Art Roundup!

I just wanted to showcase a few paintings and character designs and such as I haven't done so before.

Here's Birdie; a 1950's lady who was raised to think that being a great cook is the best way to score a hubby! Designed by the fabulous Deanna Marsigliese who now designs for Pixar.

This is a hand animated shot of Birdie

Here is the lucious Babette and her whiskey loving hubby

The outdoor dinner party scene

Some costume designs for Birdie

Here's a screen cap of the finished Cash rig done in Toonboom and my reference files

The cathedral

A wonderful jello mold, with olives! Mmm.

The kitchen

The dinner table

Knives in the kitchen at night

An early pass on character designs, very UPA inspired!

Hand Drawn Animation in Progress! This time it's for my day job

I've been pretty busy recently working on the new adult dragon animation for the game I work on. I put together a pencil test and I've cleaned up the key drawings and finalised the timing based on that. Unfortunaly I cannot share this work in progress until the art is live in the game. But I've been taking notes as I go and I plan to put up a big blog post about my process! So for now, I'll keep working away and when my work is done I'll have a boatload of stuff to share.

Here's how the corner of my desk currently looks:

I'm using a combination of physical and digital media. You can see that there is paper, pencils and a pegbar, but also a scanner and my cintiq.

Visual Post - I got lots of painting done over the long weekend!

Normally Tuesday is my weekly written post but I'm going to change things up this week! The long weekend let me get a good bit of painting and not much writing done. I binge painted pretty much. Yesterday I touched up the cathedral. It's been bugging me for ages that the light in the wedding scene is yellow but there is nothing to make the light yellow. I had figured ages ago that to fix this I'd make the natural light more white and was just putting it off until I had the time. Yesterday I opened up the background in question and couldn't bring myself to nix the yellow light which I really want to have in there and which is so appropriate. So I just added stain glass windows with yellow panels over the windows! Here are some crops of the cathedral background:

I've let shots 26, 27 and 29 go for now. Those are the ones I've been working on recently. I was starting to just get obsessive about detailing and texturing them and when it came to putting down the light and shadow layers I decided to just hold off. I can do the animation first and then make sure that the lighting frames the action as needed after animation is roughed in.

I threw down some texture on shots 31 and 32. I haven't touched those backgrounds in a looong time. The lighting on these is a rough suggestion, I'll jazz that up with some nice brushes when the animation is working.

So I had my paintbrush on 5 paintings this weekend! Not that any of them were started fresh this weekend, and only one of those is final. But the 4 incompletes are close to being done and I'm going to finish them up when animation is done. I feel accomplished!

Get excited about Frozen

I just noticed a recent post on The Rotoscopers blog about some leaked and unfinished animation for Disney's feature; Frozen. It didn't take long for the clip to be pulled from Disney's Greece's youtube page. The look of this film is thrilling! I'm hoping that the final product isn't blue blue blue like some of the concept art appears to be. I'm cool with blue, but I want to see some sumptuous environments that have more going on that snow and sky. One officially released piece of concept art has a lot of this blue going on but from the look of the two screencaps I've posted here, taken from the leaked footage, the film is looking great. There is a bit of a Cinderalla/Sleeping Beauty aesthetic going on, and a some fantastic compositions.

concept art of Anna and Kristoff - love the costume design

screenpcap of leaked footage - elsa in an ice palace?

screenpcap of leaked footage - fantastic environment!

I've been working on my Cash Toonboom rig in my spare time since last Friday but it's not %100 there yet. All the symbols have been created but they need some clean up and paint. So close to being done!! My personal goal was to have it finished today so maybe I can still get there. I can work on it a bit this evening.

Cash Rig... still WIP. And some awesome links!

I'm happy to have more free time as of late to work on Pickled. Finishing the Cash rig is my new obsession. It would be pretty sweet if I could get this done by next Friday! I'm almost there with the line work. I'll still need to fill in the paint and turn all the artwork into individual drawings. Here's the three quarter front view line work all done:

I recently saw Everything I Can See From Here, a gorgeous and eerie short film by The Line. So much awesome going on in this film. Check out their website; lots of great artwork there and a making of video on the film!

And I recently read about some new rumors of Roger Rabbit films and shorts in the works. Check that out here at The Rotoscopers.

Visual Post Friday! Cash Rig WIP

I didn't have time to work on Pickled this week, crappily. But I have a good reason; my parents are visiting me from the motherland! So I've been spending time with them. Then any extra spare time has gone towards the animation I need to do at my job. So I share with you today a screen cap of the rig I'm building in Toonboom of Cash, (the husband).

I've been chipping away at this rig (or build) for awhile now. I've been suffering through some technical dificulties so getting work done on this guy has been a struggle. But I've finished the line work of the front view (as you can see). And I've started work on the 3/4 front view.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've decided to do selected scenes from the film with full hand drawn animation. (Like scene 6.) Some scenes I may animate fully with these Toonboom rigs I'm making. And many scenes will be done with a combination of rigs and hand drawn. Getting three minutes of full animation done by yourself in your spare time takes awhile. I really want to get this thing finished one day! So this is my compromise. Here's to completing shortfilms!

They call me Yellow Jello

Visual Post Friday!!!

I finished the last background painting from the outdoor dinner party sequence! This past Friday and Saturday I was painting the spectacular yellow fruit jello mold and here it is in all it's tacky glory:

As you can see I painted it beyond the frame edge, that's why there's that green stripe and all the brush strokes beyond that. It's just nice to have a whole jello. Mmm, olives in jello....