The Final Absolute Last week.

Today marks the day of my first final. My last final is on Friday (which is also the day I move out) and that will be my final class, I'll have graduated! Finally I'll have a degree in 2d Animation character animation. This in no way means I'm done. I'm sure there is a lot more to learn but I will have to find other means and do a lot of my own work. Of course the dream is still to get that job and right after Christmas I plan to go full speed towards that goal.

Why not before then? Well I have tried but my work still needs a lot of improvement. I'm still having trouble finding smaller companies to start out in or smaller companies that are hiring. I need more networking. Of coruse I need more pratice as well. Plus it is the holidays, I should enjoy myself after 3.5 years in college.

Expect a lot of work to be posted soon, maybe even tomorrow. I plan to get back on track in these blogs and update my website. Also does anyone know about tumblr? If it's good for networking I might look into that.

Last I just want to give a thanks to the Acadmey of Art. I loved my classmates, teachers, and the city of San Francisco. I'm going to miss all of it. Chances are I'll come back from time to time, I dont live far. Heck I'd even like to move tot he city if thats where I job takes me. I hope I'll be able to visit the campus from time to time and I certainly hope this will not be the last I see of my classmates. Many of you are so super talented I'l sur eI'll be seeing you in the industry at least. Lets all try to keep in touch.

Happy Holidays

It's not art but I just wanted to show off the cheesy decoration my roommate and I put up. The lights were a pain to keep up, it took 4 different ideas to finally work. They scared us one night when we were sleeping and heard a suddenly thud as they fell. Hope you all have a wonderful holiday. Once Christmas is over I will probably be flooding this place with all my work. I've been very bad about updating because the projects just never seem to stop. I Know there is nothing as merry as two Wii's and a Chocobo.

CTN Wrap up

So CTN was AMAZING, just as fun as I remember it from last year only I got to see a lot more panels and watch a lot more demos. There was a lot of other Academy of Art Students I kept running into and of course my friends. The place was packed and lines were crazy but all worth it.
The panels I saw were things on How to train your dragon, Titmouse, Tangled, and other useful topics. There were many wonderful artists and animators there. Some I remember from last year and some I just met.

Tony Bancroft was back again doing demos and we made sure not to miss them (But I almost did because a panel was running about 30 min late). I'm not sure if he remembered us or not from last year but we got another picture taken with him. I think this will have to be a new tradition for my classmates and I at CTN.
I also got to meet a clean up artist named Kris Heller. She taught me some things about clean up and I have to say I'm very interested in it now. It is suppose to be harder then it looks and I have no doubt it is but at the same time it looked like fun. I'm a bit of a perfectionist so maybe this is something I can look into trying very soon.

I showed off my portfolio to some companies and was given a lot of good advance and some hope. I was told by one company that why were having almost all 2D animators come up to their booth rather than last year being mostly 3D. I might have more challengers but it also means people are very interested in 2D. That industry will never die in my opinion. I got some cards, hopefully made new contacts, and am now overflowing with inspiration to get to animating. Unfortunately I have about 3 weeks left of school and projects will have to come first. I'm pretty bad at networking. I hope I can find all these people with their cards and keep in touch. I'm sure I can learn a lot from their experiences.

This week

I've been doing a lot of drawing and very busy lately. What else is new when you are a college student?
Mostly I have been focusing on animation projects and character designs. Aside from that I'm piecing together things for a revamped portfolio for CTN Animation expo. I'll post some sketches I have been working on and I should be getting a new piece of animation up by this coming week. Then it'll be striaght on the the next piece of animation.




This first piece if the main character and the only one in my quick little animation clip. He dears of not only being a hero but a spaceman. I dont want to give away what will happen but here are some sketches. Ignore the little mouse to the left as I was playing around with other ideas. The animation is mostly done besides adding in his cape. This will still be fairly rough animation.





The next two pieces are some of the best from this weeks character design and drawing for cartoons class. I really like this class but keep getting stuck in the thinking process. For the last few years we have been given a model and told to draw exactly what we see. Now we are being told forget all that, us the pose as reference but create a character. So I need to reteach my brain a bit. Most of the time I just get too wound up in recreating the pose rather then making a character from it.






My favorite so far is the next. The model was sitting there with a toy gun for several poses when suddenly are teacher gave us a character description. an angry squirrel who was getting tired of people shooting at squirrels or something. I thought it was fun and I tend to like drawing squishy chubby things.

It's been awhile but...

Now that school has started I'll hopefully be posting a lot more. Forgive me but this summer was very busy with conventions, planning, work (I had a job that gave me lost of hours, THANK YOU), and a big computer blow out.
With school forcing my hand I finally have a reason to say "sorry guys but I gotta go draw" instead of working on my job. I love my classes so far and both are pushing me out of my comfort zone with I love. I'm surrounding myself with wonderful artist to learn a thing or two from them, and already planning my demo reel and portfolio for CTN Expo which I have a room and ticket for.
I'm currently making a elderly character for my animation class, I've never drawn elderly people! But I think I'm getting the hang of it and have come up with a few designs I like. I'll post up my sketch pages once I've shown them in class.

This Summer

Sorry I have been neglecting my blog but I have actually been very busy. You would think with school being out I would have more time on my hands but actually I have more projects then every.
Currently I am taking an online class which is of course more intense over the summer because I have about 3 classes a week rather then one class a week.
I also have a job that I have been working at lot at. This is good, I need money to keep buying things for projects.
I also have been looking for jobs, building covers letters and resumes, etc, while deciding on things for the future.

With all my free time I also decided to take on personal projects, maybe giving myself too much. If yo didn't know I love conventions so I'm sowing together a little costume. I also decided to get started early on things to sell at my table at the cons. Because I'll be out of school next summer I want to sign up for many more cons to attend.
I'm also getting a jump on school, knowing what I have for next semester. I'm dabbling in Flash a little more to get a head start. Also I have started sketching like crazy to come up with ideas and character designs for my animation class. I cant wait for the Character design class but also hoping it doesn't get canceled, due to it showing up on the school list very late.

End of the Semester Part 1

So now that I've had my short film class I feel I can post my videos on my blog. What a great class! It was a lot of help to learn about time management and what it takes to get a short film done. I will also miss all my friends and classmates.
So here is my short film Little Hunter. It's unfinished but then most of ours were. I will probably pick it up again some day, maybe even this summer but for now I'm going to put it away to try animating other character.

My next animation class is not until the end of the week but I feel like posting this video too. We were told to animate one character we made the entire semester but knowing that I wanted variety in my reel the instructor let me make a new character for the final.

Digital Image Class. Flight Final

So for our final in this class we were told to design a cover for the graphic novel flight. Now of course they arnt really going to be used by a company but I love this idea! In fact this is one of the rare times I cant decide one which composition I like because I think all of them have a kind of charm.
Most of my work in this class thus far as been rather dark and mono tones. Either events that time place at night or underground. I'm deciding to do something completely different and use bright colors and give it that pastel look like the actual covers have.
Here are some of the ideas I've had so far.

Goblins Home

Right after turning in the goblin creature it was time to work on enviorement. I'm not very comfortable with this as it tends to look really cheesy but I'm going to try my best and started working on thumbnails in class. The teacher basically explained to just let your mind go and the hand do the work. Easier said then done. Well I tried and came up with a few good ones, yay! I'm pretty set on these colors, I like them a lot. The problem is there is really no set structure. like I dont know what I want the houses to look like....gonna be a lot of work.

Basically I want it to be in a cave... or cavern, someplace underground. I also want them to live either in the walls of the cavern or in little stick and wood houses. I was thinking of Where the Wild Things Are when thinking of the houses. There isnt going to be a lot of colors besides greens, greys, and orange for the torches.

Goblin noms your ankels

I forgot to post this last week when I finished it but I remembered to post ti on my website. If it isnt one thing it's the other right?
Anyways I'm really happy with the way this little goblin guy turned out. My teacher gave me good advice and it was due today. He mentioned a few more things to do to fix it up even more which I will probably do later but for now I got story boards for an animation piece to work on.

Disney Internship problems

So the deadline for the Disney Summer Internship was today. I worked a long time and all of last night uploading images onto their website. all the pictures uploaded fine. I made sure to put them in the right format and make sure they were not over the file size limit. Then I tried submitting my demo reel and it kept telling me there was an error. I even tried submitting clips instead of the whole piece and it still sad their was an error. The best thing I could do was give them my website.....ugh....I really hope they go look and dont hate me for the poor youtube quality video. It looks so much better in the quicktime file. I just cant figure it out.

San Francisco Cherry Blossom Festival

Yesterday was the festival and a friend and I went to go have some fun. It was a very nice day. Earlier in the week it was said to rain yesterday but there wasnt a cold in the sky upon waking up. I was very happy.
I have both a kimono and a yukata but I let her borrow the yukata so I was pretty hot through the entire festival. Luckily I bought a cheap little fan to help me stay cool. We went into a shop and had someone professionally tie our obis and this looked really nice. The food was delicious and I ran into a lot of people I knew. There were so many temping things to buy but I was trying to be careful with money. the two major things I bought was the obi and the butterfly hair clip. I might go back for another yukata later.
The parade is always nice but most of the good spots were taken, still we managed to see everything. The children are always so cute in the parade, they look like they didn't get what is quite going on. I also liked the women dancing, it was so beautiful and well timed. By far my favorite had to have been the drums. As they passed by I could feel me whole rib cage vibrating with the beat. Your literally pulled into the music. Very good music too. We arrived at around 10am and were having so much fun that we didn't leave until 7ish. It was probably the most crowded I had ever seen Japan Town. I will most likely be coming back for the next years festival as well.

The Past Week

sorry I have not posted at all this week. Lots of big things happened but of course there was school too so I just forgot to write about it.

first thing up to talk about was Wonder Con. I got to have my portfolio looked at and made a few contacts. I also learned more about Linkedin.com which I now have a account for and am trying to gather connections. The panels were pretty good. I got into the Disney/Pixar one a little after it started. So far the movies look like they are going to be very good. I would show you pictures but honestly my camera is not that good. For 3 days I helped out at the Con and it was a lot of fun. I was helping with line control which doesnt sound exciting unless your not afraid to put a lot of energy into it. My roommate and I made it fun by making sure to smile, say "Good Morning", and shout to get the crowds excited to be there. I think it was my favorite job there.

After that is was right back to school and working on the short film. I only have 5 weeks left which basically means I need to pump out about 2 shots a week in order to get it done or fair the class. I really hope I can make it. I wanted to get more done on Friday but the problem was I ran out of paper. So far I only have.... 3 our of 16 shots complete. URGH I'm really feeling the pressure.

I also have a creature to finish for Digital Imaging class. I decided to take on something furry...bad idea. This creature is killing me. I like certain area's of the fur but not the whole thing. Here is a in progress picture. It's due this Tuesday and needs to be printed out on glossy paper. This is my main project for today. I'm going to work on this.

Model sheets for animated short

I got these done awhile ago and just kept forgetting to share them. Meet Hunter and Cat. I have no special names for them. I wil be using them in my short animated piece which I will be (I hope to be) finishing this semester.

Digital Imaging Class

Oh man the people in this class are talented. I kept looking around me in awe. I've never done a piece like this people. Must fo the time my images are very graphic, not those beautiful illistrations you see in comic books, or concept art. Well I guess thats why I'm talking the class but man a lot of students were going at it like pros. Just puts into prespective how much better I need to become and how hard the market is right now with so many other people going for the same jobs.

This is one of those death horses from Harry Potter # 5 I had a really hard time with it. Like I said it was my first time attempting something realistic. I could probably pull something better off on paper but photoshop is a whole different element.

Few days before the First day

So I got two e-mails last night. They both stated that Ed, my favorite teacher was leaving the Academy. I was in shock. I'm still not sure of the reasons bu the director of the animation department is going to be at our class to answer questions. Ed was a fabulous instructor. He was always willing to help, even with things outside of his class. If there was a festival, or protfolio project you need to get in he would give you advice. He helped me put together my pieces for the CTN Expo. It would have been a mess without his inputs. I'll be taking the second half of a class he started for the first time just last semester. It's going to be very odd to not have him a the school anymore. I'm sure a lot of students feel. Where ever he goes I hop things go well for him. Most of all I think I'll miss his demos. They were so much fun to watch, I wish I had asked to have a few more.

So I wonder who my new teachers for those two classes will be.