Transit Doodles!

Lately I've been trying to loosen up my drawings, thus making them more fun to do! Ever since attending a drawing workshop with Louis Gonzales I feel like I've been pushing my drawings into a new, very fun direction. I'm trying not to get bogged down in what's actually in front of me. Instead, I'm trying to capture a feeling. 

~Chris

Team Donatello

Here is a personal piece that I worked on during a couple weeks that I took off work. I wanted to stay sharp, and also I wanted to play with my new copy of Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro! Below is the finished piece and some work-in-progress stages.

Final. Light and dark tones added. The dark tones I added by painting different shades at full opacity. After doing so I realized that, even though this is something I'm doing for fun, I would have preferred to use just black on a semi-transparent layer. That's exactly what I did for the highlights (not using black, though... naturally) and I enjoyed that much more than hand-picking several different shades.

WIP #4. Base. I put down a base coat for all of the colours that I would work with. I put all of the base colours on one layer; since this was a personal project I didn't want to have to navigate through several different layers. Not if I didn't have to. The paint splotch however was its own layer. I used one of the pre-made brush designs as a starting point, but scaling it up this far made it extremely blurry, so I painted over most of it and just had fun designing an energetic splat!

WIP #3. Line Weight. After putting down all of the clean up lines, I went through and added more weight to some carefully selected areas.

WIP #2. Clean-up. After I was happy with the semi-rough I proceeded to create a clean version on a new layer. Looks like I jumped ahead and began adding some heavier lines before remembering to save a new version.

WIP #1. Semi Rough. After scanning the rough draft from my sketchbook I did a lot of plussing and re-constructing on a new layer inside Sketchbook.

Rough Draft. After a couple pages of brainstorming, this idea appealed to me with its energy and simplicity of design.

Ink And Watercolour Tones

Experimenting at home with my Pentel brush pen and a water brush, adding dimension to some sketches that I did while riding in transit.

~Chris

Life With Baby No. 1

Long Time No Post

It's been a while since I posted anything. This past year has been tumultuous with many ups and downs. I'm working on an exciting show that makes me very happy, but I still feel - as I'm sure I will always feel - a deep sense of loss since my brother's suicide.

The show I'm working on is one that I'm sure he would be equally excited about since it was such a large part of our childhood. I am not at liberty to say any further details about it right now however, and certainly not in this format.

Today is Saturday and I was going through my archives of saved artwork - both collected and created. It is my well of inspiration. My idea farm.

I found two images that I created some time ago that I still found to be appealing, so here they are.

~Chris

Where Are They Now?

The child actor gone sour.

~Chris

Punched By The Bat

Another one done for the Sketch After Work.

~Chris

Enthusiastic Photographer

Something possessed me to draw a person enthusiastically taking a picture - Not sure why.

~Chris

Work Doodles

I made a new page of random sketches at work this week. It's a great way to use the downtime that comes with Playblasting my scenes, and any other computer things that suck away the fun and creativity out of the day.

Pencil on paper, and colour in Photoshop. I hope to do more of these.

~Chris

My Wife's Feet

SHAPE BOX

One exercise I really enjoy doing is creating a box, filling it with random shapes, and then seeing what they evolve into.

~Chris

LINE ART

Just For Laughs: Gags

Bumpy Ride

Reference is useful

I've been trying to visualize a character of mine for a while now. He's a young boy and the setting is the late 1800s. I got a book from the Library called "Children's Clothing of the 1800s" which helped out immensely. The image on the left is drawn from the book, and the image on the right is my treatment of the character.

~Chris

Hey man, remember the 80s?

HE'S GOT A KNIFE!

Another Homeless Wizard

Pencil and Photoshop.

I'm working on some character designs for my portfolio. Somehow I came upon the idea of, "What if homeless people were actually Wizards?" and am now exploring some possibilities. This guy was my favourite from the first batch so I'm going to paint him up nice and post some WIP's along the way.

~Chris

Drawing The Festival

Some drawings I did while attending the presentations at SPARK Animation '09!

~Chris

Wolf and Bulldog

So I was doing all this crazy action analysis a while ago of a weight lifter and I've since started developing this idea around a weight lifting competition. The character designs are starting down the Anthropomorphised Animal route which has me really excited. I'm envisioning something really wacky with a heavy inspiration from Tom & Jerry and Tex Avery. I'm working on an animatic at the moment and I'll post it once it's in a state that I'm happy to start receiving feedback on.

~Chris