Rediscovering the Road Not Taken …

This was a 3 minute sketch that sort of popped out and I tried a quick ink in Flash - about 3 minutes as well. Getting faster on the Wacom. Neatness is another issue.

I liked the old bird and think I’m going to use this same sketch to play in Illustrator. Several of the job listing I checked out require it and my skills are barely more than using live trace.

Here are some variations (the last two include other quick Photoshop layer blending I tried - gradient map and a lineart only copy of the image produced by the SnapArt filter)

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Well, trying to get at least a little drawing in every day now that school is wrapped up. As I look at today’s offerings I guess they are more doodles than sketches. I didn’t start with an real idea of where they were going, and often just followed the lines until something started to emerge before making it whatever. Hopefully some value in this exercise though I had better spend some time on ‘real’ characters if I want to get better.

Thoughts, ideas, suggestions …. ?

After 8 weeks of work our student short, for the studio production class, is done. I’m off to work but wanted to post a quick link. It is a 66mb avi. I will try to compress as DivX or something else after work.

Let us know what you think!

Download link

Well, graduation day is here - now I have to find a job somewhere in the animation industry. Hopefully I can get in at some level and work my way up. I’d love to get into Dreamworks, Disney/Pixar, Nickelodeon or Sony Image Works but anyplace where I can grow as an artist, make enough money to take care of my family and be involved in the story process in some way would be awesome. I am going to try to talk to some people from the aforementioned companies, get a brutal critique of my skills, and set a goal to do whatever I need to do, to improve my skills, so that in one year I am good enough to get hired at any of them.

Anyway, while waiting for Amy at Career Services I did a couple quick sketches …

If you take the time to look at my stuff why not take a moment to critique? It really helps!

I sketched a background and colored it in grayscale in Photoshop -an effort to better control the light values without the distraction of color. I’m experimeting to see what the best way to colorize the grayscale images might be. I got a few suggestions on cgtalk. The first was to use gradient mapping which is what I tried here. Feedback on the look of the background, its suitability for animation, other coloring techniques for grayscale images, and anything else that will improve my work all appreciated.

Here is the original grayscale image …

Grayscale Image

Well, we had our much awaited show and industry mixer yesterday at the California Market Center. It was a hectic drive to get there on time with my family in tow as I had to work for several hours that morning -but we made it. The building houses the Otis School of Design and we enjoyed walking the hallways, looking at the fashion renderings - I really loved the way they rendered the textile textures (with marker and prismacolor pencils it appears). There were many standout designs including some oriental inspired pieces that were stunning.

Our school - Brooks College - had student displays from our Fashion Design, Interior Design, Graphic Design and Animation programs. There was some awesome work and for a school that has a pretty fast track (average program is only 18 months compared to 4 years for many other schools) I think we did very well. Read more »

I’ve decided to make a little niche on my corner of AnimationBlogSpot to feature one of my favorite little programs. Some of you may have looked at Moho at some point, recently reborn as Anime Studio, but unless you have taken it for a test drive you may not realize what a gem it is. I do not work for e-frontier, I’m just one of many fans of this program. You can see the

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