Now that my collegiate career is finally over, I'm taking advantage of the down time to work on sketchbook paintings and such. My gawd, do I need practice. It's jarring just how stunted my traditional skills are since I've been focusing on digital skill development; but at the same time, it's good to get back in the swing of things.

Went with Tony, Derek, Charlene, Jamie and a few others down to San Juan Bautista to chill and paint. Here are a couple of the images that came out... decent.

I have a habit of acquiring numerous sketchbooks before I fill up the current ones that I already have. As a result, I have a lot of started-sketchbooks, but few finished-sketchbooks. One of the books I dug out to use for drawing/painting down in San Juan Bautista happened to be a sketchbook I started using for Barron Storey's 'Conceptual Illustration' class. Heh. I found one of the early collage assignments we did in his class...

Anywhoo, that's all for now. Will be posting a lot more frequently now that I have the time. Stay tuned!!!

Wow... wouldja look at that... TWO entries within five days of eachother. Unheard of. HAHA. Heh, I was offered a freelance job for an independent band in New York. Basically the album was a parody off of the Transformers and I was asked to design a CD cover with the Autobots done in chibi-anime form.

It's definitely not an art form I'm accustomed to doing, but it was fun to branch out into a different style and tinker around with it. I had a little bit of trouble trying to make the characters still feel like the Autobots while at the same time stay within the cartoony, simplistic style of chibi-anime. I had to remind myself it's all about simplification. Heh... after one or two characters, I started to have a lot of fun with it.

Anyway, here's a montage of the characters I was asked to draw. I was also given the opportunity to design a series of chibi-formers similar to the Constructicons, but for this project, they would be called the Acousticons and would have been made from various instruments. Heh... Unfortunately, they're not in this lineup.

Guess the Transformer and win a quarter! Hey... that rhymes! :-P

It's roughly a quarter past 4AM on a Saturday morning and I think it's safe to say that I've lost any productivity momentum for the evening. But before I journey back to my habitat, I thought that I should update the bloggie. My photoshop sketches/paintings for my Hermit story concept are progressing nicely, albeit slowly.

In addition to those pieces, I've also been putting in a considerable amount of time in turning my Veldt illustrations from last semester into a 3D environment in Maya. Jules had the idea of letting me do one of my own vizdev pieces for my Maya environment final rather than an image I picked from a magazine. Right away, I thought of the images I did for The Veldt by Ray Bradbury.

Anyway... here's the original sketch and what came out of it in 3D land...

As always, comments and suggestions by my artistic peers are welcome. As well as the random philosophical musings that are inherent to our late nights in the dungeons of our labs and studios.

So... tell me... How are you?

I have a moment to breathe... I know, shocking! So before the moment runs out, I shall update the bloggie.

Continuing progress on the "Hermit of the Abbey" concept, I've torn down my original matte painting of his quaint waterfall cottage.

This was the original matte painting I did. Actually, now that I think about it, this is my first matte painting ever. Over the past several months, I've been growing increasingly curious as to the process of digital matte painting and photo-compositing. Over the past spring break, I decided to give it a try based on a few tutorials and matte painting forums I found online. This was the end product.

I guess my initial mistake was just throwing photo elements over my original drawing without fixing a lot of the perspective issues that I had. When I drew the image, I was trying to give it a fish-eye effect, however I failed to convey that with a wonky perspective on the house on the ledge. With such a dynamic upward angle, for example, I shouldnt be seeing that much of the rooftop. But live and learn, yes? This piece went through a series of harsh crits and was only received on a mediocre level at best. Gia was the harshest of my crits, but probably one of the more motivating in terms of starting over.

Taking everyone's critiques into consideration, I went ahead first setting up my scene in Maya and then doing a basic block-in of values in Photoshop. As it progressed I moved into the color painting layers and later started compositing photo elements into the piece. Here is my basic process and the piece thus far:

As far as the progress on this matte painting goes, there are some things that I need to immediately address... the shape of the cliff on the left and the waterfall are too similar in size and shape, horizontal, and too much like the original Maya geometry. I need to go in and break those shapes up but not too much where the shapes compete for focus. Brother Paul made suggestions about the left cliff-face and Brother Don gave me some pointers to break up the waterfall and make it more 'beautiful'... I just hope I don't mess it up. Heh. I was quite surprised and please with myself with how well the waterfall came out.

Anyway... any additional comments, suggestions, philosophical musings? Feel free to comment, everyone. :-D