Blog move

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See you there!

Random

Quick mood sketch of a scene I came up with yesterday.

Another post I'll probably regret by tomorrow

Today I turned 20.

Looking back on this last year, I have changed a lot.

I've started college. That may have been the best decision I ever made. I am doing something everyday that I truly love. I found new friends I never would have thought I'd meet. I've been to places I've never would have thought I'd go to. I've done things I never would have thought I'd do. I feel like I've only just started living.

In the next 3 or 4 remaining years of my academic life (god willing), there are a few more things I want to accomplish.

I want to start building capital and get my own place. I love my parents to bits, but I'm starting to outgrow my little sanctuary here. I want to be able to stand on my own feet.

And I want to become the best I can be at what I do.

And at the end of it all, when I have my shit together and I can finally stop worrying about those things, I am going to head for a place where the buildings reach the sky and the air is dense, where starry-eyed people watch as angels dance across the rooftops in the morning light, and I will do everything in my power to win the heart of the girl of my dreams.

It might seem like idle hope. A fool's errand. But in my heart I know she is a person I would gladly spend the rest of my life with. In the short time that I've known her, she has changed my life more than anything else in this last year. Heck, maybe even the last three years. She genuinely makes me want to be a better person. Because she deserves it. And I want to be the person that deserves her.

This morning, I was at college at 8 AM, even though it was completely unnescessary. There was no actual class, I didn't learn anything. I could have stayed in bed until noon and it would not have mattered. But I was there. And instead of getting myself down about effort I did for nothing, I felt a strange sense of pride. A rededication to being the best person I can be. And I got a lot of things done because of it.

I feel like everyday now I turn a little more into the person I wanted to be since I was a little kid. I never wanted to be a kid, I always wanted to be an adult. I wanted those things that are in my grasp now. And I never look back with regret. Because inside, that kid is still there. I carry him with me everywhere I go. And he stares out into the world with wide open eyes, amazed at who he has become...

Exciting stuff

As I might've mentioned before, I'm working on a short graphic novel about A Fine Frenzy. I just finished page one today.


All drawn in Photoshop with a tablet. I don't think I've ever spent so much time working on a page! I might've gone a bit overboard with detail. :) This is about 25% of it's actual size.

That's about all you're going to get for now. I'm following the Kris Straub school of 'show off less, work more' ^_^, especially since it'll be quite a while until this'll shows up in print.

I'm glad I was able to put in some solid work this week, because I'll tell you, I was not feeling great last week. My creativity was almost paralyzed, and I did not enjoy it. They were strange times. But with a little help from the guys over at Sugary Serials I managed to turn it around and dump those emotions back into the art. And I like what it produced.


Oh, and in the interest of full disclosure:

I met her! I met her! I met her!

Sweet dreams

This is the original sized art for my webcomic on 8 April 2008. I was pretty awestruck that I actually drew this. To use the old catchphrase: "I didn't know I had it in me!". If you want to read my dissemination on the process of making this strip, you can read it here.




Click to enlarge.

Sketchbook page 04

Some more random sketches.

Animashôn

Phew! After about 2 days of pretty much all-day animating, my animation is done!

Click here to check it out.
I'd embed it, but it autoplays -and LOOPS-, and the music is pretty loud, so...

This was a college assignment, we got a chunk of 12 seconds from a song (in this case Crystal Method - Keep Hope Alive) and we were free to animate whatever we wanted to it. So I made a guy free-running across rooftops. Admittedly not the éasiest thing to animate :), but it turned out surprisingly awesome!

All hand-animated with my tablet in Flash, NO tracing, only some reference from freerunning clips on Youtube.

Things

Trying out something a little more realitic.

I was watching Below recently, and besides being a really good movie, it has some great cinematography. I saw some shots in there where I was like "Wow, that would look great in a comic panel". There was an awesome shot that I unfortunately can't locate right now, but the above one was a good excercise too. You got that foreground/background dynamic there that I enjoy using in Dinerdate, and it's a good practice of body shapes. I really want to 'get' light, so I can draw stuff like this naturally and don't have to 'cheat' by tracing it.

And I did a quick portrait of Alison Sudol yesterday to warm up for the graphic novel.


Right now I'm gonna get back to work on the 12-second free-running animation that I'm working on for a school assignment. That should turn up here in the next week aswell.

Character studies

I'm geting back into drawing again, and here's a couple of caricatures I drew of some classmates. The bottom three are teachers.

These were all drawn from memory. It's hard to draw a caricature of just everyone, there has to be something about them that captures your attention, that stands out. If you learn how to spot that, it's real easy to put a good likeness down with a few lines.

I realize I haven't talked much about what we're doing at college for a while. This term there just isn't much going on really. We're busy setting up a kinetic line (you know, stuff tipping eachother over. Made famous by Der Lauf Der Dinge. And Japan). It's going down this Friday, so I'll take some pics, and it's being filmed aswell. Other than that it's mostly theory. And some graphic work and animation. We spend most of the time working on side projects. There's a few people making a game for the Tokyo Game Show, and I'm still setting up a few things myself including a live-action trailer for TMC, a comic and a top-secret game. More on that heat soon.

But mostly I've been doing field research the past few weeks. That is to say, playing games.

Flash!

Thunder!

(if you didn't get that reference you missed one of the best tv series ever)

I've been toying with the idea of doing some animation for a gwhile (koogwhip), and now that we have to for college I've been playing around with Flash a bit. I don't want to resort to lame tweening, so I've been trying my hand at some rotoscoping with my tablet.

A quick 5-minute 'scope of a running man (a cookie if you know which movie it's from. Hint: Laurence Fishburne and SPACE)

And this was a more detailed face test. You think it's easy to draw her sitting relatively still, but drawing the entire face exactly as you did the last frame for about 25 frames gets pretty tedious after a while.
You can see the source footage edges moving around a bit, there was some camera shake in it so I had to correct it. I could've done it with the motion stabilizer in After Effects, but I thought of that afterwards so I just did it by hand.

Speaking of AE, if you're familiar with the program you'll know it can interpolate between keyframes, sort of like Flash does with tweening. Apparently that is the secret behind Rotoshop, the animation program from the makers of A Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. I really want that program! It makes animation much easier. But I can understand why they don't sell it, because you can bet your ass there'll be a bunch of cheap Scanner Darkly knockoffs.