Mass Update Arriving Soon...

This semester has been buusssyyyy. @___@ Between working, a portfolio review for my program, and learning to properly paint has left me so much more exhausted than I could have ever imagined. The teacher was tough and gave us a lot of work, but I feel like as if I have learned so much this semester!

Now with the simple life stuff out of the way... I'm going to start with uploading the first pages of the sketchbook that everyone who passed the portfolio reviews are required to do. In due time I will look through everything I've been doing throughout the semester and picking out some more stuff to share. Enjoy~

It's actually a toy car which is why the paper in the background is at a funky angle. I think I ought to make the toy part more obvious later because otherwise this sketch looks likes a wonkily parked car. XD I've made it a goal to myself to improve on hard-surfaced objects like cars and such which have long been a glaring weakness of mine.

I need to slowly drill all the perspective stuff I learned from two years ago back into my systems. Hehe... Sad news for me today is that the pen I used to highlight with EXPLODED while I used it. O_o; But, I guess it's best not to get precious with sketches, right? Let it be and let go, I suppose.

I quite enjoyed the top sketch a lot more than I thought I would. My classmate and I were doing something really silly where I drew the main stuff and he suddenly wanted to experiment on my pen sketch by wiping his watercolors on it. The results were interesting and I admit that I've learned some really cool tricks that I want to use again from this weird experiment. For example, the wet pen ink ended up drying with a watercolor-esque effect. I was very pleased to say the least. : >

Just when I thought I would be excited to not touch acrylic again for a while, I decide to be a masochist and do more paintings. And with glass of all things. XD I've never painted glass before so I will admit that this was very, very tricky for me - especially the blue egg because I kept not being able to figure out how to mix that color out... I still didn't quite catch it, but I hope to go back sometime and figure it out. I also wish I did a more detailed sketch before attacking the ellipses like I did. They're quite... lopsided - but I guess spontaneous painting without a detailed sketch would do that.

Figure drawing dummppp~ : > This is a small selection of some figure drawings I did on the first day of actual class. The first "official" day of class was cancelled because the teacher I was supposed to have who was also my figure drawing 1 teacher from last semester had to take the semester due to nerve damage. ;___ ;

My teacher this semester is Ruben Perez who is currently an art director at Dreamworks. This will hopefully be exciting.

This is something I doodled in about forty minutes to an hour (???) while I was staying in a hotel at night. I didn't want to be obnoxious and turn on the lights in the hotel room while everyone else was sleeping, so I was just doodling junk for a while. I suddenly noticed after an hour of doodling about that I was positioned in the line of sight from a big mirror. Peering upon my reflection and noticing my laptop light put lighting to my face, I decided to do that before bed so that I can feel like I did something productive before sleeping.

I was sleeping on the floor by the window, hence the curtains behind me. the dark shape lump on the right is one of the beds I was sleeping behind.

I am still a bit mad at the colors now that I seem them on my desktop because I painted it on my laptop with the holy unreliable screen color/saturation/contrast/etc... and now the blues I put in look too saturated to me while they looked washed out like I intended on my laptop screen. =__= I was too lazy to retouch it, so everyone's just going to have to bear with this being it.

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I was at AOD in Burlingame over the weekend (reason why I was in a hotel room this weekend). Along with that, just a day before heading off to con was my first day of class this semester. O: So, basically... I've been busy with assortment of random things all week. :B I'll hopefully be able to just hit  a groove of just concentrating on all my studies and schoolwork eventually. I have no cons to attend to until March, so the prospects of me just hitting into a groove of some sort looks good... Provided I don't screw myself over with my inability to organize and schedule. ;___; Oh, the ways I sabotage my own life...

I was about to sleep when I suddenly had the urge to try doing helmet designs again. I'm still not all the way fond of my helmet designing skills, but I feel like I somehow hit a breakthrough. D: I think it was me slowly realizing how stuff connected in 3D space. One of those things I wish I was better at catching onto. >_O Agghhh... Oh, well - one step at a time. The bottom are the pencil sketches that I did before the grey blob-attempt version of it above.

Random digital doodle of the day. The colors are totally wonked out 'cause I decided to play with all the filters. >__> They're just layered funkily.

The rest are some traditional medium stuff I've been messing around with:

The top one is seriously strange, especially the face values and shapes are funky and I obviously had a bad reaction and tried "fixing" it by drawing over it with pen ink... making it worse, actually. >__> I tried doing something weird with my paint and values this time so it all went to mud. Better luck next time? P :

The 2nd drawing is something I did while I was at FurCon, it was a commission for someone who wanted me to draw their fursona on top of a nqx green blade model helicopter. I did a few other commissions, however, this was one I particularly liked and I forgot to ask for the copy of the other one I liked from my friend. >__< Oops... I'll get it another time, though since he's my classmate.

While working on the commission at FurCon, I realized that I have a habit of basically putting speed lines and random, abstract shapes whenever I get nervous about the background. =__ = I feel like it's a problem because I'm using it like a crutch instead of something stylistic. You can see the same problem in the human doodle below. D: Abstract lines because I messed up somewhere and want everyone to not notice the mess-up area.

The third one is a doodle I did to make a fake ad for myself for the next con I'm going to. I covered up the words because I don't like looking at my advertisementing... go figure. =__=

While I was doing the traditional media, I had this brain pop sort of a moment where I realize more and more that I think I enjoy working in traditional media a bit more than digital media. To me, the concept of throwing stuff onto my page and then praying it dries and stays the way I want it is part of the excitement I love about traditional media. I can just throw random things with a pigment or whatever can make a shape on the paper and sometimes I get super happy accidents. Happy accidents just don't seem to occur to me when I'm working on Photoshop, though. I think it is just my brain being very used to traditional media. To this day, drawing on my tablet is still a bit of a brain boggle, like I have to forcibly re-wire my brain to make it make sense in my brain. Maybe that'll pass with age, though? Mysteries for five years from now...

At the same time, digital media is so much faster, especially when it hits that point where you're waiting for the paint to dry. And I think I like my digital media results better, it just has more content availability in the time I have. Instant gratification, I guess?

Been stuck in a "everything I do is terrible!!! D: " rut as of late. Most of it stemming from the fact that I don't think that my technical skills have improved much this year. But, I'm going to again... try to get out of that rut again for the umpteenth time. :B 

Anyways... doodles! 

This is a doodle of a character I've been working on lately. She ended up with that funny rooster shaped hair thing while I was doodling some random shapes to add to her and the shape just stuck with me. XD I wanted to try making her shorter-proportioned than I usually draw, knowing that I have a habit of drawing long, long legs. I think  I need to tweak her proportions some more, but that will have to come another time. 

I used to LOVE the Powerpuff Girls, it was the thing that dominated my life when I was 8. I felt an urge to make a sloppy ten minute doodle of them all after watching the new special that aired on the 20th. :> And I can't get that Wish I Were A Powerpuff Girl song out of my head. Maybe I'll draw some more Powerpuff Girls some time, but I always get that itching feeling whenever I draw fanart because I always end up feeling like I'm being judged harshly when I do fanart, even though I've done it before and I know nobody really cares. =___=

Other than those doodles that I saved and didn't delete for once... I did some vehicle designs (or disastrously tried to @__@). Maybe I'll post my progress on really bad vehicle attempts another day~.

Some doodles I did a few days ago. 

Ark and Marcus looking at a weird leech-snail thing. 

A small, quick portrait thing I did of Mia and her siblings. I wanted the siblings to all have the same eye color as their mother. It's very obvious that one of them has a different biological father than the other two. XD The little girl is also the youngest between all of them with Mia being the oldest. Bonnie marries another person after Cliff leaves, hence the one more blond child in this sibling lineup. 

Something I had a sudden art craving to draw while listening to "Manchild" by Eels. I just had a weird binge of wanting to draw Ark being comforted by someone? Don't ask me why, I just did. XD After looking at the original sketch I had for this drawing, I can't help but feel like as if I liked the initial feeling I had in the thumbnail better than this sketch. I think it's probably because of the fact that the thumbnail had a bit more extreme of a down angle from The guy on the right's perspective so it looked more like he was looking down at someone and taking care of him versus this flat view I did in the end. Meh... May re-do it some time. =__=

PS - ignore the text. >__> it's just cheesy junk my brain likes to put in as text. 

The song played at the end of the Futurama episode "Game of Tones" and I just fell in love with that song, and the scene that it played during was equally beautiful - one of my favorite Futurama moments, including the older series runs list of episodes. 

I realized that I had actually forgotten to upload the animatic I did for class I did with all those character designs I posted earlier. I ended up changing the Thief's design to look more human and less like a giant bug with a bag over his head.

My animatic turned out to be really long, it runs over 100 frames with more than two characters running around at the same time for over half of those said over 100 frames.

It was worth it, though, I think. The teacher told me that if it weren't for the fact that she was only allowed to submit things that ran within a certain time limit, she would have put my animatic in at the end of the semester showing. I'm more than fine with not getting it shown, actually, I feel validated enough that spending 10 straight hours on it was worth it. XD

This animatic marks the first time I've actively integrated 3-D modelling technology into my art. I modeled the BG space in Google Sketch-up and inserted stock figures in the space to figure out which camera angles I liked. This made my process go by SO much faster, and helped me keep track of my space.