Blue Sketch Dump

I've obviously been rocking the blue pencil lately.

I Heart Storyboards

Here's some storyboards;

"I think there's something wrong with your taste buds kid!"

The above is a sketches I did for a 10 second clip, that I currently doing for my Character Animation final. I'm taking two generic rigs, having them take a drink of the same drink and having separate reactions. The audio clip is from the FUNimation's One Piece.

The following are highlight panels of a storyboard I did for my actual Storyboarding class a couple of quarters ago. The story was about a little girl who gets a Venus fly trap for her birthday. She spends the story trying to help her pet get a fly.

Keep in mind that these are random panels.

Early First Step

Not much to this one, but here's a really raw first look at the last third of "One Small Step"

Teach and Assist

Tuesday this quarter, I tutor both a Intro to 2D Animation class and a Computer Painting class. Today I was ask to do demos in both classes, sadly I forgot to save the 2D Animation demo. But I have here my "Painting Skins" Demo.

This is a great in-progress moment! It shows everything including how I block in colors, blind, and refine.

And in the 2D animation class, the instructors starts the class with a "Quick Draw" exercise. Its about 10 minutes long and he has them do sketches, today asked the class to create and draw a character. I wanted to do it with the class, so I asked the instructor to give me a word to base my character off of.

He said "Plastic Surgery".

Yeo Walter (named after Walter Yeo the first person sited to have plastic surgery) is a woman who just wanted to be pretty to impress a man. She was tricked into letting a psychopath nip and tuck at her skin to fix her imperfections. Lovely girl turn Frankenstein wife.

Super Son and Biker Dude

The above is a commission where I had to take the costumer's son, and make him into a super hero who's costume is based off both Superman and Robin.

Below is my next project for Composting. I will be working with a good friend of mine, Christopher Zazetti. The boards are based off Zazetti's idea, of an alien and tron inspired transforming creature chasing him on his bike. It'll be roughly 20 seconds long.

Rough Times, Rough Sketches

Hey guys, so in the last few days I have been going through some personal troubles. I am trying my best for it to not effect the updates or contents of this blog. We might be getting some sketches and school work for a little bit.

The above is a tattoo commission I did within 2 hours. It was interesting to do, because I'm not a huge fan of doing pieces that center around religion. The follow are sketches of shows I've been enjoying recently, Beast Wars (in Transformers: Animated Style) and the 60's Addams Family.

Inking with Melly

Just a quick experiment on inking.

If you seen almost any of my sketch dumps, you've seen this character. She appears in a lot of my sketches. She is Melody Limeson, but I refer to her as "Melly" because she was based off a Watermelon. I'll do a whole post on her eventually.

Collaborate Effort

Collaboration is a beautiful thing. With it you can take a piece further with not just your strongest strengths, but those with your fellow artist. Cuong Tran and Christopher Perkins created the below animation.

Cuong did the beautiful and stunning jungle background; he's amazing at digital painting. And Christopher Perkins, a good animation buddy of mine, did the Flash animated Lion. He's great at anything that has to do with flash.

I loved the above animation, but there was one thing that bugged me; the background and the character's style were too different. The Animation and the drawing is great, but it needed something more to make it look unified.

Christopher let me have the flash file and let me play with it, and this what I came up with:

The lion character's darkest value was black, while the background's was only a dark green. So I decided to make the brown a dark reddish brown. Something that would be dark enough for an outline and complimentary enough to set him off the background.

Another thing was a lot of the light source was coming from the background, so I put the shadows all on the front of the lion. It gave the lion depth and gave the illusion of it being the space it was given.

This is the wonderful work of the three people. Each have given something to the table!

4 Tips for Coloring

I'm going to take this lineart created by a friend of mine Britt Baue and use it to demonstratives some helpful advice for when you decide to color your drawings.

Neutralize Your Background

This is going to be our starting piece. It's currently in its purist form, and ready for coloring, minus one thing. The background is white. When I begin picking colors for my digital paintings and color jobs I always convert the white background into a neutral gray;

Why? Well because if you keep the white background the color you choose typically looks really washed out or overly saturated when you add a colored background.

Know your Palette Before You Start

Knowing what kind of color scheme is an important, but it is overlooked a lot of times as part of coloring a piece. And with so many online sources such as Kuler's and Color Scheme Designer, it has become so easy to find the right color theory for any piece.

I like to know my whole palette before I start a piece; that's how I know, from start to finish, that the piece will have good color harmony.

Weather Counts!

Now this is something you should keep in mind. Weather. Color is about lights, and weather effects our major light-source, the sun. So if the clouds are thick and it's storming out, most likely your character will have a darker color scheme.

Above is an explample with a cloudless day. The color of the character is washed out because there is no clouds to filter the light. Unlike the cloudy day below which the color is much more lush.
Remember if the sky is red due to setting, the character should have a much more red tint. Its night out and the sky is dark blue, object typically have a much more cool blue tint to them.

Think 3D also known as Look at Real World Examples

I've seen way too many pieces shaded like the Simpsons or the Family Guy promotional art. I'm not sure if there is an actual term for it, but a lot of times I refer to it as Clip Art Shading or Around-The-Corner shading.

This is what I am talking about. It's a very flat style of thinking when you shade like this. You kind of just shading near the outline. It makes it look very flat, kind of generic.

The above is my attempt of shading the character as if it was 3D. I tried to shade different materials differently because that how the real world works. Hair can be drawn abstractly as a single shape, but when coloring you want it to feel as if its made up of multiple strands.

The face I added a reflect bounce to it. A lot of times in photography you'll see this light reflect, it's also done a lot in movies. Just look at photography when you're shading for both realistic and stylized works, you'll be amazed how you can add little pieces into your work from those shots and how well it it works to improve your work.

Ice- Cream Snowboarding!

I was inspired by ironically enough Zombie Land.