The Odd Couple

A friend of mine and I often joke about how these two arch rivals, away from the more serious-business world of StarFox, would continue their misadventures in a sit-com paradigm where Wolf is continuously trying to capture or trap Fox, but usually ends up punk'd or pranked by the StarFox team leader, usually to the hilarity of Fox and the chagrin of Wolf, as illustrated in this kind of faux-logo.

High Def Exploration

In preparation for some new film festivals I'm submitting to, and also in a continuous exploration for more effective and efficient rendering methods, I've been doing some new high definition renders for Jungle Gym. I chose to tackle scene 26 this time, aka "Determination shot", since it seems to be a popular image for film fests and poster images, and would be a good opportunity to fix some render errors and layer in some grain, lens vignette, ambient occlusion, and of course amp up the resolution considerably. Here you can see a before...

And after... (click to experience high-def goodness)

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.

Taiwan International Animation Festival

So I was recently informed that Jungle Gym has been given the honor of being exhibited as an international piece at the 2007 Taiwan International Animation Festival. It excites me to think of such a large audience having to watch 3 and a half minutes of hippo-mation, I just hope they enjoy it and don't start tomato-ing the screen! So anyway, Godspeed to the first overseas adventure of Herbie the Hippo, may he find many tasty treats to munch on in the world of Taiwan.

Stand by...

It has been far too long since I've posted any new work, so I felt like I needed to post something here. For the past 2 months, I've been employed by the One Laptop Per Child organization as a designer and animator. We're doing a lot of interface design, but unfortunately I cannot talk about any specifics here, else I get fired I think. At any rate, it has been an exciting project but has also been monopolizing my time. I'm hoping soon to get some more sketches up in this space, so that the 2 people that read this blog (Hi James and Ashley) can have something to look at!

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.

Basil Birthday Card

Last year, for a friend of mine's birthday, I decided to create this card for them. They're a big The Great Mouse Detective Fan needless to say, and they're in college, so this comic was the convergence of those two worlds I suppose. Click images for full size.

Learning how to draw Basil and Dawson quickly was a headache, and as you can see it wasn't a complete success, but it was a fun attempt nonetheless. The inside panel originally had the little mouse girl leaping out of the way of the falling table, but somehow it didn't seem right to involve her in a college drinking party. Anyhow I hope this doesn't ruin your taste for The Great Mouse Detective forever!

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.