Doing Something Awesome Everyday!

Sam Ellis spoke at Ball State earlier this weekend, and thanks to my friend Zazzetti I got to go. One of the things he spoke about was the Gap. This gap is what separates artist from being good, and not great. One way to bridge the gap is to aim to do something awesome everyday.

So that's my new goal. I am going to attempt to make something awesome everyday! I'm not going to post these everyday, but I will post them in batches. Here's the first wave;

Day 1:

I wanted to do a picture with a limited color palette, and I wanted to tell a story. My capstone's story. In this picture I think you can easily see the story I want to tell. This is the exact emotion I want to convey.

Day 2:

My attempt at doing something that's very different than what I am used to. This is me trying to mimic Kirill Kruglov. I don't think I got near close to his perfection, but I did get the gist of it. I need to work on my hair.

Day 3:

A tribute to the new Cartoon Network animated series, Young Justice. I had the concept in my head, and thought it was the perfect time to execute it.

Marina

I love to collaborate with other artist, especially when I get to color someone elses' lineart. And a fellow artist on Devianart named Brufaria allowed me to color one of her sketches called "Marina".;Brufaria is a traditional artist who's pieces are done mostly with pencil. I really liked the above drawing and asked her if I could digital ink and color it. That was the original plan, but I downloaded some chalk brushes and decided to play around with those instead.

I got the above palette from Kuler.adobe.com. I like working with limited palettes, I find that makes sure the piece has a harmony all to its own. Plus I like to see how far I can push color combinations and shading.
I decided to take one step further and try to make color stand alone without the line art. I think it does pretty well. I believe I might play around with this "style" with my own drawings.

elderly, mischevious, animal lover

The other day on Facebook I posted a status asking for ideas for characters. I wanted to see how far I could stretch what I was given. I want to try and expand my skills, so this little game sounded like a fun way of doing so.

The first set is "elderly, mischievous, animal lover"

I just noticed that they could've been male. I don't know why but hearing those words made me think of a "grandma". The first thought was a Cougar (get it, animal lover?) oh yea. Animal Lover was the word I pushed the most. I've got a cougar in a human sense, a fur lover, to a animal activist.

And yes, I know I was stretching it with the youthful grandma above.

Sketchdump:

Sketching up character above. Trying to create a nice style to bring a story I've had in my head for a long time to life. I like what I got above, but I'm still waiting for it to evolve more, before I talk about it more.

And then we all love us some Mario;

Suction Cups

I'm currently working on creating a rig for my character Plush. There's one thing that's going to be a unique feature for him, that will make him special; he's got suction cups attached to his hands and feet.

After looking at a toon ball rig tutorial, I found out a fun non linear deformer called Squash. Using the squash deformer, I created an attribute to the Suction cup using the set driven keys. If you take Squash, and put it at 0, the cup reminds neutral. If you make it a -1o it squashes, and if you put it as a 10 it stretches;

Afterwards, I created a control. If you translate this control on the Y access (the only movement this control can make because I locked the rest) it will effect the set driven key Squash. As you can see below;

I am going to add an additional control to the foots version of the suction cups. The control will be one that can have the bottom of the cup move separately from the foot. So when I animated the character walking I can get this effect;

Early Boards

The following is the first set of boards for a personal capstone featuring a plush toy that you stick on the backdoor window of your car and the hula girl that you keep on your dashboard. The main character is Plush, you can see the model from an earlier entry.

The following look is my attempt at mimicking the great Toby Shelton, a character design and storyboard artist famous for Darkwing Duck, Chip 'n Dale: Resuce Rangers, Megamind, How to Train Your Dragon, and much much more.





















The idea was after "waking up" he falls facing the front of the car, and see's the girl of his dreams and instantly falls in love.

Hula Hoops and Cake

Just updating with two pieces I recently did. One of which is a drawing I did for a good friend's birthday. She's into dressing up and dancing with hula hoops, pretty cool if I say.

And here's more High Alert design work. A piece of angel food cake is really important to the plot, so I wanted to make sure it fit the style and looked amazing;

Meet Plush

Plush is the main protagonist of a short story I'm working on for my Senior level Capstone. I've done nothing but work on this guy for the last week. (Well outside of the Bowling for Soup stuff). I'm not the best at, and nor do I care for 3D modeling. But I am really proud of myself for how this model has came out.

Its no where perfect, and I know plenty of people who could of done my own character better, but with a weeks worth of determination I made the above model!

Plush is a car cat window toy most popularly associated with Garfield. In the story he breaks himself off the back window of the car, and tries to woo the hula girl on the dashboard. He's clumsy and romantic.

I'll show you more of this character as I add more to him. For now here's some facial expressions;