where owls only whisper and not even the stars dare to shine, and lab rats from across the land overrun the luminous western macintosh forests of the great kingdom of CJ. There in the northern most forrest, where the macintoshes begin to yield to the towering hewlett packards, lay our hero. Triangulated and abandoned by the printers, left for dead by whoever indeed left him, this poor piece of paper lay hopeless and alone. Shivering on the table, he'd look over often at the other misfits and misprints, wondering what their fate may be. What his fate may be. The trash can quietly sat across the room and watched him, knowing patience would bring its reward, and dinner too. Our piece of paper knew his life would be short.

What he didn't know was that evening one maiden from the third level of the icy northern caves was traveling through these very forests. Walking by him, she stopped. She noticed something peculiar about this piece of paper. From his heart had been cut a perfect equilateral triangle. A stranger thing the maiden had never seen. She picked him up to examine him further when an idea fell from the fluorescent heavens and struck her all at once. She knew what was fated to be done.

Without a moment of hesitation she pulled her magic micron from its sheath and waved it about, making mark upon mark along the surface of the noble sheet. The fluorescent tubes flickered, screens dimmed, and some say even glitter flitted through the air just then. The maiden donned the paper. It was then he realized his great destiny - to become, the mask. He toured the forests with the maiden, making friends of Sir Brett, Chandler of the Round, and many others. With ceremonial push pin, he was appointed to the board of the fifth circle of CJ, where he lived happily ever after.

The End.

late light

2011-03-15T03:27:00.003-04:00

A larger oil painting (18"x24"?) for class done over the course of four short sessions around 5:15-5:45pm. It's in the area off to the side behind the bayou apartments and a pretty good contrast to the rest of campus. I approached this one a little different than I usually paint, and it was lots of fun. Gotta pay more attention to surface build up though - keep those darks thin and lights thick so the darks don't catch light and the lights get some more solidity. The right came out pretty nice, but the left isn't quite up to the same level.

Process shot here

vignettes

2011-03-15T03:08:00.004-04:00

Stupid drawing time with the great Kendra Phillips!

Lot's of little one word "draw offs". Topics (if I remember correctly) included xylophone (I only now just realized that phonetics messed me up on that one), french fries, triangles, toothpaste, finding the beauty within, giraffe, moose masseuse, Adam chicken, and monkey brains. 'Twas lots of good old fashioned fun to say the least.

These were part of the 101211 sketchbook but, like the recent figure drawings, I wanted to give them a post of their own. (:

sketchbook retrospecitve 101211

2011-03-15T02:53:00.003-04:00

Yet another sketchbook, this one from December 11th 2010 to around February 26th 2011.

Includes stuff from chinese takeout, diner theaters, starbucks, don pablos, chillin with the guys, class, open mic night, thumbnails for painting, valentines day, and stupid time at applebees.

Ebony pencils and those really thick microns that are practically markers are the greatest. They really are.

fewsfewesfuse

2011-03-11T18:13:00.004-05:00

Stole away to FEWS for a little bit (:

sketchbook retrospecitve 101017

2011-03-11T17:44:00.003-05:00

Sketchbook from October 17th 2010 to the beginning of winter break. That one filled up fast. There were a lot less notes, but there's some pieces from Max Howard and a presentation on title sequences. Also, I had lots of fun drawing kids on the playground when I went to my mom's school with her (last couple of images). It's one of the most difficult, interesting, and rewarding places to draw.

sketchbook retrospective 091216

2011-03-07T15:44:00.007-05:00

I realized a while ago how little sketchbook stuff I have been posting these last couple of years. Since my last real substantial sketchbook post I have filled about 5 sketchbooks. Most of it is people watching, that's a big part of what I do. Intermixed with drawings are notes. ...Lots of notes (probably 1/3 of this book was solid words). I've tossed a few useful tidbits in with the drawings as I came across them. Most things are common knowledge, but it's good to be reminded from time to time. So without further ado, here are the highlights of my sketchbook from Dec 16th, 2009 to Fall 2010.

Tune in soon for more sketchbookery. It's a pain in the butt to scan these suckers but I'm hoping to get it all up during spring break.

if - warning

2011-03-05T21:22:00.004-05:00

A warning about scissors and keeping the appropriate amount of digits.

again, no inventory in the mailroom this friday. Couple that with an anthroplogie catalog found in the trash and some scrap wood found over at the woodshop and we arrive at what you see above.

illustration friday

if - swarm

2011-02-27T12:23:00.003-05:00

For Illustration Friday: swarm.
I haven't been doing much IF lately, but this Friday at the mail room taking inventory was canceled.

late light process

2011-02-22T20:18:00.003-05:00

A late light painting I started for class. Only have one session in so far, but I've been working differently on it and like where it's going.

finding beauty

2011-02-22T20:14:00.001-05:00

Some stuff I did for a silent auction for charity. Lots of fun (:

painting at island park

2011-02-22T20:07:00.003-05:00

More adventures in oil painting! These were painted at island park in the morning hours. This first one is a larger painting done during one class, the four after are super small and were all done during one class, and the last two are slightly larger ones both done in one class.

painting around school

2011-02-22T19:55:00.003-05:00

These are my first oil paintings (aside from one earlier one). They're quick studies from mostly around campus. They're mostly around 45min to 1.5hrs except for the last two which are larger ones done in 2-3hours each. Everything is posted, so you get to see the train wrecks too! Sometimes you learn more from the disasters though.

rewind

2011-02-04T12:10:00.006-05:00

I Managed to get over to crealde over winter break for their sunday like drawing. Quick stuff in gouache.

This break I also painted with oils for the first time.

hey, it's february

2011-02-01T16:59:00.006-05:00

Thesis pre-production is devouring my life, but it's lot's of fun! Meanwhile, I've been getting my character together for lip sync, currently on blend shapes. I also have been doing lots of landscape paintings (which I hope to start getting up soon).

children's book illustration

2010-12-31T23:51:00.004-05:00

Final pages w/ dropped in text for Children's Book Illustration class. First is the cover, second is a spot, third is a bordered full page, and fourth is a two-page spread. Not pictured: 32 page dummy. Illustrations are in pastel over a purple gouache wash, the princess lineup has gouache detailing overtop as well.

catman

2010-12-15T00:53:00.005-05:00

Final painting for DFA! I tried working in an entirely new way on this and it brought a whole bag of its own unexpected troubles and led to a lot of reworking, especially of color. Working completely flat makes you really have to face value, texture, and the information conveyed by edge quality, and it was really great to do.

This was done in photoshop, mostly polygonal lasso tool, some solid brushes, and a little bit of blur. All colors were kept separate so the file ended up getting really huge (well over 100 layers), but that allowed for easy editing of specifics and quick specific color adjustments (and color adjustment was a very very big thing in getting this to work).

Aaaaannnnnd, here's some of the process! I always find it interesting to see how things came about....

one week left!

2010-12-05T11:59:00.004-05:00

I love planning dialogue animation. Can't wait for next semester when we get to animate it too.

(:

push pull!

2010-11-24T16:27:00.004-05:00

Here's my push pull natural animation. An exaggerated version is in the works.
It's my first legitimate foray into the world of compositing as well, which is lots of fun in and of itself.

See it in HD here! (7.1MB)
You may want to right click, save as. The colors look pretty cruddy in firefox right now... at least on this computer.

Time crunch got pretty bad towards the end of this project too so it's likely that I'll go back and touch up the animation and possibly the rendering as well.

value painting

2010-11-24T16:13:00.004-05:00

intermediary & final

final is color corrected to compensate for the different appearance of the image when viewed outside of photoshop. I suspect it's due to a discrepancy in color profiles used inside and outside the program. I'll probably look into a way during break of standardizing things when I work in photoshop so I can cut back of all the problems that come up when coming out of it. If anybody's already got some profiles know how and would like to share though, please do!

process!

2010-11-05T21:19:00.004-04:00

A black & white painting I'm working on for DFA right now. Super High Res. Photoshop. (jpg profiles made it a lot darker too...)

stuff from DFA

2010-11-03T17:24:00.005-04:00

Finally, a legitimate post.
These is some of the things I've made in drawing for animators so far this year. Our first project was a character design project where we looked to random sources (photos of textures, random line drawings (aka, "doodles'), and abstract silhouettes) for character inspiration. We drew over them to create our characters, much like finding images in clouds, and then chose a few to develop further. These are all the characters I came up with from the project.

There were a lot of misses, but some cool stuff came out of it and it was a really fun process regardless. This bird guy is one that I shaded. I found him in a photo of tin foil. Below that is a character I found in one of the doodles. I'm using him for the push pull animation assignment right now.

After that project we did our self caricatures for lip sync (to be made animated next semester). I went through a lot of design exploration and ended up at a horrible place. Thanks to the encouragement and help of my friends here, and my own realization of how bad the design I had really was, I went back to drawing. With a few parameters in mind I drew a whole bunch of stuff.

Until I finally hit this,

which was then painted as this (for a possible lighting/texturing mock-up).

cookies>candy

2010-10-31T11:53:00.003-04:00

if - racing

2010-10-26T23:02:00.003-04:00

I think it's funny when people argue over who is older. It's like they're racing to die. This was the first thing to come to mind for the topic, after things involving cars of course.

illustration friday.

Animation Triathalon

2010-10-24T13:02:00.004-04:00

Here's the three animation exercises from the beginning of school. Nothing too special, but again, I learned a good amount and can't wait to apply it to push pull!

birdWhisperingBandit

2010-10-06T17:24:00.004-04:00

so much to do and so little time (and putting things together to post takes time).

but here's this (:

back

2010-09-08T17:54:00.005-04:00

I'm back at school and animating, etc. again! Will post more as project enter completion!

thugz

2010-08-12T00:25:00.004-04:00

Made stuff for the Character Design Bi-Weekly today (topic: Thugs with ugly mugs)!

My mom's a first grade teacher and I go in at the beginning of every year to help her set up her classroom. Helping usually means playing with all the awesome toys :). I had tons of manipulatives at my disposal including pattern blocks, links, milk caps, stacking rings, buttons, and snap cubes (not to mention all the office supplies).

Drawing based on the first dude; he was my favorite.

Here's a thug for life. Cut him and he'll make you cry.
This guy was tons of fun to make. Ears and nose are made out of thin (bust strong) blue plastic from the cover of an old planner from high school. The rest is gold acrylic gouache (for his teeth!), black acrylic gouache, holbein ink, and of course 1 onion. Balancing on onion on your wrist, even with tape, is not as easy as it would seem.

if - caged

2010-08-10T20:20:00.004-04:00

For the Illustration Friday topic "Caged".
I'd also like to start listing stuff on etsy, so I'm kicking it off this this one :).

possible painting

2010-08-08T23:22:00.003-04:00

I got the itch to paint today so I snatched an egg from the fridge and had at in photoshop for about an hour until the light changed too much/I gave up. I'm moderately happy with it considering it's the first thing I've painted in quite some time.

Also for an hour I had a go at redrawing one of my guys from the meowmix post.

I also tried out some screen capture video stuff.
process of nightcat, =~18MB.

For those with mac os x, I found this sweet little auto screen capture program here for free. It's very bare bones and you edit the configuration file to change your settings instead of a windowed user interface. You just tell it how often to save, where to save, and what image quality you want and let the thing run - the only catch is you can't quit it like a regular application, you've got to kill the process instead. That's easy to do though so long as you remember you've got it running. I used the default of taking a screenshot every five seconds, batch resized them in photoshop to a width of 640px, and then imported them into frame by frame (also free). It was pretty easy to do and quality-wise came out pretty well :)

sktchs

2010-08-08T23:01:00.003-04:00

napkins/engineering paper/sketchbook
mostly quick people watching from school/the bus.

meowmix

2010-07-26T23:22:00.003-04:00

Hoping to develop some of these guys in the coming days.

I've been reading a lot of books lately. I just finished up one on Aubrey Beardsley and Kim Elam's Grid Systems and am about to start on her book on typography. I'm also working through a book on pre-revolutionary Russian graphic design and just picked up Gruppe on Color and The Art of Robots today from the library. Gruppe's book is really amazing. I've only just started it but right away started taking notes - there's so many good things he says in it! I'll likely be posting some of my favorite quotes when I'm done with it too, seeing as how it's out of print and pretty expensive to acquire.

as of late

2010-07-26T22:38:00.003-04:00

Relatively recent miscellanea!

True story. Good luck trying to copy/paste pieces of money in photoshop too. Had to scan in with acrobat reader and the shift the hues before copying and then shift them back again after pasting.

3 unrelated images layered up in photoshop. Fun stuff.

Saw this dude in the student union on my way to the computer lab. Instead of doing whatever I was supposed to I had a new important mission. You just can't pass up purple polo w/ sweater vest.

if - double

2010-07-25T03:12:00.004-04:00

For Illustration Friday, topic: double.
Kind of cool, kind of creepy. Happened upon some neat stuff in making this.

still life

2010-07-25T00:23:00.007-04:00

This is the last post from the sophomore projects, I swear. The still life project was our last one, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was nice to get such a project to finish the year out with. Not to say this project was a walk in the park, but texturing is very different from animation, and shares so much with drawing and painting, areas I'm far more experienced and comfortable in.

This project was a short and simple one. We were given files of assets, plain models and some simple props/sets that we were free to slightly modify/fix and arrange into a composition to light and texture. I ended up using a total of 8 lights (6 spot, 2 directional), and it was my first time using raytracing. We had to create shaders networks for all our materials, and it was my first real time getting into that too and building them from the ground up. I tried to keep things simple and render times low (I think at the end it took about :48 seconds to render the frame with depth of field, but then again the computers we use are wicked fast). I worked to keep all my maps low. Everything is procedural except for the fruit and paper towel bump, which is a small tiling raster pattern that I painted. The outdoors, bananas, apple, and pears are 1024 maps, the orange, cherries, and grapes are all 512. My knowledge of photoshop was very handy on this project, though sometimes there's just no substitute for enhancing and painting noise patterns yourself.

Not many renders/paint overs ended up getting saved on this project, but here's a few I found.

Here is a video showing, quite literally, a day's work. A lot of frames were dropped with the screen capture while scrubbing through the day's saved renders, and the quality's not great enough to show the subtle changes in things, but it gives a nice overview of the progression regardless.

Reference was of particular use of this project. Most of it was high res fruit photos pulled from flickr, but a fair amount too was just reference for color, mood, and design aesthetic. These three were some of the ones I kept open a lot to keep my head straight and stay focused.

etchings

2010-07-13T17:13:00.013-04:00

Yet another post/image dump from last semester, this time from printmaking II, aka etching. I really enjoy printmaking classes. It's nice to get out of the computer labs and work with some real materials. It's also a great class to simply try stuff out in and play with ideas.

My first project was my most ambitious. During the winter I looked at a lot of beautiful work from the amazing Charley Harper (including The Giant Golden Book of Biology). When I got back from winter break I started drawing these simple birds that became more and more stylized and streamlined as I drew them. One day at work I drew some clustered together on a post-it, which ultimately became the basic prototype for this print. You can see the drawing colored over in photoshop at the bottom of this post. This project print used a three plate color separation and aquatints (more on the process of this piece at the bottom of this post). It's an edition of 5 prints which are signed on different sides - as there is no distinct "up" or "down" to these prints as they can be viewed from any side. Some of the birds are based on real life ones including pelican, seagull, flamingo, killdeer, and kingfisher.

Next I did a series of portraits of my CA friends. This was induced by my work at portrait night during the first half of the semester. I wanted to bring what I was doing there over into prints and at the same time explore the concept of portraiture through technique. The prints are on a full sheet of paper (22x30") and the print itself is made up of 9 separate coper plates that are 2x3". After several experiments with ink I decided on a mixture of ink base with a touch of black which gave nice gray prints that looked almost like graphite. The extreme amount of base had the unexpected effect of yellowing into a gold color within a few days, which I came to like.

For these plates I used a process called deep etch where you block out the plate and etch it for a couple hours, leaving large areas exposed to the acid which flat bite. The areas that flat bite consequently don't hold onto the ink and mostly wipe clean, leaving some ink clinging to the inside edges of the recess which then prints. Highlights were painted out while my friends sat for me and then after the asphaltum had dried I went back in with a scribe drawing in more detail from a photo.

Special thanks to my friends who took the time out to sit for me!
Tim Palmer
Adam Campbell
Josh Garlick
Matt Sullivan
Gordon Pinkerton
Betsy Bauer
Stevie Lewis
Alberto Beguerie
Uri Lotan
You guys are awesome!

My final project came from looking at glitch art for the first real time. It's everywhere and it's awesome. Most of my time on this project was spend in research and idea development on the computer because I was so unacquainted with the genre and hex editing (another post to come on that later as well).

I find the idea of translating something that's not am image into an image file to display graphically. Originally I wanted to get a RAM dump off of a computer, but my googling around told me pretty quickly that something like that would be near impossible with my level of computer knowledge. So, I turned to other files like logs, but couldn't find any that met my expectation, so I ultimately went with notepad.exe and translated it into a bitmap image by writing he image header and then dumping the file into the body of the file and filling the end with the necessary zeros.

The print itself is made in the following way: I printed out an enlarged and photoshoped version of notepad.bmp on the laser printers and then lacquer transfered the image to japan paper by hand so I could get a more imperfect transfer. Then I roughed the paper a bit, taking off the top layer of the transfer in a few places, then I stained the paper with acrylic gouache. Then using a template I cut out the rounded square from the japan paper which would ultimately be the the screen. The actual etching is a simple line etching printed with black ink. The substrate, as you can see, is a cardboard box. I saved all my cereal boxes through the year to recycle, so I conveniently had quite a few hand by the spring. On each box that I printed on I pulled up some of the top layer of the paperboard in the lower left corner (the signature and numbering of the edition is done in a similar way in the right corners). To print I dampened the cardboard with a spray bottle of water and ran it through the press with the inked up plate with the japan paper square with some glue on it's back over the computer screen. Printing it presses the japan paper to the cardboard, gluing it, and then the image is printed on top at the same time. The process is known as chine-colle, and is really cool. I'd like do do more work exploring it's possibilities further.

This is what it looks like to make an etching. That jar has asphaltum in it. It's very much like asphalt and full of tar and all sorts of other wonderful things. Whatever you block out on a plate wont react when placed in acid. The acid eats away at the uncovered area and creates a recess. During printing the ink gets in these recesses and stays once the plate is wiped. Lines and areas that aren't real thin will flat bite if they are not given a texture through a process like aquatinting (we spray the plate with a coat of spray paint =~ 50% dot pattern which blocks out those dots from etching and gives the plate some "tooth" to hold onto the ink in those areas when wiping. Because my lines weren't thin I had to use the aquatint process to create then and so had to paint around all my lines and other dark blue areas. Doing that took a very very long time, much longer than I ever expected (about 10 hours per plate if I remember correctly, probably more for the first one). To draw out the birds (because I didn't have a draft made up separately) used a waterbased marker and drew directly on the plate. Once I was done blocking out my plate I cleaned off the marker and tarnish that had developed in a water/vingar rinse and a light polish.

At this point my main plate looked like this. I then applied the spray paint for the aquatint, and once that was dry I put it in the acid to etch for several minutes.

The etched plate looks super cool when cleaned :). Next I ran a test print of this plate, then scanned the print, and then created the mock up for the colors/tinting/separation in photoshop. I then separated each layer of color and printed off a page with all of them so I could use it as a diagram to follow while working, knowing what to block out, what to not block out, and to make sure I didn't forget anything. The red plate was extra tricky because I wanted two levels of red, a light, and a more intense one. To do that I had to etch the plate twice, blocking out all the white areas first, then the light areas for the second etch.

When making the color plates I would have to print the main plate on paper, then run it back through the press with the color plate exactly where the main one was to transfer the image to the plate. Once it was transfered I took a scribe to delineate the edges of that shapes that I intended to block out (the light lines scratched into the plate above). Once all three plates for the the blue, red, and green were made I could print them all together. To do this all plates had to be inked up and wiped and then printed one after the other in the exact same place so they would register. Because of the inks I was using wiping the plates was taking way too long, but paper wiping helped to pick off the plate tone much much quicker. Registration was such a pain. The plates, while really quite close in size, didn't match up completely, despite being cut and filed carefully, transference of images, along with drawing over them, only served to compound any possible error, plates and paper could shift slightly in printing and just to make matters worse, the plates actually started to warp during the printing of the edition. All in all it wasn't too bad though, and I was able to touch up a lot of spaces with watercolor afterwards.

concept2

2010-07-12T21:27:00.006-04:00

Story's not my strong suit, but here's some shots from animatics from concept design class!

sitStand MEGAPOST

2010-07-11T10:26:00.029-04:00

As promised here is the giant sit stand post. Of course this still isn't everything, but it surveys the process pretty well. Not pictured are many many other screenshots, renders, tests, diagrams, and sketches. Oh yeah, and there's 556 maya save files, including model, rig, props, lights, scene, and a great many incremental saves. These are mostly divided up by subject, but of course a lot of this stuff overlaps, especially toward the end.

First comes story, that's where you always start. Along with that comes character design, figuring out how everything's going to look, how everything's going to play out in terms of posing and acting, and how it's going to be presented and staged. At this stage too it is important to look ahead to the technical requirements of your model and set. What is everything going to need to do and are you going to able to make it do that? An example of this is the expression sheet which is great for getting a feel for what the character's face needs to do so you can know what you need to achieve with your blend shapes.

Starting out in maya we modeled our characters. This was my first time modeling a fullbodied/human character and my third time modeling with polygons. Modeling isn't exactly my cup of tea and I'm rather slow at it. It's kind of cool though to build your guy from the ground up though even if 3d is rather dead and unappealing until until things start to get rigged and textured.

If I remember correctly I modeled Carson from a cube using a lot of extrudes. He's modeled using a proxy that would take the low res poly mesh half and create a subdivided smoothed copy and mirror it across the axis. At this point too you quickly run into situations where you have to make decisions about how to translate 2d into 3d. I had to look at my flat illustration many a time and ask myself "what does this shape mean in 3d?" Pictured above is one of those instances where I had to interpret the nose shape. I went with the one on the right.

A lot of the time I had the pleasure of getting the nitty gritty of the mesh worked out. Working to get everything into quads and create a good edge loop flow isn't exactly a walk in the park. Pages and pages from my sketchbook have scribbled mesh diagrams in them from this period. Sometimes even that wasn't enough and I'd have to print off screens like this one I compiled to think through things with paper draw overs. Click the picture to view a .gif of the face mesh at this stage.

This is a screen of the "final" model textured and without a smooth node. (I say final because I later realized that in the excitement of being done with my model I forgot to go back on top of the symmetrical mesh and make the pant cuffs uneven, which I later fixed.) The hands were a pain to do but things became much better when Beavan showed me this awesome hand tutorial. It's not in english but the pictures spell out everything. The feet were a lot of fun and I'm rather happy with how they turned out. The foot is made from his hands. I copied the hand and mostly just pushed and pulled and scaled things to make it into a foot before I attached it to his leg. His geometry is all one piece, except for his hair, and of course, his eyes.

After modeling comes rigging where you set up all the joints, deformers, and controls for your puppet to move. After first semester we really don't do any real rigging. We used the setup machine for our characters which is a paid for third party plug in ($40 I think) which automatically rigs characters after you fit widgets over you mesh, but even that has it's own tricks and issues to learn to work with. And of course after that you still get all the joys of painting weights and tracking down all those little influences that find their way into vertices they don't belong in. Here are some screenshots.

1. It seems like this only really happens to me... but when I'm modeling in polygons I get graphics card issues when using a proxied mesh where whenever I extrude or cut faces parts disappear. Things look normal again but it's still kind of annoying to restart maya every 15 minutes when modeling.

2. Always remember to hide your joints. Weird stuff happens when you put a key on one by mistake...

3/4. It's just fun to mess with rigs in ways you're not supposed to :).

View for a .gif on what happens when you forget to parent eyes in a rig.

Next is blendshapes which is used to rig the face and uses target geometries which have been sculpted in their own ways and deforms the character's face to match the deformations on the target geometries. I wasn't really expecting much out of blendshapes, I just knew going in that I wanted a good set because I found I enjoyed facial animation so much while working on the animation exercises at the beginning of the semester. Turns out I love making blendshapes. It is perhaps one of the more tedious things to do and particularly vulnerable to some technical and user screw-ups but for me it was the first time I saw life flow into my character and it very much revitalized my enthusiasm in the project. Used for this were some very helpful and time saving taper scripts as well as js facial scripts for setting up the controller sliders.

Posing is really just a lot of fun. Often while I was animating and navigating around in the perspective cam some possibility or another would spark my interest and I might just tweak a few things or just use that particular perp view and render it out. Since I used a painting for my background instead of modeling a set and used a 1024 texture map for Carson my render times were very low, I remember waiting at most 15 seconds for a render and usually they were much closer to 5.

Background time! Early on I decided that instead of modeling my background I wanted to paint it. I probably could have stood to model it but it did teach me some very good things about lighting and light quality and applying the concepts of color and value to 3d.

Click for background progression .gif!

This was the first time I had significant issues lighting my scene. I found it very difficult to light Carson since he's so tall and skinny. You've really got to fake a lot of the ambience so that he doesn't look so dark but at the same time you want to preserve a sense of strong afternoon daylight with solid shadows, while at the same time not blowing out highlights on the arms, shirt, and feet. My most annoying problem was dealing with the issue of the hat not casting a shadow at the top of his bangs. I tried messing with every setting on the key light that I could before throwing in the towel and emailing my teacher. Apparently the light was simply too far away so I supposed that just messed up the shadow map calculations. d'oh. The top render illustrates the shadow issue I was having while the lower render shows early lighting and test compositing. The dark stripe is due to trouble with transparency in after effects and I soon just used a surface shaded plane with the image mapped to it and rendered it together natively to avoid the issue.

Some lighting test renders for after effects taken into photoshop and had fun with instead :).

The overall scene with cameras and lights.

Prop modeling! All props had to be modeled in NURBS. This chair probably took 5-10 hours to model. Lots of little pieces.

The cinderblock obviously didn't take as long. I often made plans/thinking diagrams like the one above on paper. This one didn't even get followed really because I changed my mind on certain shapes, but it's always a good thing to figure out how you're going to do something before doing in to do it. Displacement maps are also super cool when rendered at their default settings.

Part way through and all the way to the end you work on animation. The screenshot above shows how I like to work a lot of the time. Having maya on that whole monitor is just too much maya for me. I like to keep it smaller and then put other stuff around it like reference, related inspirational art and photos, drawings from the project, and text files with notes. It helps keep me focused on what I want to get across with this instead of getting sucked in to working ahead in maya without the end goals in sight.

Above is one of the time when I got so stuck with the animation I had to just walk out and figure out just what the motion was. I ran through it a bunch of times and different ways in the lobby, sketched out the intermediate poses, made notes on the timing, even went back and drew over screenshots with notes too work out the silhouette and details further. I still got nowhere. I just couldn't get that arm reach to work and animated it from scratch a few times. At that point I just had to step away and move on because I wasn't getting anywhere with it that day. Later on when I went back to work on that section I realized that that action I had wanted wasn't even the right kind of action for this situation. It's yet another example of unwittingly getting caught up in the here and now of detailed work instead of keeping your eye on the overall piece at hand.

Here is a 3 min (=~16MB) movie illustrating the animation progression from some of the many playblasts that I made and what I remember from the time.
http://webspace.ringling.edu/~emcmahil/misc/animProg.avi

And of course, here's that director's cut, which you can thank Adam for:
http://webspace.ringling.edu/~emcmahil/misc/emcmahil_ssDirCut.mov

figure painting {digital}

2010-06-12T20:27:00.003-04:00

I did these at the end of May when I got the chance to go to Crealde for one of their figure sessions. Top one is 5min and the other 2 are 20min, in painterX of course. Just getting back into this there's a lot to straighten out....

slither

2010-05-30T02:13:00.005-04:00

I just realized how much I like messing around in photoshop and just making stupid crazy stuff and exploring aesthetics without any of the pressures of usability. So, I've taken the illustration friday topic of the week, "slither" and made this,

grass photo from
illustration friday

notepad.bmp

2010-05-05T17:32:00.006-04:00

Earlier this semester I got on a glitch art kick (which explorations for I used in my final printmaking project) and finally got into some hex editing. At first I just messed with jpgs off of google but then I really wanted to see what data files would look like translated into images. I really wanted to use a dump from a computer's active RAM but based on my googlings around that looks nearly impossible at my current level of understanding. I then tried to look for log files to translate but couldn't find any that were conceptually suitable to my project. After some deliberation I decided on taking notepad.exe (from vista) and using that. If I remember correctly this was done as a 24 bit bitmap. All I did was right a header for the image and add some zeros at the end of the file to pad the spaces so it would display, everything in between is just the hex interpretation of the program's code dumped in. At first I made it 64px tall, which was cool, but I noticed what looked like some pattern stretching in the top (ultimately, I was really hoping to find interesting visual patterns generated from patterns in the data) so I rewrote it for a width of 64px and got this beauty out of it. It looks like an actual notepad in the file! The artifact repeats at different sizes throughout the file and very closely resembles the actual notepad.exe icon. I was not expecting to find this at all, very cool. I have no idea if this is an artifact of the file's information (If the information for the icon is included in the body of the file), if this was in any way intentional, or if it is a complete coincidental anomaly, but it sure is cool. I'm definitely going to be shoving some more files into bmp form this summer and will be posting a much more expansive and probably explicative version of this post later with some of the jpg I broke too.

...back to packing.

sitStand

2010-04-13T00:15:00.005-04:00

Time's up... so here's sit stand!
After school's out I plan to post detailing production and all the development that went in to get this fifteen second thing off the ground in the two months that it took. I'll also be posting a special edition render, so stay tuned!

Here's a full res file (~= 30MB).
emcmahil_ss4thPass.mov

still going

2010-03-28T01:48:00.003-04:00

Progress!

I paint too pastely...

2010-03-21T02:35:00.003-04:00

Trying to figure things out. Colors matter, values matter more.

workworkwork

2010-03-14T14:12:00.002-04:00

working working working and then working some more.
This, is not work.

QuadFecta

2010-02-11T22:00:00.005-05:00

The first computer animation assignments of the year: a finger point, walk, head turn, and take. These were strictly animation exercises and the model and rig were provided to us. It's my first time animating a human character, or anything with arms really.... Needless to say I learned a ton on these and feel like I'm in a much better place when it comes to understanding animation. The take was the only one I had time to fully revise, and even though it was my favorite one when I did it it still looks worlds better. It's amazing how such slight changes, small relationships, and subtle emphasis make a world of difference in the visceral experience. Currently we're working on a modeling project in NURBS and then we're going to start SIT STAND, the big assignment of the semester. I'm pretty excited for this, and so is Carson.

gold paint is fun

2010-02-07T02:30:00.007-05:00

Here's some stuff from the past two portrait nights. I like finding a stylistic constraint/goal and working with that during those three hours. It's really nice to be able to explore these ideas over the course of multiples while at the same time being flexible and free by not being committed to a serious/legit concentration of work. For example the golden portraits were started with Scott's when I painted his beard in bronze gouache and I just kept on with it because I kept having left over paint and didn't want to waste it. I'd like to keep trying to explore different aesthetics, methods, colors, materials, and exaggerated drawing styles in particular. In the immediate future I'd like to do some stuff with soft pastels, mixed media/collage, and maybe even work with these as etchings... Gouache works pretty nicely in washes - keeps that color vibrancy up, and printmaking paper scraps are fantastic to work on, but not vellum, that stuff can not get wet; I still need to figure out what I can do with all my left over vellum.

Got some stuff from FEWS too. I'm trying to go to it just about every night for an hour as a break from work in the labs. I realized after last semester that I wasn't drawing nearly enough and was starting to lose touch with things. My observational and expressive skills have slowly shifted but I feel that my overall drawings have gotten a lot weaker as of late. I really need to pay close attention to things, get off the line again, and get back to being aware of mark making, the quality of which I've been severely neglecting...

this just in

2010-01-27T02:33:00.004-05:00

The lastest: silly portraits and drawings of birds on a post it - soon to be an etching.

2010

2010-01-27T02:27:00.005-05:00

Stuff actually from this year. Some sketches from open mic night and some portrait night watercolor sketches.

more semiOld stuff

2010-01-27T02:21:00.008-05:00

From last semester. Some stuff from portrait night, some sketchbook (pretty much the only legit sketchbook stuff I've done...), and a couple of drawings from when I visited Crealde over winter break.

ta2

2010-01-17T04:45:00.003-05:00

Our last project for traditional was a collaborative dance (so play this while you're listening to some music and pretend it works), this was my section. Medium was fairly open, though pretty much everyone stuck to hand drawn. I used cut out paper that was watercolored. The pieces were also covered in contact paper, which cause a reflection issue at the beginning but really protected the small paper pieces from all that abusive handling. Since my animation required a camera move and I couldn't get a hold of one of the HD cameras to crop the image down I had to rig up a moving set with foamboard, tape, and a couple of pegbars. When finished I had a great big piece of plotter paper that I attached punched paper to for registration and could roll up on the far edges. The super pegbar (made up of three) could slide up and down and side to side in the foamboard. Probably took around 8-10 hours to animate, with a lot more time in planning things out. I don't ever want to work with a puppet consisting of parts that small.

ca1

2010-01-17T04:28:00.005-05:00

Because my favorite part about my simple poly exercises were my title cards, I'm not going to post them. These screen shots are more fun anyways.

Well, to start things off you always need a good breakfast, or a 3d paint placement map that looks like one.

Extrude and I had our differences. Graphics cards apparently aren't too fond of me either. I couldn't imagine why.

Penguin jugs, however, look like a promising invention

as do coincidental legos. I wish legos were as coincidentally found as pennies, then at least I'd be able to build stuff.

Colors hate me.

Ripping apart geometry is fun, always.

I have lots of great ideas, like cranking up the smooth on poorly made geometry and then turning on the vert ids. It makes for a pretty great fullview adventure, I must say.

What I learned this semester: buckets are cute, in a way that parallels first generation pikachus and toddlers.

print1

2010-01-17T03:34:00.004-05:00

I printed stuff!

Inkless embossing based off of one of my monotypes

Collograph in oil paint, based on the tufted titmouse

Linoleum based on my experience with the quadruped walk cycles

Etching based on a water color sketch I did back during spring break after watching the Theif and the Cobbler. Same basic image, but with a different opinion. Done with line etch, aquatints, and spit bite (but for some reason parts of the plate had a really hard time etching directly with that acid....) One of the prints of this edition was pulled for the department's permanent collection.

I went to FEWS!

2009-11-11T13:02:00.006-05:00

I also grabbed some trash printouts from the conveniently close interior design lab.

dialogue!

2009-11-11T11:42:00.002-05:00

This was fun.

primitive theater!

2009-11-11T11:19:00.002-05:00

sweat blood and maya.

quadruped walk cycles

2009-11-11T11:14:00.002-05:00

yep.

ten cents

2009-10-07T04:51:00.004-04:00

Exploring ideas for my collagraph project. I've settled on the subject of birds (not just birds but birds with dime eyes, specifically) but still need to work out the issues of stylization, color, composition, and application of materials in regards to the construction of the debossed image. At any rate it's super fun.

the man upstairs

2009-10-04T13:07:00.009-04:00

Our first assignment in Printmaking: illustrate a narrative using monotypes and then put them all together in a book. I did mine around Ray Bradbury's short story The Man Upstairs.

seagulls also love doritos

2009-09-23T00:52:00.003-04:00

I did this at the last stop motion club meeting. It's my first time animating cut out paper, or really seriously animating anything in physical space, and I'm really happy that it came out as well as it did (I was kind of expecting a train wreck). Animating paper is so much fun, really hard to keep everything in the right spot (none of this except for the background sheet and the blue stripes where fixed down), but fun nonetheless. Work also goes a lot faster since it's all straight ahead with no turning back. I probably only spent around 3-4 hours actually animating it and a couple more to get things figured out, cut out, and set up. I had also just finished up my pantomime just a couple of days before this so my mind was still in animation mode, which certainly helped make this come together. I'm definitely happy with how loose things ended up feeling despite not being able to deform any of the shapes or work with distorted frames. Everything stayed exactly the same except for the wings, which were only three interchangeable shapes and still read surprisingly well.

This was made with a camcorder checkout out from IT and Frame by Frame, a super piece of freeware (not too mention the only good and really workable stop motion freeware for Mac that I could find). http://web.mac.com/philipp.brendel/Software/FrameByFrame.html

fishing for complementary angles

2009-09-23T00:28:00.007-04:00

Our latest assignment in traditional animation was to create a short pantomime to work on body language and emotional change. On this assignment I started to understand things at another level (levels, which I'm sure are infinite, but learning is learning!) especially with overlapping action. I've started paying so much more attention to that lately and really try to work with it. I also wanted to work on animating a more interesting and graphic character. Looking back I feel I should have pushed the designs further and paid more attention to keeping them there in the animation. I know the story and motivation really doesn't make sense anymore, since so many things were cut and reworked, but he is barefoot for a reason! As far as the motion goes, it could definitely be tightened up and plused more as well as made less swimy (haha!...). What really made things for me though was during the critique so many people let out a sincere sympathetic "Awww" when he became sad. It's so satisfying when you create work that people connect with, and really, that's at the heart of all art. As with every assignment it was a great learning experience and I look forward to taking everything from this into future projects.

thar be bars arounds these parts

2009-09-23T00:13:00.008-04:00

This summer I did some fiddling with collage and the like. That's how this ended up happening. The speech bubble has a cut out transparency glued to it functions as a dry erase board. I also taped some rare earth magnets to the back of it and they do a fabulous job of holding it up, despite the weight. All the materials except for the glue, paint, and magnets I got for free too, they were just going to be thrown out unless claimed.

we are so happy together

2009-09-07T10:38:00.004-04:00

One day I got a fortune cookie that said that.

On another day I made this: