Post College Graduation

You may or may not have noticed the long absence of blog updates. In fact, today literally marks the one year anniversary since my last post. Which, to be honest, is a complete coincidence and was in no way planned. I actually meant to get back to posting much sooner, but things didn't really work out that way.

So what happened? Where have I been for the last year?

Well to put it simply, I graduated college and got a job.

But it's a little more complicated than that. I had to move (three times). Get situated as an independent adult in a different state. Find new doctors. And a whole slew of things related to relocating alone. Not to mention being on Crunch for a project the last 2 to 3 months.

On top of all that, since I am no longer a student and am instead working full time, the majority of the work I do now is under NDA. And while I'm still creating new art, a good portion of it falls into that category which means I'm not at liberty to share it here.

So not only have things been extremely hectic, but I also haven't had as much to post about.

The good news is, things are finally settling down. My job is fantastic. I've been learning so much every day. And I recently got to play a pretty major role as the environment artist for a game we recently wrapped up(sorry, I can't say much more than that), which was an unbelievable opportunity.

And that about sums it up in terms of my year long absence. Of course before I go, I've got a few new images to share.

The first thing I did over the summer after graduating was a small some what experimental canvas painting. I had had this image in my head for a while of a painting I wanted to make that also incorporated actual buttons sewn onto the canvas. I initially wanted it to be more abstract in nature, but ended up so focused on painting her skin that she turned out fairly more realistically styled than I intended. Each button was hand sewn onto the canvas, which was a huge chore and caused me to burn out on the painting before I got everything I wanted done. But I'm still pretty happy with it, considering it was more of an experiment than anything else. I might come back and work on it again in the future, but for now it's done.

This was a quick 1 maybe 2 hour mix media piece I did because I just felt like it.  It's fairly large, 18"x 24." If I remember correctly there's some charcoal, china marker, and white paint. Maybe a some type of wax crayon as well, I'm not too sure. I was using a bunch of the random art supplies I had left over from school. 

I improved my digital painting quite a bit, much of which is thanks to owning a cintiq. The thing about this piece is you can literally scroll down to my second to last post to see where it was when I picked it back up. I only spent 4-5 more hours on it and managed to get it to this point.  It's still not done but I'm loving all of it except for her face, which needs some work.

I've been happy with my improvement with digital painting, but since I still want to get even better I decided it would be beneficial to do a traditional still life from observation. I didn't want to go all out though, so I decided to keep it simple and to just do a small clove of garlic. It took me 2 and a half hours exactly and I couldn't be happier with it. The small peel on the left is my favorite part because I really feel like you can really see it's translucense, which has been something I've struggled with rendering appropriately in the past.  The only downside was that by the time I was done my entire bedroom smelled like garlic!

And that's it. Well not all of it, but by far the best picks out of everything I've done outside of work over the last year.

I'm hoping that I'll have enough new work that I will be able to do another post next month or maybe sooner. Weekly posts are unfortunately going to have to be a thing of the past as I simply just don't have enough work that I can share.

Artificial Light

It's been a while since my last post, so I thought I should go ahead and share some new stuff.

This quarter I'm taking a lighting class along with my thesis, and while I don't really feel like my first assignment is worth sharing, I'm really happy with the latest one so I wanted to post it.

I had much bigger plans for it, but for the time being I'm having to put them off until I'm done with my thesis. I wanted to have some weeds growing near the fence and put some big rocks in the ground that kind of lead towards the shed. I also want to eventually sculpt the ground a little bit so it's not just a completely flat plane.

But considering the amount of time I had to work on this, I'm really happy with how it looks despite not having everything I wanted. I think the lighting turned out really well, and I'm happy with pretty much all of the textures except for the ground. This is definitely  a project I will be coming back to to fix up for my portfolio.

Aside from my lighting assignment, the rest of what I have are just quick drawings I've done to help myself relax and take away some of the stress from thesis.  Most of them where done in under and hour, usually 30 minutes.

Dreaming is definitely my favorite part of sleep.

The More I look at this one the more I dislike it. There are a couple of strokes I wish I hadn't put in, but it's okay.

 I don't title my work often, but I've been calling the drawing above, "Fear."

Can you tell I was stressed/frustrated when I did this one? Pretty much all of that went away once I was done drawing it. It's really great to be able to just get rid of all that negative energy by doing a quick drawing.

This was actually one of my favorite drawings from high school that I decided to color. It's funny how easily I can recall the original image I had in my mind even though it's been 4-5 years. She actually has a feathered tail in the original drawing, but I didn't have enough time to color it and it looked weird leaving the pencil in so I took it out for now.

I've always wanted to do a large scale painting of this, I'd still like to some day. I think the anatomy might need a bit of adjusting first though.

Smorgasbord!

~Please be aware that this blog post includes some drawings that display artistic nudity. The last section of the post includes drawings from a Life Drawing Class.~

Update time! Finally! I know it's been such a long time since my last update. I was actually hoping to have this done before Christmas, but I got very sick the week just before vacation and was out of commission for about 10 days.
The good news is, because it's been so long, the number of drawing and random doodles that I have to share has really piled up so prepare for lots of new pictures!

I'm going to start with the best, a disney-ish illustration that I've almost finished. The style is very, very different for me, but I think that's part of what made it fun. It really started as an exploratory sketch that turned into a sort of self-challenge to see if I could actually pull it off. It's one thing to do this as a line drawing, but I don't have a lot of experience when it comes to actually coloring my drawings-which is why I've been trying to practice it.

 Overall I'm considering it a huge success, although I would like to adjust how the blanket is being held up because it doesn't really make sense for how she is gripping it. I'll probably put this one in my portfolio, since a lot of companies like to see that you can draw and in multiple styles. Like I've said it's so different from my usual style, so I think it will really stand out as a good representation of how versatile I can be.

And now for something completely different...
I've been taking a glass class this quarter, and these were my first attempts at sculptural beads (sorry for the less than great photo, I was in a hurry to take it before I left for vacation).

 I'm very proud of them. They aren't master pieces, but for my first try I think they turned out pretty good. From Left to right: Navi from Legend of Zelda, a Guinea Pig, some angry birds, a fish, and some yoshi eggs.

I have a lot of doodles and quick drawings that have accumulated over the past several weeks.  All of these were done for the sake of doing art and just taking some time to relax from all my crazy thesis work.

 The other day I felt like I really needed to just set my mind free. The image of some one with wings on their head is definitely lacking originality on my part, but for a quick drawing I really love the way the wings came out. Plus, when something's for fun, who cares if it's original? I had a lot of fun with this drawing and that's what matters.

 Not much to say about this one other than that the first thing I did was scribble on the page and then decided the scribble looked like and eye- which led to me creating the rest of the picture.

 I did this in about 5 minutes, but I absolutely love it. I kind of wish it was an actual water color and not a digital piece.

Again not much to say. I like it, I wish the perspective on the elbow coming forward had turned out right. I managed to do an okay job of faking it, but it stands out enough to bother me every time I look at it.

This one was supposed to be in my last post, but I couldn't find the file at the time.

Again, just trying something different for the sake of it. I really like this style and I want to keep playing around with it when I get some more time.

Alright, all that's left are the photos I took of some of my drawings from the Life Drawing class I took last semester.

Marker and Conte Crayon. I loved trying out different materials, and more specifically mixing different ones together. The photo/computer doesn't give a good sense of it, but I really loved the texture I got from putting the white conte crayon over the marker.

I found I enjoy drawing muscular people best, for some reason I have a much easier time re-interpreting what I see on to paper when they are. However, I really think this one turned out nice, even though I had a hard time getting the right shapes at first.

I need to re-photograph this one. This is one of my favorites because unlike most of my drawings I actually kept my pencil strokes nice and neat and it turned really great because of that.

In my defense, the reason I end up getting messy is because I have tendonitus in my hand/wrist/elbow/shoulder, and it's usually hard for me to control the pencil for small/fine details. I found that accepting the messiness and learning how to use it to my advantage tends to work better than trying to fight it.

I have the same feelings about this one. It needs to be rephotographed and I love the pencil strokes I used to shade it. I did my best to clean it up well enough to share now since I have no idea when I'll get around to photographing it again.

Whew, that was a really long update! I'm done for now, and hopefully it won't be so long before I'm back for the next post. As always, please feel free to leave feedback, ask questions, or anything else along those lines.

I'd Like A Sanity Check, Please

It's been a while since my last post. Part of that is because I've been busy with my thesis (which if I have been updating the blog for weekly, so that's a good place to check if I don't post here) and part of that is because I've been so busy with work and school that I don't really have any other stuff to show.

My Self Portrait sculpt hasn't been updated enough to really show. My teacher told me I was the only one who was re-topologized and ready on time and because of that he gave the rest of the class an extra week to catch up. He then asked me to go over UVs in our next class, so I then got further ahead by also doing my UVs a week ahead of the rest of the class so I'd have something to show while going over my process.

I have two things I'm really excited to show, because they are more or less complete (or as complete as some one with not very much time can make things.

 

I'm the most excited about this piece because I literally just finished it about an hour ago. I basically had the phrase "Sanity Check" in my head as I drew it. I didn't have much of a plan for it, but it was one of those drawings that just kinda flowed onto the page without me really knowing why. If I could do anyhing different I'd definitely redo her torso and limbs. They work well enough, but the body language isn't quite right for the attitude she should have. I'm very pleased with her face and all the crazyness popping out of her head, I don't think I'd change it very much.

This is the first pen drawing I have done in several years. I just kind of sat down and decided I felt like drawing something decent. I spent about an hour and a half on it, just kind of made it up as I went. The proportions aren't right, but I think I'm ok with it considering I didn't really rough anything of it out before hand.

Those are the two main things I wanted to share, however, I did recently discover a drawing I thought I had lost that I'm going to hopefully work on some more and finish. 

I was really upset when I couldn't figure out where the file for this went. Turns out I saved to the default documents folder(not very useful when on a public computer) instead of switching to the desktop like I usually do. She's your typical goth punk girl, doing what else but voodoo, like all good little goth girls do. I really like the style I had going and I'm eager to see how it turns out. Hopefully I can keep it cohesive enough that I don't decide I hate it in the end.

I don't have much else other than that, so until next time!

Life Size

It's officially mid terms which means of course that the quarter is in full swing for me. I've been running around between all my different projects and my two jobs so things for the blog are naturally off schedule. I'd like to say that I can get back to weekly posts, but I don't foresee that being realistic any time soon. Nonetheless, I will be doing my best to update as often as possible.

I had a rather exciting last two-weeks art wise. I got to do my first ever life-sized figure drawing which was also live (meaning in person from a model), which was the most fun I have had drawing in a long time. 

I knew I wouldn't have enough time to shade the whole thing supper neatly and perfectly so I decided to just have fun with the materials instead. I end up doing a ton of smearing with my hands just whenever I felt like it. I then kept some of my shading untouched so that the strokes were still clearly visible and in the end it came out with a cool mixture of both.

 I am over all extremely happy with it, except I think the shoulder area and back of her kneck is not quite right. Unfortunately, that's because my view changed a little bit after the model too her first break and that was the one area I hadn't clearly mapped out in the first 30 minutes. There are a few other minor issues, but I am still extremely happy with it. It's also really cool to have a drawing that's literally as tall as I am.

 I've been working on creating a self portrait in 3D for my Modeling Strategies Class, and I've been having a lot of fun.

On the Left is the photo I took of myself. Since I'm not doing details just yet I decided to go ahead and mirror my face and work from it like that. Once I get closer to the end I can switch to working asymetrically, since no one's face it's perfectly symetrical. 

I think my profile view isn't as strong in terms of the accuracy of the model, but this has only been the first week so there is plenty of time to make adjustments. I'll be spending a lot of time fixing the nose which is almost entirely wrong in terms of shape. And I need to work on getting my cheek's bone structure right, it's a little more fleshy (for lack of a better word) than how I have it on the model at the moment.  I haven't touched the eyes at all so they are off in both the front and side views. 

I also started a new digital painting that will mostly likely end up on my never ending pile of unfinished work. In terms of time and access to the right tablets, it usually just isn't realistic for me to even be starting these, but it is something I really do want to get better at. The only way to get better is to practice, so I try and fit it in when I can.

NA big difference here though is that unlike most of my other digital drawings I started this one from a sketch I did in pencil. I'm much more comfortable and better at drawing characters from scratch in pencil. I have improved at it on the tablet, but I think it'll be a long time before I can surpass anything I can do on paper just because I have so many more years of experience with paper. It's turning out pretty well, I think her waist/hips might be a bit small for her upper body, but that's easily adjustable. I like how the fans turned out, although I'm not too sure about how convincing their angles are. We'll have to wait and see how this one turns out.

The rest of what I have this week are mostly just doodles.

I've been getting back to drawing in pencil, I think drawings done on paper always have so much more life to them than ones done digitally- at least in the case of my own work. He's unfinished as I'm still trying to visualize what he's wearing. I pretty much had the idea of the wolf hat (unoriginal, i know) and drew him because I wanted to draw that, but now I don't know what to do with the rest.

This is a Drawing I did of my friend Ben really quick. I like it because it looks exactly like him. 

And finally, whatever this thing is. Don't ask because I really don't know.

Catching Up To Summer

Now that I'm back and ready to roll, I thought it would be nice to take a moment and post all the stuff I did over the summer. Although I was mostly busy, I did find time to fit in some artsy things every here and there.

But first, I should also mention that I did hear back about the Girl Gamers In Real Life Scholarship

Competition, unfortunately, I did not win. But that's okay, I had a lot of fun participating and the overall experience was worth it. I'm still excited to have made it to being a semi-finalist, even if I didn't win. 

Something I spent quite a bit of time on this summer was preparing for my senior thesis. I did a lot of conceptual work, mostly with quick models in Maya. 

But before I get to what I did for it over the summer, I want to mention that I am keeping a separate blog of my progress which I will be updating each week. I added a tab at the top of the page that will give easy access to anyone who's interested in following it.

That being said, I expect to be very busy with my thesis this school year, so if there's ever a week that I can't update this blog, you can check my thesis one and still see what I've been up to. I'm working two jobs on the side of school this year as well, so there's a good chance I may have to change from my weekly posts to something less frequent.

Anyways, back to the art!

As I mentioned earlier, I did a lot of conceptual modeling for my thesis, but even before that I did some experimenting in Zbrush to help me decided whether or not I wanted to go for project focused on characters or on environments.

This summer was the first time I ever got to use Zbrush, so of course I started off with some online tutorials and just playing around. My goal was to learn the basic tools and just get a feel for the program overall. So I ended up making a face from a simple sphere shape as I watched the tutorials on the different tools and tested them out.

I only had enough time to try it out for an hour when I did this, but for my first try I was pretty happy with the face I managed to sculpt into the sphere.

I felt comfortable enough to the program to decided to sculpt off of a base mesh, so I spent an hour of free time every couple of days making a bust for me to sculpt off of.

But by the time I finished and found time to work again I had decided to go with environments for my thesis and abandoned the bust for another time.

 When it comes to characters I prefer to draw rather than model in regards to conceptualizing, but I found that since I have less experience drawing architecture it was much easier and faster to model the concepts than it was to draw them. 

This was my first scene that I created in roughly 8 hours to help me visually create a style that was cohesive.
A good example of this is how I changed the bridge in the top image to the one on the bottom because I realized the first one felt too big and bulky and just didn't fit in with the rest of the scene. I was planning on remaking this scene for my thesis with better models (these were mostly just blocks that I quickly adjusted to get the look I wanted, so model-wise they are not something I would actually want to re-use), but then I realized the number of models and textures I would have to produce would just be far too much for me to actually finish in time. So instead I'm using this has a sort of style guide/inspiration for a smaller scene with the same idea. All of which you can read more about here.

After spending about two months working on my thesis whenever I had time, I decided one night to do something different and picked up that bust I had made earlier. I brought it into Zbrush and just started playing around. I didn't really have an end vision or goal, I just wanted to see what I could come up with.

I ended up making her into some sort of alien species. Again, there was no real goal other than to just have fun, and I think I spent maybe 2 hours on it.

The rest of the stuff I did consisted mainly of sketches, so there's not much to talk about. I just did them for fun.

I have another one somewhere that I'll have to find and post. I know I scanned it, but I'm not sure where I saved it to on my computer.

Outer Space, Doors, and Ice Cream

Woot! I'm done with finals! Which means I have a ton of stuff to share! Seriously, I have so much to show it's not even funny.

First of all I finished the textures on my character.

I still don't like a lot of things about it, but at this point the issues I have have more to do with the model than with the textures. I am extremely happy that I managed to do the entire thing with procedural textures (with the exception of the patterns on the belt which I drew by hand in photoshop). I think that the wrinkles in the white shirt turned out extremely well for being a procedural bump map.

So remember way back in December when I said I was going to be assisting some seniors on their thesis projects? Probably not because I haven't mentioned it since (click here to see my post, "Working Toghter"), but I'm actually done with that as well now.

I was working with Skybase on his film The Door to Tomorrow to make some of the settings for his scenes. I modeled a very simple Hospital room and hallway which he then rendered and painted over before adding the animations.

I've got some renders as well as the painted over versions that Skybase was generous enough to allow me to share. I did the models but he did all the rendering and painting.

Please note that the renders are purposefully noisy because of the process he was using to paint over them worked better when there was more noise.

 He presented the finished film last night and it was absolutely beautiful and I am so honored to have been able to have been a part of the project. As far as I am aware the full video isn't currently available online, but he has several trailers which you can find here on his Vimeo. I highly recomend paying it a visit as the stuff he's been doing really is amazing.

I also worked with my friend Kyle West on his senior thesis. He created an asset package with a character and vehicle. He developed this really cool idea of an ice cream man with a special customized ice cream truck. My job was to make the logo for the ice cream company, which he had a pretty specific vision for so it was more just making that idea a reality in illustrator.

He really wanted the logo to be simple and straight forward so the overall concept was always pretty set. He knew he wanted an ice cream cone, for obvious reasons, and that he wanted the company name to be on a banner. So the things I played around with was the style of the cone and ice cream as well as different shapes and placements for the banner.

We came up with the idea of the bow tie because the character wears one as part of his work uniform so we thought it would be a kind of cool way to add a little branding to the company. I think we definitely made the right choice in the end. I wasn't a huge fan of the soft serve cones I was comming up with.

Another thing I did was make the eyes, teeth, and eyelashes for his character.

I know it's a pretty creepy render. He looks like he's wearing a ski mask, haha, but I didn't want to post up Kyle's face model, so I just used the parts I used to match things to. The eye lashes I modeled one lash and then animated along a curve and had it generate copies as it animated.

And one last thing I have is yet another digital painting I've started, hoever I'm going to be finishing this one. I'm doing it for a scholarship so I'm hoping I can finish it up well enough to have a shot at getting some financial aide for college. I've only put four and a half hours into it so far so it's not done, but I'm extremely happy with how well it's going considering I'm not extremely experienced in digital painting.