Walkers

Stills

I put together a finished piece to show to class, even though my project isn't finished yet. While I'm considering whether to post that attempt on the internet (and having trouble compressing it without the colors getting washed out,) here are a few stills to tease you:

Made it Move

Four seconds to stare at...














...or I still haven't finished my essay.

Animation Teaser

Three seconds to stare at...












...or procrastinating on my essay.

I really love the computer - I truly believe it is a revolutionary technology... but sometimes I wish different applications were different physical machines.

Making it Move

Just thinkin again...

A few weeks ago I was walking to the subway on the Lower East Side, and I passed by four cute, bright, and boxy large plastic toys with over-sized heads and undersized instruments representing the four members of the Beatles, and I wondered:

When do we cease to be real, and instead become the malleable ideas of others?



Or are we always that way, it just isn't so apparent?

Update and Portfolio Picures 3

I've been animating up a storm, but none of it is ready for the eyes of the internet... I have this short short, "Huggabear" that I basically finished in I don't know, September maybe, but I have yet to fully finish the clean-up and coloring of it... shame. I guess I've been too busy working on my longer short, "The Conjurer of Spheres." It is kinda like my first film in that it is a collage of little bits (I swear, someday I'll spend three minutes with one or two characters, promise,) but it has color, some camera movement, and the eerie feeling like there might be a plot. "Huggabear" is succinct, has cute characters, and is a story... which is probably why I'm reluctant to finish it. Or again, maybe I'm just too goddamn busy. It's at that time of the semester when school has become burdened with deadlines and I fear I'll never finish my sculpture. Damn Cintiq, you've got me so 2D... literally, I mean do pixels even have depth? Lines don't exist in the real world, and neither do my paperless drawings.

So what the heck, why not some old analog drawings to spice up the night:































































With an old digital one I made this summer for good luck:






















Looking back at this one, I'm fairly certain I was influenced by the colors in Paul Driessen's "The Killing of an Egg." Noticing that is the same feeling I got when someone pointed out to me that I used an idea from Jan Svankmajer's "Dimensions of Dialogue" in a flipbook. I've been concocting up a whole bunch of walk cycles and I'm sure it's not just from reading and watching Richard Willam's "The Animator's Survival Kit," not just from my own curiosity and desire to develop my skills, but from seeing Ivon Maximov's "Fru 89" a couple months ago. How good it is to subconsciously connect with great artists, how bad it is to copy...

The Promise Land

I'm going on exchange here next semester!

And while you're there, virtually, check out the film "Beton." I think it's the reason why I started using TVPaint Animation Pro. I know I should learn Flash if I ever want a job someday (although I did have an animation internship this summer, but they used Photoshop, which I really don't recommend,) but as a pencil person, lines that can undulate in texture and opacity are very important to me. Plus, it's really nice to not be using an Adobe product. Plus the interface is pretty much intuitive as long as you know how to animate and use alpha channels. But back to that film, it is gorgeous, uses perspective in surprising ways, has many frames you could pause and hang up on a wall, plus it really makes you think.

Moab or Portfolio Pictures 2

I made this:

Plaster, Paint, and Canvas on Plywood

7'8.5" x 5' 8"

Wearing this:

Grey Zentai Suit.

Still from the super 8 film, made to play along with the piece,
The Making of Moab.

Someday I'll go to Utah and see Mars.

Welcome to November!

To christen this wonderful month I bring you a picture of me from a year and a day ago.

Just thinkin...

At what age in an artist's life do they become, if so lucky, the person who made the art they are known for?

When do we become real?

The "Real" Great Falls

I went home on Rosh Hashanah and drew some rocks by Great Falls. I transfered the image to a block and created this woodblock print:

(Note, the edges have been trimmed because of the size of this scanner.)

Summer Reminiscing

It's officially coat weather. I have my first official cold, and I have finally allowed myself to accept the inevitable weather change. Oh for strawberries to be back in season! This past June, I went strawberry-picking with my mother in a field spotted with five-year-olds. We found this incredible fruit there (which I drew when it was still composed):




This picture evidently doesn't look better with paper, or at least the paper I tried it with... but this one does:

Life Drawing

It's hard not to take Richard Willams' word to heart. If you don't know about him, he was the animation directer for Who Killed Roger Rabbit, and with his Animator's Survival Kit, he has become know as an absolutely amazing teacher. So I've been going to life drawing classes (and hosting some) every week or every other week now for the past two months. I'm not out of practice, but not exactly in it either. But it does help, I can feel it in my work. I still listen to music while I animate though... (And if that last sentence made no sence to you, well, read the book.)

Check out the magic:

Life Drawing

Dead Pixel

Poor Cintiq-i-poo.

Portfolio Pictures

I just (a week ago) put my portfolio together for an abroad program to study animation. Instead of dumping all the pictures in one post, however, I'm going to post it here bit by bit. (On a side note, and that side note pertaining to the word "bit," I'm taking an engineering course at our engineering school in digital logic design a.k.a. circuit building.)

So in this first installment I will present to you the precursor to my animation. I bought myself a huge piece of paper and covered it with whatever popped into my head - creating a Bosch-like landscape (loosely based off of Great Falls, its namesake).



and here are some details:

RE: Paper Epiphany

More magical up close:

Paper Epiphany

I "painted" in this sandwich drawing on Wednesday.
















On Thursday I went to my paper-making class and the teacher gave me a bunch of old student work she was going to throw away. I scanned in a sheet, gave it a little curves correction, and multiplied the image from the other night over it.
















Magic.

Unknown Relationship

Here's a little animatic I did a year ago based on my misperceptions:

Were they lovers...

...strangers..

...or just good friends?

Sketchbook

After scanning in over 1000 and counting doodles and drawings from the past year or so, every night as I lay in bed, a delicious new image pops up in my head, only to be forgotten and undrawn by morning.

After days of digitally pulling pencil from paper and six audiobooks, I’m getting sick of scanning but I’m burning to finish.

Feel free to browse my rough work while I venture to employ myself with a more creative activity.

Sketchbook Part 1

Sketcbook Part 2

You’ll soon see these drawings cropping up in different ways; collaged, colored, and put in motion.

Farm

My generation is at this indecisive point between old and new technology. I learned how to print photographs with chemicals, I’m going to learn woodblock printing and how to make paper. I learned the whole process of lost-wax bronze casting and other techniques involving some crazy don’t-let-it-touch-your-skin chemicals. And yet I’m going digital, partly because I don’t want to cut myself off from the momentum of graphic technology at such a young age. Still, all this computer stuff has been driving me a bit crazy. The programs have yet to sink into my regular process. I needed to get away from it and clear my head. So I went to a farm with two friends and worked and drew some things analog. Of course I scanned them in and colored them:



Life drawing. I actually did see some clouds like that (though not by the mountains).




The face in the tree – a half from life, half from imagination fabrication.




And cartoon memories of my friend in the lake.

Landscapes

I’m always an artist at the core, but revolving around that I have these phases of side-interests; For a while I was extremely interested in how understanding the science of how we see can be used in understanding how to make what we can see (art), sometimes I focus on (especially on the subway) what is the meaning of and the use of the time between an action and the result a.k.a. what is the role of waiting and its subsets of boredom, side-tracking, anticipation, and dread in our lives and our perceptions and acceptances of time and mortality, then of course sometimes I think about nothing, sometimes I contemplate my thighs, and lately I have a new material interest in mastering graphics software and using them for animation and illustration. I haven’t really started my new animation yet (which worries me – I felt stuck and scared when I tried to really dive into it) but I have been editing some of my scanned drawings such as these in this little landscape diptych:












I really love the control the computer gives you over color but I’m still a little wary over its materiality.

Hello!

I draw a ton of weird stuff, but it’s been hard to figure out what to do with it all. Last summer I cut out a lot of these drawings and pasted them into a scroll that would act as a surrogate sketchbook, but I soon realized that that was a dumb idea - it damaged the works and did nothing more to them, although the mechanism I made for viewing the scroll was kinda cool. Then I discovered animation, and I realized that I could, instead of working out every detail of a drawing, elevating it to art by making it on fancy paper and finishing it to look all polished (and stilted) I could instead integrate these works into an animation by using them as character designs, poses, etc. In this animation, because no one taught me anything in that class, even though I supposedly go to the best art school in this fine country, I recorded my careful line drawings stop motion style with a lousy DV camera. It has no layers, no color (except on the cut-out parts), no computer effects, and yet I’m fairly pleased with it:



But now that I’ve discovered animation, I’ve discovered what’s been right in front of me for so many years, my computer. And so, I am now beginning to archive my drawings via my new scanner and edit them in Photoshop and Painter via my brand spanking new Wacom Cintiq 12WX which I don’t know what I did without. This summer I’m taking a digital compositing class that essentially teaches me After Effects, I’m deciding on whether to learn Flash or Toon Boom, and I’m making some stuff that’s fun to look at. And so this blog will be a sort of process journal and showcase of my work as I move into the twenty-first century with my 2D artwork. Enjoy!