Here comes CTN-X!

I'm marching off to California this weekend for the first Creative Talent Network Expo in Burbank. It hosts some intense talent and amazing opportunities for all skill levels and interests in the animation industry.

What makes me go? I'll be introducing myself to the industry center, I want to find out where I can strengthen my skills and respond to portfolio criticisms and challenges from piers. I'm also going to meet my idols as people not bloggers.

There's a lot to be said about developing specialized skills to make the pipeline as productive as possible. I'm not sure where my skills are pointing me so I'm exploring options at CTN-X too.

Character Design with Chris Oatley

Aloha, this week I had a blast recording a podcast episode with DTS artist Chris Oatley of Chris Oatley's Artcast. If you haven't checked out his show... shame on you, . We talked shop about continuing artistic development, networking strategies for the entertainment industry, and character development technique. I'm constantly learning from the great talents everywhere, here are some things I picked up recently. Feel free to leave your own criticisms and suggestions.

I started developing some sketches for a Sci-Fi concept. Chris took one look and sent me to a great resource The Skillfull Huntsman, the book that takes a Grimm Bros Fairytale through early concept development as if it were a real production. Here's my first sketch (1.25hrs) and some areas that instantly stood out for improvement after picking up the book.

I wanted to try some of the exercises mentioned in the book. Here are a couple of the principles The Skillfull Huntsman put forward:

Compare Apples to Apples-Using the same basic pose and create various designs varing scale, pattern, positive and negative space, etc. Here are a two of mine using one pose.
A good silhouette holds endless possibilities-After I was satisfied with the outline of a character, I try to see the different possibilities within the one form. By imagining a different place, time, gender, technology, etc. I came up with these two drastically different characters, each one has a different story & personality. What character do you see?

Did you know Luke Skywalker started out as a girl in Ralph McQuarrie's drawings and evolved into the character we know today. The initial design process is to mine the creative depths of an concept; establish a strong appropriate silhouette and build from there. Avoid jumping to the details like I did in my first drawing.

Check out these great character designers- Awesome forms. Joe Olson, Nicolas Marlet (Kungfu Panda), and Peter de Seve

More to come as I explore this world and other projects.

Feelin' Peachy - Tutorial

Welcome to my first blog tutorial. I'll cover a little bit of my thoughts and my process for creating an ad I did with an "color editable spattering" technique for a regular client of mine. The technique is great for quickly creating variations for color keys and comps.The challenge was to create a dynamic Welcome to Atlanta Top Ten list, while using the assigned cliche of a Peach.

I'd been fascinated by late nouveau / bauhaus posters and also the Ratatouille posters uber talent Eric Tan-borrow from the best. I wanted to create a technique that would give me the textural style of the prints but have crisp vector edge treatment as well.

After settling on a sketch, I build from basic shapes to make sure the design still communicates properly.

Here are the basic non-type shapes.

A little frisket was made from a vector path that represented the inner color and leaf. Next I created the overlaying textures by spattering BLACK ink with a toothbrush onto illustration board, the frisket masking off the desired area.

A couple spatter variations were made of each shape to let me add color variation later and give me more options to choose from.

I scanned the dried ink and coverted the color mode to GRAYSCALE. (JPG, PNG, or TIFF file fortmats work fine)

In Illustrator I've placed all the pieces and can reassign and manipulate the coloring at will with the color sliders even pantone colors- (evil power hungry laugh).
Here I liked to use multiply( in the transparency window) so the colors to ineract and mix a little.

I wrote/designed the text, modifying the company's font, Geometric 315, to take on the Bauhaus style for the titles. A broad texturew as added in the background. I'm always taking pictures of random textures and scanning odd things to create an endless reference library to work with for both illustration and design.

To add the finishing touches, I used the text paths to masked some additional spatterings. The repeated textures help make sure that the texture and and crisp edged text are unified. Violla! See the completed image at the top of this post.

Please leave feedback, and I'll see what other traditional /digital tutorials I can put together. For some great tutorials on digital painting check out videos by Chris Oatley and Sam Neilson. They are both generous artists and amazing people.

Sketches: Factory and Feast

I couldn't help posting these sketches and offer some sage advice from today. No mind-blowing drawings, but it's part of what I did today.
My mother-in-law took the family to a buffet tonight, where I met the gentleman in the sketch.

He had an entire plate full of steak and then several other plates as well. A "Wide Mouthed Bass" shirt he wore suited him I thought; he made a great character to sketch

Advice #1
Now, I'm not Mr. Universe but I need to say, if this drawing resembles you...Put down the FORK!

The second sketch is a nearby factory I did during lunch. I did it mostly to hone my marks; there is no forgiveness with a pen and line mistakes are obvious in architecture.

Advice #2
If you want to get better, use every minute available to improve- the commute, meal time, after hours, while your file is saving,etc. No one has enough time to do everything, so make the things you do accomplish meaningful- whether that's family, work, talents, or even relaxing.

See ya' soon.

Colored Expressions

What do you do to exercise your lighting muscles? Here's my weak attempt as promised. I am pleased to have flexed a few muscles but feel I could have tried to stretch more in regards to dynamic lighting. I used no reference for the lights.

Please let me know of any skill refining exercises you know of; continual growth, that's what life's all about.

Expression Sketches

I have been up late tonight working on color keys and needed something to relax. SILLY FACES! I like the hyper-extension of the features, but know I need to work on economy. I started to do color variations but started nodding, I'll try to post them before the end of the week.

Personal Project- Rough JUMBO development

Aloha friends-
For those who have wondered what's been cooking in my studio, I'll let you in a couple projects since they're not for any client. I'm posting a couple of animation backgrounds-still very rough- to keep myself motivated and to fish for feedback from my superiors PLEASE.

I'm developing a collection of backgrounds for my entertainment design portfolio with some much appreciated guidance from Lou Romano, and Glen Harmon- Thanks again guys. I hope to have 4 more backgrounds completed shortly.

These are from a story I'm developing based on the famous JUMBO elephant. I have childhood memories of the Jumbo monument in my dad's Canadian home town where Jumbo died. The historical and period research is there and I am getting into the paint.

I'm a only a few hours into these, and hoped that my fellows might steer me away from pending disasters.

I hope the backgrounds reflects the way a circus infuses a slow dusty town with life through color saturation and shape dynamics. I am also designing signage pieces for the story; here is circus paste-up banner where I tried to incorporate the shape of the elephant's trunk in the design. I've also tried to cluster the other circus characters into depending on how they relate to Jumbo-fear vs. fascination, trickery vs. apparent craft, etc.