Pencil Tests II

Here's my favorite one, so far. It's a cannonball test animation; the assignment was to convey the feeling of a cannonball coming toward you and landing in front of you. I want to finesse my camera shake and dust cloud eventually, but it was a pretty good first pass.

Pencil Tests I

I thought I'd go ahead and post my pencil tests that I'm doing for my animation class. This first one is a balloon floating across the sky. The assignment was to make it feel like a balloon through movement, but the shape had to be just a plain circle (no tied end or string). I'm not super pleased with it, but my instructor thought it was pretty good.

Christmas Project

I haven't posted in a while because I have been wrapped up working on Christmas projects. I'll post some of them on my blog as I get them reformatted for the web.

The first one is an action figure I did for my brother. The initial sketch was fairly detailed, but due to constraints of the material and time I was forced to simplify.

Big Nose

Today I decided to put everything else on hold for a few minutes so I could just draw with my daughter. This is what we drew. My daughter was more impressed with the pencil sharpener than with the drawing, though.

Detach

This week's topic for Illustration Friday is "Detach," which seems kind of nebulous to me. Even though I usually try to do a new piece for the topic, I felt that this worked well for how I pictured "detach." Camping, hiking, and especially skiing are my ways of detaching from whatever might be bugging me at the time. This piece was a 5-10 min oil study that I just love. Sometimes you don't mean to make anything special and it turns out well.

Sail

"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale..."
So, I tried to push myself and see how fast I could pump out an illustration for this one. So I spent from last Friday till now trying to come up with an idea and then about 20 minutes drawing this and coloring it. I am not super happy with the color job, but better to have it done, I guess. I think the idea is still good, though. Maybe this will become one of those ideas that I revisit later when I am more patient and focused.

Poof!

This week's Illustration Friday topic is "Poof!" This hits especially close to home for me, since I experience "poof" on a daily basis. This is my morning routine.

Sketchbook

I just scanned in a bunch of stuff from my sketchbook. I thought I'd post one of the pages here and if you want to see the rest you can go hit up my gallery.

Old Wrinkled Man

For some reason I love drawing old wrinkly men; they have such personality to them. The big noses, the sagging jowels, the huge domed craniums, and the drooping earlobes. There is such experience, wisdom, and years and years of hard work behind leathered sun-beaten faces like that. This one I did as a doodle on some scrap paper but decided to ink with a brush and throw some washes of color on it. It almost gave it a Chinese look.

Horse Boy

My daughter and I just finished reading "The Horse and His Boy" by C. S. Lewis. I don't know any other 18 month old that asks for C. S. Lewis over Dr. Seuss for a bedtime story.

It was fun to read it again and it made me want to do an illustration for it. I think the colors are overly saturated, but if I keep noodling on it anymore I might go crazy.