Dragons on the Mind

Working with Dragons all day will definitely have its influence on idle sketch time. Drew this in an airport recently using one of our nifty Dragon Sketchbooks they have at work.

Faux Movie Production Logo Animatic

So earlier in the summer, I had the idea to do an arrangement of the Super Mario World "You defeated a koopa kid" victory song, and the more I thought about it, I started to get the idea that it might work perfectly as a movie production logo, if Nintendo ever had some sort of in-house movie studio or something.  So, I decided to do a MIDI version of the arrangement, and put together a quick animatic of what it might look like (watch in High Quality if possible):

So there it is!  Turned out allright, I think.  The next phase, if I decide to keep going with it, will be 3D layout/previs to see how the camera animation will play out in full 3D.  Hope y'all dig it so far.

Cheetah DS Crash Drawing

Over the years, my DS has gotten more fragile especially when playing games off my M3 Lite, and sometimes it will just randomly crash in the middle of a game, evoking this momentary feeling of "wtf!" This drawing started out as just a head-sketch I was doing at work, which then evolved into this upper body image, which I decided to splash color on. Overall, a boring pose, but I thought I'd post it anyway!

Mouse Lady

Recently on my way back from a trip to Washington D.C. my plane was grounded on the runway for an hour or so, so I decided to sketch some random junk. I started doodling a mouse head and it turned into this mouse-in-dress thing. I imagined that she had won some bet against a fellow companion and was requesting that she get her fair pay. So anyhow, I decided to ink it up in Flash since I hadn't tried that before and throw some color on it, and here it is. Wee.

The End of a Super Phun Time for now

Well, tonight marked the mid-season finale for South Park, and the end of my first run ever at South Park Studios! Overall it was very challenging and a bit stressful at times, but always fun and exciting with each new episode we got to work on. I was officially invited back for "season 12.5", so I'm of course very happy to be coming back this fall! I imagine this will be the last post regarding working at the studio for a while, so I thought I would show a tiny slice of what I get to do at the studio.

As a Technical Director, I create and rig lots of sets, characters, props and effects animation, which 99% of the time we're given specific approved guides from Art Department to follow. Yet, every once in a blue moon, a montage will happen that has a lot of mini-bgs within a larger bg, such as a location within a background that has been pre-designed, but needs a specific angle for a shot. Art Department has more important backgrounds to create than to spend time creating angles that aren't as critical, so this responsibility will pass directly to a Technical Director. Such a case occured for me on our mid-season finale "Super Fun Time" in the "Super Phun Thyme Montage" sequence. I was asked to create a POV within an arcade machine for a video game Butters and Cartman are playing, so I sketched this up at my desk quickly:

On the top is the initial layout, and then some variations simplified for our Animation Technical Supervisor to take a look at. Once it was approved, I went ahead and created / rigged the final setup, which ended up looking like this in the final show:

Hooray, I'm helping! This may seem super minor, but it still gives me great pleasure and excitement to see something I created displayed on network television, assembled with the rest of the fantastic work of my talented colleagues at the studio. Anyway, it's been a blast so far, and I look forward to busting out the remainder of Season 12 when new episodes are in October. Until then, it's time for some sleep, vacationing, and thesis work!

Wacom time

Working the long hours during the South Park run gives me very little time to doodle anything, and I've been wanting to draw some stuff since I bought that new Wacom tablet for home, but yesterday I got a chance to practice using it a little. Often times I'll stand in front of my mirror and make various facial expressions and poses to study how they look and feel, and this was one of those poses that I figured would be a good one to get more used to the tablet on.

Suddenly, braaap!

This is a little piece that I made for my brilliant illustrator friend, Eji. She was telling me one night about how she has these surprise burps sometimes, and chose to describe it to me in ascii-language as follows:
( '3')
( 'O') !!!
( '~') ...
Which, basically demands to be drawn. So here was my chibi-interpretation! Click image to see full-size version.

Celebrity Sketch

A friend of mine recently wanted me to create a one-page comic involving actress Ashley Peldon for a favor I owed him. And so, for a few days I was researching many headshots and photographs of this gal, and created many horribly executed caricatures of her. I thought I would post the only remotely successful one here.

Early Dragon Concept....

This is a drawing I did of a character from an old comic series I used to write called "DavidWorld", mentioned in passing in this post. This character was "Mandy", and she was a powerful mage vixen-like character with a nice magenta-sheen. Her popular ability in the later comics was the ability to change forms, like this dragon-lizard-like form.
When I got into 3D animation in High School, one of the traditions I had started was to always try to model and rig this dragon form of Mandy every time I learned a new 3D software. Now that I've learned Maya pretty thoroughly, I've been planning on doing a rather robust model and rig of this new design. Her old design was something more non-anthro, and was kind of cute but I think this form lends itself better to 3D. We'll see if I ever get around to doing it.

Noode Doode

A progression of a life drawing I did in Glen Vilppu's life drawing course at UCLA last fall. Sketched on tablet PC, so all the joys of being able to draw in layers easily.

Random Fox n' Dragon

I've been meaning to put up some more random art, and so here are two sketchy things I did in the past few weeks.

Here is a random foxy dude that I sketched during a lecture in micron pen. I had been working exclusively with tablet PC for several months, so it was a nice moment to return to pen again and remember how much more control I can get.

And here is an in-progress concept sketch I did for a friend. This is his dragon character that he has been asking me to draw for quite some time. I told him I would do some practice drawings to warm me up to drawing a much better final pose. This was the first full-body I did of his character, done on the ol' tablet PC.

Olde Timey

Lately I've been drawing a lot for my MFA thesis-in-progress, so I haven't had much time to produce any new original non-school related pieces. So thought instead I would dig way back into some ancient artwork of mine! I found this grade-school gem in an old black notebook I used to draw in that I brought back with me from my last trip to my hometown in Michigan.

This is a fancy looking image of a character "Troy" that was part of a game / comic series I drew when I was little called "Davidworld". When I was 12, I apparently thought not only was I such a good artist, but a well known artist that it was important I number my different drawing styles for my adoring public. I particularly love the crap-tacular tiled image whose pattern dies miserably as it approaches the right side of the page. Strangely enough, I even remember drawing this image at a hotel / restaurant called "The Virginia House" in Cape May, NJ. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this masterpiece from the past...erpiece.

Silly Sir Sketches

My friend James Suhr is currently at Nickelodeon as a storyboard artist on a show in development called "Making Fiends" created by our department's very own Amy Winfrey. He was hanging out in the UCLA animation department tonight, and visualized what I would look like were I transported into the bizzare world of Making Fiends.