"Turn up"

Too proud of this model to not show it off right away ;)

I have to admit, I've felt like I've been playing "catch-up" ever since I started at SJSU. All my friends and classmates always seemed miles ahead of me. And by the time I got into my first semester of BFA, I felt it 10x harder. I always believed I had the hunger and the passion, but I'll also admit the work habits needed an overhaul. With just 2 months til graduation, it's been scary to think of where I'll be standing as soon as I step into the real world, and instead of the 100 colleagues (FRIENDS) I'll be going up against for internships, I'll instead be going up against 1,000 people around the world applying for the same job as me, with 100x the skill level.

That all said, I've never let myself give up. I haven't posted much of my work in the last year cause I haven't felt confident enough. But now... I know it's a late bloom, but after barely scathing by the first project of this semester, I turned it around for this one. It's an amazing feeling to have watched this piece go from scrap to something I feel is one of, it not my best, work so far. And even more important, despite the month of late night work I put into it, I had FUN. And I want MORE. Very excited to put something that I believe is portfolio-worthy.

This model was a concept drawing from Jake Parker. Our goal was to model it, and texture it in a "DOTA/Warcraft/etc." style. This means there were no lights being rendered on the model. Hard to explain, but basically all the textures, including highlights and darks and form turns and shadows, were all painted. I wish I could stress how much work that really means, cause you wouldn't really tell from looking at it unless you know the process haha. It was a hell of a challenge, but I tackled with full confidence.

Anyway, here it is!

Mini Dump of Paintings

This one was from a movie called "Never Let Me Go". Not really sure why I had so much trouble with this one, there wasn't very much going on at all in this still. But maybe that's why it was tough. My horizon looks funny and I think I got too caught up on trying to make the boat and guy look perfect. Oh well, practice is practice. 

Second here, I decided to try a "virtual plein air" again. I got to a point in this one where I ended up losing track of time because I actually enjoyed painting this one quite a bit. Definitely feel like it shows too, I like where this ended up and I feel like my eyes are starting to pick colors a little better now. Proud to say that I haven't color-picked at all since I've started doing these paintings this summer.

I don't have a 3rd.. But I have an excuse, I swear. Realizing there's only a few more weeks (more like less than 3) before school, I remembered that I technically never even finished my first and only modeling project of the summer. SO, I started one. I was hoping to do 1 project a week but I just started up with Maya 15 and getting used to the new features and menus took so much more time than I thought it would. We'll see. Won't show any progress here, but here's a look at what I'll be working on for the week:

None other than Sparkster from Rocket Knight Adventures! I spent probably a good hour just searching the internet for a good set of Orthos for any sort of video game or movie character. I only happened to run into this by chance on google looking for Buzz Lightyear (I have no idea how, this guy has nothing to do with Toy Story). He's from one of my favorite Genesis games of all time and it also made me realize that it was not only a Capcom game, but a character by the one and only Udon, pretty much the artist for all that is Street Fighter. Needless to say, I hopped on this image as soon as I spotted it and decided to jump my modeling spree with him. We'll see how it works out!

Speed Still Dump 02

Knocked out 2 paint sessions today. With school coming up fast, I feel like I have so much to catch up on. 2-3 of these per day for the rest of the month is probably not even enough but I should really push for it. Not to mention I've barely even gotten to touch on Maya, blah.

First was a scene from "The Aviator". I spent super long on this, probably 2.5 hours and I couldn't get it to a good "finish". It made me realize how tough smoke and fire effects are. Although my biggest concern with these studies is color and mood rather than getting FX right, I still feel like I missed the mark on this one.

#005, 2.5 Hours, The Aviator

Second one I did today was more successful in my opinion. It was also a little more fun to work on.

#006, 1 Hour, Empire Strikes Back

And just for good measure, I'm throwing in yesterday's paint from Secret Life Of Walter Mitty. This one I think was fairly successful outside of mostly the snow capped mountain tops.Though looking at it now I do notice that it doesn't have as much of a "grand" feel as the movie still. Needs more atmosphere.

#004, 1 Hour, Secret Life Of Walter Mitty

MUST KEEP PAINTING.

A Creepy Something

Almost two weeks without a computer after my laptop went down on me. Shopped around and finally got around to finding a desktop that could suit me for my senior year. After going more than a few days off of painting it felt genuinely hard to get back into the groove. It took a while to find inspiration and find a subject that I had fun painting. I feel like I missed out on two weeks of progress especially since I started off so well doing almost 2 paintings a night, but nonetheless, no excuses.

Needed SOMETHING exciting or fun to get me started again so I initially tried to come up with a character. After not having much success haha, I literally google'd "creepy looking sea creatures" and came up with a few species. Pulled some images I liked and tried to just create something creepy.

Mind you, I'm using my desktop on a monitor that never really worked well with my laptop because the colors on this are way blown up, so what I see right now is probably way different from what you see. I imagine when I post this it'll look way dark, but it might work to its advantage haha. I spent maybe 2-3 hours on this, which is way more than I think I should be capable of. Took some time to regroup all of the other brushes that I had had on my laptop as well too so there was a lot of experimenting.

This isn't even an amazing piece I'm proud of but I'm at least happy with how it looks and it was a fun one to work on. Definitely could go back into this and get some crazy detail. But in the end, hopefully you can look at it and get some kind of creepy feeling from it.

Speed Still Dump 01

So for the past 3 days I've been doing movie stills rather than the "virtual plein airs". Maybe i'll switch back and forth every so often? I dunno, maybe I'll just do whatever. The movie stills are really fun. I've been posting my studies on FB but I suppose I should be posting them here. Here's my last two plus my latest one today:

#001, 1.25 hours, "Django Unchained"

#002, 1 hour, "Stay"

#003, 1.25 hours, "The New World"

I like this one a lot! I'm proud to say that for this series I completely avoided color picking and I think I was doing fairly well and even much better on this last one. I'm squinting a lot more and trying to just pick out the big shapes and go for the "feel", not the details.

More to come soon!

Paint Study Dump 01

My first dump of painting studies I'm doing this summer. I'm not trying to give myself too many guidelines, but I mainly want to work on my color and lighting. Most of these will probably suck, some will be okay, and I might have a gem or two. Doesn't matter, I'll post it just so I can see my progress.
#01 -- 06/10, ~2 Hours.This one wasn't all that bad actually. I'm happy with the feel, but my light values were definitely lacking.

#02 -- 06/10, ~1.5 Hours

Felt good coming off the first one and felt confident enough to do another one later that night. I think this one was better, and looking from the thumbnail I think I hit a lot of points pretty well. I can see what major difference it makes to have strong contrast in darks and lights.

#03 -- 06/11, ~1 Hour
Not sure why, but I wasn't really feeling this one while working on it, and I'm sure it shows. That being said, I was interested to see what I could do with half the time I worked on during the last two. One hour is crazy fast, and I was trying to train my brain to stop working details and think bigger picture. Color choices I didn't very much like, but on the bright side it looks like a good "underpainting" that I'd be able to continue working on. But I won't, at least for this one haha.

Spring 2013 is a wrap!

Interesting semester to say the least.

Finally got my hands dirty on some Maya 3D modeling, and as I expected it's definitely something I love/loved getting my hands in. Glad to realize that it might be my "back-pocket" go-to as far as finding a position in the industry in the future. My flare gun didn't come out quite as great as I had hoped, but still happy to say it was one of the more polished ones from the class.

Taking the beginning animation class was a tough course. Learned a lot more than I could have asked for and got as much of a push for pushing my artistic boundaries as I've gotten from the rest of the classes I've taken thus far. Still don't think it's something I would pursue too far in the future, but I realize that I need to put my head down and learn anything I can. At least good to  know that I had a fairly decent handle on the basics of animation, besides not pushing key poses as much as I should be. So much more appreciation for 2D animators for sure though.

Here's a few select shots of my Flare Gun. I was really happy with the hard modeling, would've used a few more polygons if I could have, but we were working for a low poly model. A higher poly model would've probably crashed my laptop though, haha. The painting was alright.. It didn't pop up as much as I had hoped when it got put on the model, but at least some of the scratches came out decent looking. The shot with the background makes it look a lot more decent though.

This was the walk animation we did before our final, the Personality Walk. Obviously did a moonwalk, lol. Came out pretty good! I liked the results, just wish I had the drive to have actually had him go off screen. Would've been a lot more frames but I got burnt out.

And finally, here's my sack pantomime. Shoudn't have to explain the story because otherwise, if you as the viewer can't figure it out yourself, then I did something wrong. It was tough!! So many damn frames, so many damn drawings. Last part of the semester killed me though, and I had no more energy to spare even on sprucing up the backgrounds.

Pretty sure I say this every year, but overall, I think I could've done more. It's remarkably hard to stay "hungry" 24/7 as an artist, and blocks always come at the most opportune times. The biggest thing I'm gonna work on this summer is repetition and fundamentals. The basics are always so important and I always catch myself straying from them. This summer is gonna be filled with digital painting and some 3D modeling on the side, and I'm excited to finally be able to work on some of my personal stuff.

I'll be posting over the summer for sure!