Chalk is also fun.

My sister asked me to help decorate a blank chalkboard for my 6 year old nephew's space alien-themed birthday party; this is what I came up with:

Daily Art: Anicient Phoenix

Day 102:

I think that this page of the cut-up sketchbook may be finished now. I won't say that it's done for certain because I've gone back and revised a number of pages in this book already, but it's certainly where I want it to be for now.

Daily Art: Day 100

Day 100:

I spent the majority of my day painting the designs from yesterday's daily art on the faces of kids and a couple of adults. I never stopped to request any pictures of my paintings, so, unfortunately, I can't show any of my work on this blog, but I was quite happy with what I painted today.

Oddly, given my perfectionist nature, the face painting that I did today that I am most proud of was a half-mask of Spiderman on a kid who was probably about 2 years old and was constantly turning his head this way and that the whole time that I was painting. It was the fastest Spiderman mask that I've ever done, and it had numerous overwhelming flaws, but it got the gist of Spiderman across despite the challenges, and for that I'm proud. I was so afraid of accidentally poking that kid in the eye with my brush since every time I aimed my paintbrush toward one point of contact it was probably about a 50/50 shot of whether I'd get my brush on that spot before his head turned, and a half mask is all around the eye area. And then there was the chance that he'd turn his head and eye into the brush... But that risk was why I worked quickly and took shortcuts and managed to actually finish the mask, despite its obvious flaws. Before when I've encountered similar difficulties the parents have always given up and taken the kid away before I could finish, leaving a half painted area on their kid's face. They thank me politely and pay anyway, sometimes apologizing for their child's behavior, but I'm disappointed to see their kid go off half-done. I feel like I've failed at my job, because it's natural for a kid that small to move around a lot, especially when someone's tickling their face with a soft, wet brush tip. Today I assessed the situation and worked through it, and the thought of those chicken-scratch spider webs makes me smile...

Now, since it's day 100 and I have no imagery to show for my face painting, I made sure to do something else that I could show today. I did a bit more work on the ancient phoenix page of my cut-up sketchbook. I was trying to give the colored background a bit of a stained-glass feel. I think that it's working, but now I need to go through and darken up the outlines again since the watercolor pencil pigment dulled them a bit wherever it overlapped...

I can't  believe that I've been doing this for 100 days already...

Daily Art: Three Weeks of Daily Art

I've been working on the most recent pages of my Cut-Up Sketchbook for the past few days while I've been out of town:

Day 98:

 

Day 97:

 

Day 96:

 

Day 95:

 

Then I spent this past weekend with my niece and nephew helping my sister prepare for my niece's birthday party, so the art on those days is all party and kid-related:

Day 94:

On Sunday I acted as the unofficial photographer of the birthday party. I won't post pictures of the kids online, but I will show a snippet of an action shot of the piñata smash:

 

Day 93:

Saturday was cupcake decorating day:

The crab was following a design that my sister found (on Pinterest, I'm sure...)

 

Day 92:

On Friday I drew some pictures of "Frozen" characters for my niece and nephew that they chose to fold into fans. My nephew wanted Olaf and Sven, which he then colored before adding drawings of his own of Anna and Cristophe:

And my niece wanted Elsa, which I colored for her:

 

Day 91:

And before that was more Cut-Up Sketchbook:

 

Day 90:

 

Day 89:

On day 89 I spent the better part of my work time taking screen shots, editing, and compositing progress photos for this blog. I think this qualifies as Daily Art considering the amount of time that I spent working in Photoshop, but it does not yield its own images. You'll just have to look at days 76-88 to see the results of day 89's work...

 

Day 88:

A tree:

In the form of a photo collage.

 

Day 87:

I made a list of all of the remaining tasks to complete in the revision of my Juggler's textures this day.

And then I decorated it:

 

Day 86:

The 86th day of Daily Art was a Saturday on which I spent 5 hours face painting. Here's a sample of my work:

 

Day 85:

I also face painted on Friday:

 

And made a quick sign advertising the face painting:

 

Day 84:

On this Thursday and the two days before I spent time creating a 10 second long demo reel for my former school's Spring Show. As a student who was enrolled in the fall I still qualify for entrance into this year's show despite the fact that I've already graduated. This is the reel that I submitted:

 

Day 83:

I submitted that reel because I realized that the submission guidelines prohibited having any contact information anywhere other than the first frame of the 10 second time span (I edited out that frame for posting on the internet). This is the reel that I created the first time around (and the way that I would have left it had I had free reign).

 

Day 82:

This was the day that I began the reel-editing process.

And the day that I discovered that the resolution requirements were full 1920 x 1080 HD and that I had to re-render a couple of my turntables.

(such as the Juggler wireframe turntable that includes the image above.)

 

Day 81:

I spent this day trying to turn detail that I'd previously achieved through a normal map into detail achieved through a displacement map.

It worked in general, but lacked much of the sharp definition provided by the normal maps...

 

Day 80:

Daily Art day #80 was filled with technical behind-the-scenes stuff that provides no great imagery, like transferring sculpting from one object to another to utilize the UVs of the new item rather than the original one...

 

Day 79:

On this day I concocted some designs for face painting:

 

Day 78:

I reorganized my Juggler's UVs this day so that each individual piece of her won't require its own unique map when I texture paint her. I probably ended up averaging 3 - 5 items per map instead:

 

Day 77:

On this day I finished UVing every single piece on my Juggler so that I could really texture paint her rather than relying on procedurals as I did previously:

And, before that, I built a new mesh for the tire in my Juggler's shoulder:

It has far fewer polygons than the tire with the modeled tread, but I think that I should be able to create the same look of a tread by creating a displacement map with the tread pattern in it.

 

Day 76:

And, finally, on the first/last day (depending on how you look at it) of Daily Art for this entry, I created a new, solid mesh to replace the very high-poly wire mesh in my Juggler's tea ball.

Then I created and tested displacement and transparency maps to use on the new mesh to make it look like it's built from the same wires as the original mesh:

 

That's all folks!

Daily Art: 3D Print Prep & More

It's been a busy week and a half since I last posted. I let a bit too much time get away from me between posts again, but it was for a very good reason: I put in an application to a Talent Development program at a major animation studio this week. Fingers crossed that something amazing comes of it! Now, back to daily art practices:

Day 75:

I revamped my demo reel a few times this week. Today I completed the most recent version; I fixed a couple of errors in the revamp that I completed earlier in the week. In the earlier version both my Gecko and my Juggler models disappeared shortly before the screen faded to black. One minute they were there, then suddenly they weren't, then the frame faded to black before progressing on to the next set of turntables. They both did this in slightly different ways for slightly different reasons, but I was able to identify both problems and adjust the file accordingly. I don't know how I missed it before I uploaded the version that I completed earlier this week to the internet...

 

Day 73 & 74:

I worked on the same thing two days in a row and never paused to take in-progress screen shots of it. So here is the finished image covering both days' worth of work.

 I didn't complete this entire storyboard in the two days that I worked on it. I actually began the thing a few years back, then lost interest in it in favor of other projects. It's been nestled in the back of my mind on my to-do list, however, and for some reason I really felt that it would be a valuable example to add to my Talent Development program application portfolio. Most of the work that I completed over the two day span was coloring the panels. All of the initial drawing and layout was already completed, and I had blocks of color multiplied over each panel depicting the dominant shade that I wanted each frame to be. The work that I did over the weekend was pretty akin to coloring in a digital coloring book of my own creation.

 

Day 72:

Saturday's work was just a quick sketch of a lion head. I found myself studying the contours of the face of a leopard whose photograph appears occasionally as my computer's desktop wallpaper and wanted to draw a new version of it. Changing the proportions of the face turned it distinctly lion-like, but, as I wasn't really aiming for any type of cat in particular, I was pleased with it. I'd like to turn this sketch into vector artwork in Illustrator someday.

 

Day 71:

Friday I spent a short amount of time UVing the clock on my Juggler:

 

I've been UVing all of the Juggler's pieces separately because I started working on the character this way, but I know now that that was a mistake. Having a separate UV map for each piece of the character wastes space and makes the character far too data-heavy to function efficiently. I can't do much to fix all of the UVs on the objects that I've already added normal and texture maps to without re-doing an awful lot of work, but I can, and will, combine the UV maps of some of objects that have no texture information to them yet before I go about adding such information. I'm planning to dispense with the procedural textures that I gave the Juggler for my thesis and texture paint her in Mudbox instead. She will be a wonderful piece to add to my texture portfolio, which is distinctly lacking at the moment.

 

Day 70:

My art on Thursday consisted solely of a quick little face-painted mask of-sorts. More practice for when I begin doing this at the farmer's market.

 

Day 69:

Wednesday was the day that I truly revamped my demo reel. I fixed the little issues that I missed later in the week, but this was the day that I truly put effort into working on it. It's fairly similar to the reel that I've been using (it features many of the same models with the same turntables), but the turntables are re-ordered to showcase my best models first. I know that this is how a demo reel should go: you show your best work first so that the recruiter who views 100 demo reels per day becomes interested immediately and doesn't just turn your reel off thinking that everything on it must be as mediocre as the first thing and move on to the next reel. I know that's how it works, and yet... I've been using my thesis reel because I know that it has my best models on it. The problem is: I designed my thesis reel to work up to my best work because I knew that the panel that it was intended for was going to watch the entire thing and then discuss it. I saved the best for last, which is exactly opposite of what you should do when you create a demo reel. And somehow, until quite recently, I missed the error. I never revamped my thesis reel to make it more appropriate as a demo reel in any way other than changing the slate information to be more suited to its purpose; until now.

The new reel puts my Addict first, followed by my newly-textured Gecko. Then comes the Juggler and the Warrior. Next is the Gallery environment. I nixed the still image of all of the models in the environment together because it no longer reflects the current state of the models now that the Gecko is textured; it also makes the addition of my Felix model tagged onto the end distinctly out-of place.

This version of the reel includes the 8-bit Dragon for "Amazing Adventure" at the very end after Felix, but I nixed that turntable later in the week when I fixed the errors in the reel because I'm just not happy with the quality of the turntable that I created for that model. It's not lit properly, the speed isn't constant, there's no wireframe view... It just looks unprofessional compared to the rest of the reel. Felix doesn't have a wireframe turn either, but the quality of the turn-around that he does have is so far above the one that I quickly set up and rendered of the dragon that I'm still satisfied having him at the end.

 

Day 68:

I spent the first three days of this round of daily art prepping my Szeth-Son-Son-Vallano model for 3D printing.

I'm not planning to sell him or anything of that nature, but, after the artist who designed the character said such nice things about the model, I figured that it would be nice to have a physical representation of him. I might even try to send one to the artist and the author who created the character if I'm successful; I know that the author, at least, really appreciates fan art.

Unfortunately, getting a model such as this ready for 3D printing is no easy feat. First off, The model has to be water-tight, which means one single, solid piece. When I built the model he consisted of exactly 15 different pieces. It also has to be under one million polygons, and the model that I built had something like 8 million quads if my memory serves me correctly. There is also a minimum thickness that any part of the model can be (how much that is depends on the material used to create the print), a minimum distance between two separate sections of the model (which means no intersecting or otherwise touching geometry), and a slew of other stipulations about the dimensions of the piece which will cause me less grief than the few that I have already mentioned. This means that I had to decimate the model to bring the poly-count down below one million while keeping all of my sculpted detail, and then connect all of the different pieces and any piece of geometry currently touching any other (this includes connecting the fingers resting on the surface of the model's face to the face as well as attaching the wrists to the sleeves and the coat to the shirt and the pants to the belt and every other piece to all of the other pieces).

I originally thought that I could complete the task of connecting all of the different pieces of the model fairly easily by putting all of the subtools on one layer in ZBrush and Dynameshing the entire thing, but it didn't work as well as I'd hoped. The geometry that Dynamesh produced needed so much clean up that it just wasn't worth it - at least by pixel-pushing and merging vertices in Maya I have more control and can keep track of what's going on with the shape of the model. I couldn't even make sense of all of the intersecting geometry that Dynamesh created...

So, after trying and failing attempted shortcuts in ZBrush a few times I brought the decimated model into Maya and have been merging vertices "by hand" ever since. The model will still require a lot more work before it's done, as well as some additional ZBrush sculpting to clean up the flow of the seams once the model is all one piece, but it's coming along:

The above image illustrates where I've deleted geometry from both the shirt and the belt in the areas that it overlaps. Next I will connect the vertices to make it water-tight.

This image clearly illustrates why the model will require extra sculpting in ZBrush to clean up the newly-created seams between the previously separate items.

 

Day 67:

On this day I connected Szeth's calves to the inside of his trouser legs:

 

 This image shows all of the successful connections that I have made thus far:

 

 

Day 66:

The first day that I worked on Szeth I began by connecting his shoes to his feet.

 

That's all that I did last week. The coming week should be very heavily Juggler-oriented, as I'm trying to create all-new textures for her in the hopes of submitting her for consideration in the Academy of Art's Spring Show. I think she'd be a fine fit for the Hard-Surface Model category.

Daily Art: Film Art

I've spent the last week working on the film artwork that I mentioned in my last post, and I've gotten permission from the director of the project to share the pieces that I've created for the film here. The drawings that I created are basically set dressing pieces that are supposed to have been drawn by the main character in the film. So, without further ado, here are the pieces that I created for my first outside freelance art contract:

Days 51-57:

The First Concept:

The Drawing:

(Actually, the "concept" for the first one is really just the same drawing minus a few revisions. I just started sketching with pastels after I got the job and came up with that image, then decided that rather than creating everything on-the-fly at full size I should do a few thumbnails to give the director choices for the final pieces. Hence, from here out, the concepts will actually be completely separate images from the finished pieces.)

The drawing is pastel on black paper; approximately 11 x 17".

 

The Second Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is pastel on black paper; approximately 10 x 13".

 

The Third Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil and marker on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

 

The Fourth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is marker and watercolor pencil on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

 

The Fifth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil, marker, and charcoal on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

 

The Sixth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is colored pencil on black paper; approximately 12 x 16".

 

The Seventh Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil, charcoal pencil, and colored pencil on paper; approximately 11 x 14".

 

The Eighth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil, pastel, colored pencil, and a tiny bit of liquid paper on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

I finished the last of the drawings yesterday and spent my artistic hours today fixing the extremely quick cell phone pictures that I took to document the drawings into something more professional looking.

Here are a couple of examples of today's work:

and

I am satisfied.

Daily Art # 16

I have begun the digital painted version of Mother Nature.

Day 45:

The first stage of the wind turbine on which Mother Nature is frolicking.

 

Day 44:

The sketch depicting the general layout of the digital image.

Daily Art #12

Catching Up: Part 2.

 

Day 32:

Today I have spent a lot of time fixing photos.

I've been cropping, tweaking perspective, adjusting color balances, levels, and saturation, painting out random tiny artifacts, and much, much more. And after all of that, I did this:

This is an early stage of a painting. It was originally intended to be an acrylic painting, but after adding a quick layer of color to the cloak I'm considering switching it to a digital painting... We'll see how it goes I guess.

 

Day 31:

Yesterday I drew the sketch that was the beginning of the Red Riding Hood image:

By the end of the evening it looked like this:

 

Day 30:

I drew some thumbnail storyboard sketches. 

The heart image series is separate from the other images. I wasn't really going for full-on storyboarding here: I just wanted to get a few images that I hope to properly storyboard later out of my head for now before I bury them with other ideas and forget what they looked like. There are still more images related to this story that I need to get down, but this is all that I've gotten to for now. The first two images are crossed out because I simply wasn't pleased with how they turned out.

 

Day 29:

This day I just spent time drawing grids on paper to have a place to work on my storyboard thumbnail sketches.

 

Day 28:

Some work in my Cut-Up Sketchbook:

 

Day 27:

More Cut-Up Sketchbook:

 

Day 26:

Even more Cut-Up Sketchbook:

 

Day 25:

The day that began this particular series of Cut-Up Sketchbook doodling:

 

Day 24:

Switching gears now to painting:

It's not much to look at - just the early stages of a painted project. I bought the wooden tree with the black outlines on it, but I'm going to paint it my own way. It'll still be owls and hearts in a tree, but it should end up fairly different from the original design.

 

Day 23:

This was quite a long day of art as I painted mailboxes for my niece and nephew for Valentine's Day.

They're quite simple, but I figured that I didn't need to make them masterpieces since they're playthings for a three and five year old...

Day 22: 

This day was the the day that I painted the base coats of color on the above mailboxes.

Day 21:
And this is the day that I completed the base coat of paint for the owl tree:
Whew! That was a lot in one post. Hopefully I'll keep this updated more regularly in the future. (I was doing so well for awhile there...) :)

Daily Art #10

I've continued work on my cut-up sketchbook for the past two days, but I've been working on different pages (somewhat...).

Day 16:

Today I worked on the page two pages past the page that I've been working on for the past few days. The facing page next to the one with the palm tree doodles has a semi-transparent vellum in the middle of it. Thus, when the page is turned the palm tree cave doodle shows through. I plan to leave the actual doodle black and white, but I colored the vellum with ink to "color" the drawing on the other page:

The image of the picture is a little blurred because the pages won't sit flat together, but you get the gist. This is just a start. I'm going to be refining this page a lot more after I get the other side of this page done. This beginning layer of color is really just a guideline for what I'm going to put on the page later.

Day 15:

Yesterday I did a little refinement to one of the pages that I've worked on (and previously thought finished) before. The very first page of the book has a semi-transparent piece of paper in it. I like the style and color of the paper, as well as its placement in the page, but, unfortunately, I wrote on the cover of the book awhile back and missed the fact that the writing went right across that piece of paper and showed through to the decorated inside of the book. I've been meaning to fix it for awhile, so yesterday I finally got a start on it:

I fixed the mishap by blacking out the back of the entire semi-transparent rectangle; that covered up the writing. But then, the black showing through looked bad against the other papers and designs on the page, so I made it blend in a bit more by painting glitter nail polish over most of the square. Now I need to refine it a bit more with paint, but I haven't really had opportunity to paint lately, so it may be awhile until I continue with this particular piece of the book.

Daily Art # 8

Day 13:

More drawing:

I think that I should share where this project started, so here's the beginning of the Cut-Up Sketchbook:

And here's where it's going:

And here's where it was yesterday for Daily Art:

Day 12: