Thursday, October 28, 2010

Translating to Illustrator

While I was sifting through a few hundred files trying to find a few templates I had lost in the Great Deletion of 2010, I came across some elements that I created for some concept boards last year for work.  While I use Illustrator on a daily basis, outside of some miscellaneous free-hand drawings I don't do a lot of pen tool-based illustration in my own style.  If you're not familiar with Illustrator, the pen tool is essentially a way to manipulate vector curves by hand, and usually looks a little something like this.

fun!
It's not nearly as intuitive as illustrating by hand but you do get a lot of control over each of your lines.  I think its uses are intended more for design and industrial elements, so when it comes to trying to make something look cartoony with the pen tool you usually get something a bit more stiff than loose.  Here's an example of some character work done with the help of Illustrator:


this show is quite good.




Personally I think a lot of this style is like the new animé in the sense that you see it EVERYWHERE and 80% of it looks the same.  With the advent and current widespread use of Flash, a vector-based animation program, this style isn't going away anytime soon -- plus it doesn't take a lot of illustration know-how to design some of the simpler characters.  Like I was saying earlier, I took a stab at it last year and here are three quick Illustrator illustrations:

I don't hate them but they look too clean to me.
Also if you're curious as to what the elements were made for, they were made for a pitch for this J.C. Penney/Van Heusen football promotion.  If you watch closely at the 5-second mark on the video embedded on the site, that was me making my national broadcast debut!  You may also notice that none of the elements I worked on made it into the final product (although I did end up animating the whole thing). 

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Salesman Pete and The Amazing Stone from Outer Space


Salesman Pete from Salesman Pete on Vimeo.


If Saturday morning cartoons started looking like this I'd definitely start watching them again.  Props to the team that put this together... great work on everything (and I do mean everything)!

Thursday, October 21, 2010

... and then there's this.

click to enlarge
I drew these both separately & laid one on top of the other on my desk.  After seeing how they stacked up on each other, I thought I'd try combining them.  Just some random sketchin' but I think this could be something interesting to explore down the road...

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Casualties of Animation: Where'd My Files Go?

Earlier this week I discovered that my personal work drive at the office had been mistakenly wiped by a freelancer.  Everything from the 88-Keys music video to the recent work I've done with Locksley to everything else that I've photoshopped/animated/recorded/etc in past two and a half years was gone in mere seconds .... or was it?

Kind of.

I ran disc recovery software and it recovered quite a bit of information, actually.  People told me I was lucky to get the data back... but I think that's only about half-true at most.  While I did recover about 234 gigabytes of data; what were once neatly organized files, folders and sub-folders are all now proprietarily named and mish-mashed together.

And there are 1.4 million of them.



Anyone want to be my intern for a few months to sort this all out?  Eh?

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Caricature Time!

 This year I've been selected to do portraits of all the employees of Lifelong Friendship Society for our annual holiday card that gets sent out in late November.  While I generally enjoy drawing faces and giving them a twisted sensibility, I've never delved too deeply into the world of caricature art.  It's not that I didn't like it, but I think it had more to do with having to deal with the person you made the drawing for afterwards.  It's like having a kind-of-fun one night stand but then having to go out to breakfast the next morning.  Too much awkwardness for my young tastes.
When I was at Columbia College in Chicago I worked with an ex-professional caricature artist, and watching that dude crank out drawings was ridiculous.  The way he captured which features to exaggerate while still making the person look somewhat human always impressed me.  I even had him do the face of Warrick Carter in all those cartoons I got fired for back in the day.
So here I am today, getting some warm-ups started for the holiday card...

still needs some work...

The original handsome.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Oddisee "Ci'iy Life" Screenshots

I mentioned awhile back (and I mean AWHILE back) that I was working on a music video for one of my favorite producers in hip-hop, Oddisee.  Well, I'm still working on it during my free-time and luckily winter's coming back 'round -- so it'll be perfect for the season!

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I have about 2/3 done... expect the final product "soon"!

Scream Hoppin' 2010

I did this animation exercise a few months back but figured I'd color it up and throw it on the blog.



... but enough with all that.  Lots of new work coming soon!!!

Friday, October 1, 2010

Lost and Foundish: Livestrong

Here's another illustration from my college days.  I think the reason I left this off my website was because I had already posted another grotesquely-obese person riding something on wheels... maybe I didn't want to typecast myself.

click to enlarge

Have a great weekend!