L.A.

Last week I took a trip down to L.A. for Siggraph 2008. I was a student volunteer this year... perhaps the only year I will be able to do it since I will have graduated by this time next year. The conference was pretty intense... way too many things to look at and sooo little time, but I did manage to make my way to a few booths of note. Laika had an awesome booth that showcased some stop motion sets and puppets for their upcoming film "Coraline". I also checked out the Walt Disney Animation Studios booth where I got a ticket to show my portfolio reel. I got some excellent feedback on my work and I met some great people there... very exciting.

Of course Siggraph wasn't the only thing I did when I was there. I reconnected with old friends and made some new ones. I attended the annual AM Siggraph Industry party and had ball hanging out with AM classmates and mentors... some of which traveled from as far away as Sweden to be there. The cherry on top came at the end of my trip. A few of my friends and I were invited to take a tour of Walt Disney Animation Studios by our mutual mentor Mike Belzer (aka nicest guy on earth!). The picture above is from the end of our tour (I am in the light shirt next to Mike...right below the A). All in all, I had a really good time... it really put everything into perspective... it made me look forward to the upcoming job search.

I should have a few drawings up soon... also I hope to post more work from here on in as I continue to prepare my portfolio and reel.

Portrait of a "henpecked husband"

This is a portrait of my rendition of a youngish Rip Van Winkle (click to see it larger). The facial features changed a tiny bit from the last (un-rendered) sketch below, but I really like how he turned out. I painted this in Photoshop and used techniques similar to Oil Painting including a glaze made up of three overlay layers of primary Red, Blue and Yellow at varying opacities.

The next step in my little character design challenge is to develop the body characteristics which I have already started to do in my sketchbook. I am hoping to paint the final full body design in the same sort of Dutch/Flemish painterly style.

Van Winkle Beast

So I took the first two concepts (at the top of the page) from my last post and mashed them up to create this sketch:

I further refined the features which resulted in this sketch:

I didn't do much rendering on this one... I had some plans to make it all purty like. I've finished the final face design... it should be up in my next post.

Van Winkle Faces

These are a few facial development drawings I did for good ol' Rip. I picked four of the thumbnail sketches from my previous post and developed the facial features a bit more. Now I'll most likely pick one or mash all four of them up into some weird Van Winkle beast! This little project has been really fun for me... its actually been keeping me from my studies...UH OH! Next week, I'll be at Siggraph in LA helping to keep that convention machine well oiled. I'm sure to find some interesting tech geeks to draw.