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

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

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

When Boredom Is Fruitful

Watching James Bond and Doodling

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

LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS

My fiance has been in Japan sice last April. I was there for six weeks which really helped to break up her away time into a couple more managable chunks. This last stretch has been about two months so far, with one month still to go. I don't know how people managed in long distance relationships before there was all this crazy communication technology. Emails, video chat, you name it. It's like she's just in another room until the chat ends and I'm forced to face the bitter reality of a lonely existence with no one to share all of life's little pleasures with. Only one more month to go. I can do this.

~Chris

NINJAS ARE WAY COOL

There's a really awesome rig floating around in different animation circles affectionately known as Norman. For my money, Norman is the shizznit.

I've retro-fitted Norman a few times for some 11 Second Club submissions in the past but none of those retro-fittings even come close to this latest one. I put a lot of work into it and I learned a heck of a lot of technical stuff that I wasn't aware of before.

I also got to model a Katana which turned out great! Well, to be honest it's not a true Katana. It's kind of a mix between a Katana and a Ninja-to. Oh man , I've been geeking out over this retro-fitting for like two weeks.

Now that he's all finished I'm going to animate some scenarios because I seriously want to see this guy in action!

~Chris

Facebook Doodling

I just realized that you can embed the saved brush strokes in the form of a movie when you draw something with Facebook's Graffiti application. I drew this little Godzilla-like thing when I was in Japan. Kind of fitting.

~Chris

OFFICE NINJA

I was telling a buddy of mine about the AWESOME POWER of hand dryers in the washrooms in Japan. These things must be nuclear powered or something because they are so powerful that they dry your hands in about five seconds. The gust, no, the surge of air that comes out of these things actually pushes your hands down with its gale force wind.

Anyway, one thing led to another and the drawing of the hand dryer turned into a chubby office ninja with a cheesy Karate Kid head band, naturally.

~Chris

Killing Time

I was teaching at Vanarts today and, inevitably, there are always some bits of downtime when the students don't need a whole lot in the way of feedback. I like to doodle during said downtime because if there's one thing that annoying ads before movies has taught me it's that downtime is BAAAAAD!

Everything was coloured at home.

~Chris

Japan #1

Well, I'm in Japan now.

Two aeroplanes and 15 hours of travel time puts me on the other side of the planet. It's funny that just two days ago I spent almost the same amount of time on a bus and managed to cross one province. I guess you had to be there.

In the Vancouver airport I sat and watched all kinds of people coming and going, I bought a new sketchbook for the trip (which is made out of recycled paper and the cover simply has a blank, brownish canvas) and found a great opportunity to draw an image for the cover. There was this one slightly awkward looking girl that walked past and the image of her kind of lasted. I drew her several minutes after she passed, so the sketch is drawing upon my memory for the most part. Pun absolutely intended.

I had quite a lot of time to kill so I just kept my eyes open for more sketching opportunities but I didn't really find anything until I sat down to wait for my boarding call. Looking out across the runway I saw a nice opportunity to practice a Landscape.

Now that I'm actually in Japan I'll be keeping my eyes open and looking for opportunities to commit some images to paper. Failing that, I'll see what I can do in the realm of photography. One more day in Kawagoe, my Fiance's city of birth, and then we head to Okinawa for four days.

Stay tuned!