Wood Fairy

Cafe Sketches

These Cafe Sketches I did back in 2012, but I never had a chance to post them

Costume

I discovered a new artist recently that has been so inspiring! Her name is Claire Hummel and you can find her artwork here
http://clairehummel.com/

It's not only her art, but also her passion for costume design and fashion that has been absolutely awe inspiring! She has an epic post about where you find out about historical fashion and what books she would recommend.
http://shoomlah.tumblr.com/post/76245310670/claires-fancy-pants-historical-fashion-master-post

I was very lucky and was able to find a few of the books at my local library. I feel like when I first got into animation and you're overjoyed because someone has opened up a whole new world of wonders to you. I don't know Claire, but I just wanted to shout out a big thank you for all the hard work that has gone into accumulating the knowledge and the fact that she took the time to share it with all of us :)

Below is an image that was inspired by one of the books. 

Galactic Fear Plant

One of my co-workers introduced us to an amazing day during one of our sketching sessions. 3 people out of a group come up with 1 word each and then you have 15 minutes to do an illustration. It was so much fun and the word combinations that came up were just hilarious.

This is my drawing for Galactic Fear Plant :)

 

Variete Show

When I went to visit my family I had the chance to catch a Variety show. I definitely need more practice, but trying to capture the fast moving poses of the performers was really fun.

The little prince

Some of you know may know that I'm currently animating on the movie version of "the little prince". I can't really say anything about the project at the moment, but working on it has been amazing!


To share something small, this is a drawing I did for one of our newsletters :)

Cafe Sketches 02

 

Cafe sketching

Cafe sketching oh how I missed thee.

Fight or Flight

 

This drawing is pretty old, but I thought I'd post it none the less :)

For Dan

Hey guys.

I finally have a new scanner!! So hopefully I'll be able to update more regularly again :)
This is a drawing I did last year for my friend Dan (http://danpozo.blogspot.ca/), who besides being an amazing animator is also an amazing guitarist!

For François......a sponge :)

Cloudy2 wrapping up

Sorry for the lack of update guys. Cloudy 2 is in the last stages of wrapping up and my last day was Friday. It was a bitter sweet goodbye. We had such a fantastic crew working on this film, from every department all the way up to the directors! I can't wait to see what the film will look like finished. All I can say is that the individual scenes all look like they were paintings. Such an amazing sense of colour, truly inspiring!

I definitely have to send out a huge thank you for getting the chance to work on this film! I learned so much and feel like I've only scratched the surface of what's possible. Everyone on the project was so helpful and such an inspiration!! I can't wait to carry forward what I learned onto my next film. =D

iAniamte Character design

Hi guys :)

I wanted to share a character with you that I'm designing for my school iAnimate. They were looking for a little girl design, so I did a bunch of concepts and this little girl was chosen :). She was actually my favourite of all the designs I did, so I'm really happy! I love that she's not quite a girly girl, but has a little spunk behind her and doesn't mind getting hurt ^^.

Also a big shout out to Angelo Sta Catalina who will be modelling her. Angelo has a really good sense of design so I can't wait to see how she turns out :)

mermaid

A big thank you to my friend Elizabeth Romo who came up with the idea of making her skin blue =D

I believe :)

Gnome

Old Tree

Rococco

Hey guys

I just wanted to share another design I did with you, that I had a lot of fun with. He was described as a colourful forest creature with wings =D.
 
I also had the chance to do some of the animation on him which was really fun. I'm not sure I'm allowed to share that here, so for now, the design :)

Blondie

This is another monster design I did. I loved drawing the teeth on the baby ^^. Bad teeth designs in animated films always remind me of Hogarth and Penny. Somehow just this slightly imperfect thing made those character so much more real to me.

No one will probably think of this when looking at the design, but I was thinking of shooting stars when I drew the lines on the dress ^^

Cafe Sketches

Instead of a design this week here are some random cafe sketches I did a few month ago

Sparky

This is another monster I was working on.  This one was really fun. For the texture I came up with this idea because I was thinking about little bits of crust floating on lava.

If you guys get a chance to play the game, my friend Elizabeth Romo did some really cute animation with her =D

Igniter

I started designing for a company in San Francisco recently, where I get to design little monsters, which has been super fun.

This monster is called Igniter





I'll try to upload more of them as they get released :)

for Chris

I thought it might be nice to see the process that it takes to get there. So for this image that I did for my teacher Chris, I scanned the stages that it took to get to the final image.

Usually the idea is the hardest and most important part. I think it's really important for the drawing to be something personal (if at all possible). So there are usually a few different versions to get to the final ruff drawing.

Once I've found one that I'm happy with, I scan it and then print it the size I would like the final image to be. I then go over it and add construction and figure out the drawing more properly

Then another piece of paper to figure out all the details and any final stages

I then scan this last image, print it, put graphite on the back and transfer it to Bristol board. That drawing then get's cleaned up with a brush pen (I usually use Pentel's Brush Pen). Once the drawing is all clean I start colouring it with markers and sometimes watercolour. (I have a bunch of Copic Sketch Markers that I use)

And that is pretty much it. Then the only thing left to do is to scan the image. ...Although that said I'm never really happy with the scanned images. They always loose some sort of colour. I probably should buy a new scanner soon, it could be because the one we have is ancient lol.

Well, that's pretty much it. Hope you guys enjoyed the image :)

Game

These designs were done for a game idea some of my friends were working on last year. The game ended up not going anywhere, but it was really fun trying out different design styles and coming up with characters. These are a few, hope you enjoy them :)

Random

Hey guys. I had a few drawings which I didn't get a chance to post yet. Some were drawings I did for friends and some drawings I just did for fun. Hope you enjoy them :)

Another great workshop at iAnimate

I just finished another great workshop at iAnimate!

For those of you that feel that you still need to work on your body mechanics, the workshop I just finished was amazing! It's called feature workshop 2 - body mechanics. If you ever have any questions about it totally feel free to drop me a line.

And since it's the end of a workshop, I did a drawing as a thank you for my teacher Mike Safianoff. I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but if you guys get a chance to learn from Mike, totally jump on that opportunity right away. He's a super nice guy and super talented too. He really went above and beyond with his time and effort for our class. It's because of him and my classmates that I feel I improved as much as I did.

So yeah, without further ado,...the drawing:

Doodle

Sorry for the lack of updates. My next workshop at iAnimate started in January and it's consumed most of my waking hours. That said I've actually tried to draw a little bit every night for the past 2 weeks, which has been liberating and wonderful!

This is just a quick doodle I did that was inspired by one of the character rigs at iAnimate.

The aftermath of Christmas

Music

Attitude

iAnimate Workshop 1

I just finished Workshop 1 of the iAnimate course and I have to say IT WAS AWESOME!!!

I can't compare it to any other online course out there, but I would love to share what the course was like for me.

If any of you are considering iAnimate I would highly recommend it! The administration part granted was not as organized as it could have been, but once we got into our classes things were amazing! I took their first Workshop (WS) starting with the bouncing ball, going all the way up to a walk cycle. For someone who had never used Maya before, this was a good decision. Knowing animation going into the WS was great but not necessary. For me it helped to solidify and experiment with spacing and timing. The progression of assignments from bouncing ball, to a "luxo-like" character, to full character really got me used to the graph editor and all the controls in Maya.

Besides your own classes you also have access to all the other classes that are being taught. I found this really cool! I got to watch in on some of the later workshops to get a feel for what they would be like and found this super informative. The students are also collecting a "best of" selection of the best Q&A's of all the teachers. This way if you don't have time to watch everything (which I assure you, you will not! There is way too much stuff to see), you will still know which Q&A's were really informative and watch those. Also Jason Ryan, the creator of the program gives a weekly lecture to show how he animates. These range from him showing us how he would tackle one of our assignments, to showing how he would analyse acting and how to tackle any new rig that gets created. All of these lectures are also saved in a section that you can download/watch as a student.  I seriously tried to watch as much as I could, but there is no keeping up with all the amazing stuff on that site. We have a month break in December, so I'm going to try and catch up then.
Also something that should be noted is the "iAnimate rigs". They are really amazing! Again, I'm new to Maya, so I'm probably not the best person to judge, but the more experienced people told me they are the closest thing to a feature rig out there.

To see what iAnimate is doing, you can watch their current student reel here
http://www.ianimate.net/index.php/ianimate2011showreel.html

I also want to give a big shout out to my teacher Jacob Gardner. He was really great to learn from! Patient, enthusiastic, funny and an inspirational animator! If you guys get the chance to learn from him I would say jump on that opportunity right away!

Also, in case you guys are interested his friend Stephen Melagrano, Ben Willis, Adam Strick and him have a great animation websites called "Speaking of Animation"
http://www.speakingofanimation.com/
They also have a podcast here
http://www.speakingofanimation.com/pods/

That's it ^^ Let me know if any of you have questions and I'll try to answer them as best as I can :)

Fashion

We'll miss you

This is a drawing I did for my friend Billy, who will be leaving next week to move to Spain. We'll miss you!!

Fall is here

iAnimate

Just wanted to share with you guys that I just started my first workshop at iAnimate! I feel really happy to be part of the program and couldn't be more excited!