Illustration Friday: Rain

Wooo! First post in a loooong time. And it's appropriate because upstate New York is being drenched right now. (Though I made the IF deadline by an hour...so if anyone sees this, that's great.) Also, would you believe this piece is completely digital? And done in software that only costs $20? Well it's true! It's called ArtRage. They have a free version too!! All you illustrators should check it out riiiiight now.

And for anyone else who cares, I graduated college and I am now working at Fisher-Price as an animator! Wahoo!! Though the job is only til February, so I will be looking for something in a few months. (Anyone out there from Laika want to give me a call? Yeah? Okay, cool.) Oh and my new website will seriously be up soon. I want to get it done before Siggraph in August...so...yeah. Look for that too.

Ezra's Epitaph Coming Soon

I made this postcard for Ian's movie. Ezra's Epitaph will premiere at Bard College on May 6th at 7 PM in Avery. I can't wait!

Rendering!

Here's a teaser of what's to come in 7 weeks...

Lady and the Tramp Storybook

To celebrate the release the new Platinum Edition (or is it 50th Anniversary Edition?) of Disney's "Lady and the Tramp" I've decided to scan in and upload some beautiful illustrations from a Tramp storybook I've had lying around. I picked the book up for 50 cents at a tag sale, which was still a good deal for a first edition (1955) regardless of the fact that it's falling apart. The art is spotty in the book - some illustrations are completely off model and uninspired while others are obviously by talented artists. (I only included the best ones.) Look at the way the rain scenes are rendered! Very nice. The cheap Disney storybooks released nowadays make me die inside. (Also, this book is long out of print and nobody's making any money off these pictures...please don't sue me for posting these.)

(front cover)

(back cover)


I also have a first edition Bambi storybook that has some amazing art in it...maybe I'll get around to posting that some day.

Illustration Friday: Song

ROCK! \oo/

Some sketches...

Illustration Friday: Cats

Did this one early on in the school year. I was gonna make a series of 6 paintings in this style...but then I had to make a thesis. So it's been postponed. Cats! (That's totally gonna be my mom in a few years...)

Bill Peet's CARS

So I'm surfing around Bill Peet's website and I find these old designs for the Disney short, "Susie the Little Blue Coupe." I've yet to see the short, but these designs look uncannily like Pixar's character designs for CARS. See for yourself:

Bill Peet's car designs

Pixar's car designs

I duno. I guess there's only so many ways to design cars, but I feel like Bill Peet must have had a pretty strong influence...wouldn't be surprised if they had pulled some of his drawings from that handy Disney archive. Visit Bill Peet's site for more pictures from "Susie."

Illustration Friday: E is for...

Enlisted officers coming to your college campus and tryign to get you to sign up for the army! Heh. So yeah, this was for my college mag, Reporter. But that topic's so wide open that I guess it works.

Ezra's Epitaph Graveyard Set

Yesterday Ian and I created a miniature set for his senior thesis, Ezra's Epitaph. It's a really cool graveyard with a coffin and a tree on the top of the hill. We made it surprisingly fast...in about 6 hours. I'm working on some CG stuff for his film as well, so I will post that at some point.

The Set! There are live action people composited over certain sections of this...as well as stop- motion animation.

Here is the back of the set...you can see that we started with balled up newspaper which we covered in masking tape to hold it down. Then we used plaster cloth and green floral foam to create the terrain. We crumbled up the foam to make the grass, as well as added some tufts of fake fur painted green for long grass.


I was going for "scared" and I don't know what Ian was doing.

P.S. This movie's going to be awesome. Coming Spring 2006 to a Bard College campus near you!

Thesis Color Script

I just returned from NYC and the Pixar exhibit at MOMA. If you have a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. There was SO much art to see including maquettes, texture designs, animation studies, color scripts, etc...so inspiring to see! They were also showing Pixar's new short, One Man Band, the day I went...but unfortunately we missed seeing it by an hour or so. It was so packed in the MOMA...the line for tickets stretched out the door and down almost a whole block! (Thankfully it moved pretty fast.) Anyway, I came back in the mood to create some visual development type art, so here is a full color script for my thesis, Love at First Roach. The colors you see here are general ideas for lighting and texturing, but will likely look a bit different when fully realized in 3D...feedback welcome as always.



By the way, if you can't get to the exhibit, I highly recommend the book they've released which can be purchased for just $30 at MOMA's website. While there you can also listen to the audio tour with some of the work from the show.

Illustration Friday: Surprise

Thought you were gonna play in the big game, HUH? Well, surprise. You're not. HA!

Thesis Update

Here's a new render of my characters after I tweaked the textures a bit.

Thesis: Textured Models

Here are Suzette and Pierre all textured up! Had to do the UV's on these guys twice, but now they're okay. Settled on just a fur-ish texture for Suzette, which in the long run will save me a lot of headaches. Rigs should be ready soon and that means animation time! WOOO!

Illustration Friday: Free

Though I don't necessarily agree with the message I was asked to convey in this illustration (for the Reporter mag) I thought it fit well with this week's Illustration Friday topic. The article this illy goes along with is about the seperation of church and state, specifically about the lack of God in the classroom. (Can you tell that's the capital building?)

Dance of the Seasons

I recently worked on a very interesting project titled Dance of the Seasons. It is a 2 minute animated film that was (mostly) made in just 24 hours. Two fellow RIT animators, Joe Daniels and Jed Mitchell, have put together two similar 24 hour challenges in the past, but both were done in CG. Dance of the Seasons is unique because it is entirely hand drawn (over 1,000 frames from 5 animators in 24 hours.) Dave Suroviec was an animator on the piece and kindly lent us the basement of his apartment to go crazy in. We began the 24 hour period with no idea of what we were doing, but we did have the music handed to us by Joe and Jed. (Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Hours.) We began at 10 AM on a Saturday and spent a few hours brainstorming and sketching until we came up with some sort of coherent idea. This led to storyboarding and listening to Dance of the Hours on repeat for the entire day and night. Brittney Lee did the character design for "Petey" our main squirrel (I suggested the name we gave to the squirrel inside our apt cieling) and she cranked out some nice model sheets. While the animators began their work I sat down with Joe and the storyboards and figured out all the layouts we were going to need. (Thirteen total.) They went surprisingly smoothly, but somewhere around 2 AM I began working with Photoshop to color them. And apparently Photoshop loves me so much that it decided to crash on almost every background I worked on, often multiple times. I was drinking coffee (which I don't often do) and feeling jittery and crazy, but it was fun! We had a video camera on and off throughout the night...I'm interested to see some of that footage. And it should also be said here that all of the people who worked on this film are students of Nancy Beiman, who inspired us to create a hand-drawn collaborative film. (I don't know what she thinks of it yet, but hopefully good things.) Anyway, I've posted a few of my favorite layouts from Dance of the Seasons here:










Now! Go watch the entire film (Large or Small, Quicktime 7, H.264 codec) which Joe has kindly posted for everyone to see. And visit his blog to see the other two 24-hour films that have been made at RIT.

And here are some pictures from the making of Dance of the Seaons!

Jed and Joe survey story ideas. And yes, Joe wore the Goofy hat for the full 24 hours.

Brittney at the boards!

We're messy.

Brittney animates!

Nathaniel works diligently.

Our pencil testing station.

This is where I worked all night. (I had a comfy chair too.)

RJ and Dave passed out around 9 AM.

Check out the blogs/sites of the other folks that worked on the film:

Brittney Lee
Dave Suroviec
Jed Mitchell
Joe Daniels
Nathaniel Hubbell

And that's it! Hope you enjoy the film.

Thesis Color Keys

Here are some color keys for my thesis...they need some work

Illustration Friday: Broken

I'll be honest, this was another illustration for the Reporter. (The cover, woo.) BUT it is about evolution and the direction that we could be headed in- a break in the evolutionary process through technology. (I didn't stretch that too far, did I? I really miss Illustration Friday. ;)

Halloween '05

What was my costume this year you ask? Something horrfiying. Something so scary you can hardly bear to look. That's right: I went as Tom Cruise and Meg (my roommate) went as pregnant Katie Holmes. ::cue high pitched horror movie shriek::




We walked around saying things like:

Meg: "He's the most AMAZING guy!"

"Have you heard about scientology? I'm having a silent birth!"

Me: "If it's a boy we're gonna name it Tom, and if its a girl we're gonna name it Tom."

Then I'd jump on the couch and give lots of thumbs up's.