So I haven't updated anything in a while, but I'm on my way to loading up a bunch of new stuff on here. I thought I'd start with a two-minute live action short I did for my Video Editing I class. It's entitled VII.

This is a piece I did in response to the recent discussions on Cartoon Brew, Channel Frederator, and other blogs about Cartoon Network going more towards live-action programming. This assignment was for my Digital Arts and Technical Workshop class. The teacher told us we had to design a poster in Adobe Illustrator that conveys an opinion on a particular subject of interest.

I wanted to include certain key elements that are all portrayed throughout the poster: the Cartoon Network logo with the "C" crossed out, a foot squashing Mickey Mouse, Screech from Saved by the Bell as a marionette puppet snapping Bugs Bunny's neck, the Cartoon Network executives in their chairs around a pool of money, and the Adult-Swim-style caption at the bottom saying, "the death of cartoons," because more live-action programming on the network means less cartoons. I see it as the future death of cartoons on the network.

I took source images for the execs and Screech and drew them all out in photoshop. I then took those drawings and copied them into Illustrator and converted them to Live Paint, which gives them that real graphic feel. I used the Live Paint Bucket to color only certain parts in the piece (namely, the cartoon characters where color was applicable, part of the CN logo, and the money, which I made tan so that it was almost greyscale, but not quite. The rest of the drawings I decided to leave black and white, because I wanted the color to only pertain to Mickey and Bugs.

The final print ended up being 11" x 17" and printed on luster paper, which gives it a nice semi-gloss. I then mounted it on foam core with a 1" border (leaving more space at the bottom).

Five Dollar Bills

So as I begin what I hope to be a career in animation, here is one of my first animations. The exercise was for my Animation I class. We had to take a sound clip we made and animate a lip-sync to it. The animation could be any medium we wanted, so I decided to use Flash. My roomate Kevin helped out with the sound. We recorded it on his computer and I edited it on mine simply with Sound Recorder. Then I imported the sound into Flash and came up with a quick, basic worm character and drew him out lip-synching to the sound using frame-by-frame animation. I'm not going further with the joke he's telling: I decided to cut it off at the end of "five dollar bills," because our lip-sync only needed to be about 10 seconds long.

Here's a digital piece I did for CGtalk.com Daily Sketch forum. Took about two and a half hours (Photoshop). The subject matter for the sketch was "Possessed Car," so I went for a darker mood. The truck is supposed to be rolling down a hill and being a possessed car, it rolled over some victim, who's arm is chopped off and dragging along behind.

Cgtalk.com Daily Sketch: "Blue" under time-limit.
Photoshop
57 minutes

Concept Sketch of Intern for Animation I cut-out animation assignment.
Drawn in Photoshop, referenced from earlier concept sketches.




Concept Sketch for Copy Machine for Animation I cut-out animation assignment.
Again drawn in Photoshop; based off earlier concept sketches.

Self-portrait w/ signature
Done in Illustrator.
Summer 2005.

CGtalk.com Sketch of the week: Theme "In the Darkness" under a time limit.
Photoshop
45 minutes

Adobe Photoshop. Picture off http://www.rusactors.ru/wallpapers/duzev/02.jpg. Brushes off deviantart.com. I was just experimenting, not really going for anything in particular.  

"To the bravest soldier, I know and love." - Done with Photoshop; brushes off deviantart.com.