It's christmas

I painted this for my mom yesterday. She thought it was pretty funny, then she critiqued the shit out of it.
I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday, I'm grateful that I got to spend mine here at home. Aside from spending time with my family, it's been a blessing not eating PB and J and frozen pizza every day. I'm also starting to crawl out of the art funk I've been having for the past few weeks, which means I've gotta really buckle down and decide what new pieces I'm going to create for my portfolio.
Also, I've started thinking about getting my Master's. I've begun the application process to both Cal Arts and SCAD, but I'm only in the early stages. I'm not AT ALL sure that it's what I want to do, but I feel like I need to start making moves. I've been adrift since graduation, and I can't just keep blindly applying to video game and animation houses hoping to get picked up, while sitting at home drawing all day. Furthering my education might be the best thing for me right now, who knows? Anyway nothing's concrete, so we'll see where things go.

Disney

Well I got rejected for the Disney Talent Development program, which was mildly discouraging. They took the time to tell me what they liked and what they thought my portfolio was lacking, which was really cool of them considering how many applicants they've probably been bombarded with. Gotta work on that stuff and then try again.

Hamster Bot MODELED

A friend of mine, former classmate, and unfairly talented modeler named Bakia Parker is modeling the hamster head bot guy that I painted. Go look at it RIGHT NOW.

EYEGASM

ALSO, I just finished both Ender's game quartets (which is what? an octet? I just made that up but it sounds right) and enjoyed them for the most part. I thought there was going to be more of a bridge between the two sets, but I suppose not. For example, is the virus that Volescu made supposed to be the beginnings of the descolada? Do they ever address the fucking alien planet at the end of children of the mind? Are they unwittingly returning to earth, mistaken in their belief that the descoladores are aliens? Is Bean's genetically engineered condition the origin of the Chinese people of Path in Xenocide? Wtf Orson. Give me closure man.

Man that banner is terrible, I don't look anything like that.

Pipes n shiyet

Last week I went to a sketchcrawl in Baltimore hosted by Sean Murray, which was a lot of fun. About 7 of us showed up, and there was lots of people/environment sketching done. I drew a horse and an insanely complicated gothic church (pieces of it anyway), which I can't show you guys because I don't have a scanner. It was fun times, super cold sketching and sketchbook sharing in a cozy coffee shop. I look forward to the next one. I drank a big ass, fancy-named coffee beverage which cost about as much as a mcdonald's meal.

I've been working on concepts to build my portfolio lately, which will be shown in another blog pretty soon. And totally unrelated, but I gotta start prep to move out of the apartment in the coming month/s. I'll pack the day before I gotta be outta here.

I did the Jedi dude for the Bi Weekly jam over at CGHub. I decided to put it together with the old sith painting for my portfolio's sake.

I'm such an inconsiderate idiot.

A BIG ENORMOUS THANK YOU TO IAN MCCONVILLE.

Thanks to him and the fine folks of 3 Panel Soul, someone other than my roommates come to visit my blog. Thanks for the shout-out Ian, and I apologize for being such an idiot that I waited almost a month after the fact to properly show my gratitude.

3 Panel Soul - http://www.threepanelsoul.com

Good lord

I'm 24 now.

Doodlez

Been in a pretty bad art funk the last two days or so, not sure why. Actually I've been in a pretty bad funk in general over the last couple of days. Moping around the apartment, sleeping a whole lot, getting pissed at people for no reason...clearly I need some cranberry juice.

Anyway, I wanted to force myself to be productive at least a little bit today, so I blog-surfed and doodled in sketchbook pro.

I need to work on poses.

Ness

I doodled Ness last night.

Stuffs

Not much to report. Still job huntin', still unemployed.

TABLET PC FOR SALE

Well I hate to do it, but I've got to sell my beautiful beautiful art baby. I'm extremely broke, and student loan assassins will be knocking on my door in about a month and a half, demanding my first born child. Unfortunately, I've got to sell the only luxury item I've got......so here are the specs, and a photo of the product in it's current state. If you're interested, send me an e-mail at DanielMAraya@gmail.com with "Tablet PC" as the subject.


Items: Fujitsu Stylistic St5112 Tablet PC, Environment Protection Carrying Case, Charger.

Tablet PC Specs: Intel Core Duo, 1.20GHz, 2GB RAM, 36GB Free Hard Drive Space.

Deviant Art

A lot of people seem to hate it, but I don't understand how you hate an online community. It's so huge, that the experience you have with it completely depends on what you make of it. Like any other online community, it's full of nice people, mean people, intelligent people, stupid people, talented people, ambitious people, self-promoting people, amicable people etc. You'll find whatever you're looking for there, it's not really the devil.

Because I know you're wondering. here's mine:

www.DanielAraya.deviantart.com

"..If you're not into the whole brevity thing..."

My roommate (Neil) is responsible for this. I live with the two goofiest animators on the planet, sometimes it rubs off.

Tomfoolery

I drawed some stuff. Nothing to rant about today.

Bacon

Here is some new shit. Well, the Obi Wan is a revamp but the sketches are new. Been messin with my tablet PC a lot lately, which is convenient since I can't seem to sell it and since I'm on this huge storyboarding kick.

My roommate showed me this blog: Click this. Pencil tests from some of the badassest animators since the Renaissance.

Also, my sister is in town this week, and that's cool because I see her once every year or so. I'll probably not be updating much as a result.

HAHAHAHA

Another post of sketches, and a Silver Surfer pic I did before I went to SDCC. I wish I spent more time refining the Surfer pic, and I really wish I exaggerated and cartoonified his proportions a bit more, but I wasn't going all stylized back then.

Also, I put him on the tip of his board to pay homage to a popular surfing style of the 60's which my roommate suggested.

warning: BEWBIES

This is just a scan of random pages out of my sketchbook. Not much to say about it really....it's a big pic.

experimentations

Playing with messier, looser strokes.

WOLVUHREEN

Been nailing down my look, and settling on the direction I want to take my work. Instead of working on the stuff I SHOULD be working on, this afternoon/evening was spent on this.

I'll do my best to explain what I did in each step, but I kinda just saved at random times so it doesn't make for the most in depth look into my process. Honestly, I barely even have a process, I just slap my tablet with the stylus until something comes out.

Uno) Rough sketch done in Autodesk Sketchbook pro on my tablet PC. I had no idea what I was going to doodle, so I defaulted to my standard "dude standing around" and gradually morphed him into Wolverine.

Ni) Flats. Pretty self explanatory. I tend to pick super ridiculously saturated reds for my base flesh tone, because I usually calm it down as I progress. Or not. I don't even know to be honest. i REALLY like the piece at this stage, in some ways more so than how it finally turned out.

Tres) Using a standard airbrush on a new layer, I glaze in some hue shifts. Some are arbitrary, some are super exaggerated (the face). I like to keep adding shifts in hue to keep things varied, as opposed to having big blocks of the same color.

4) On a multiply layer I paint in the basic shadow patterns.

Go) I paint some orange junk to indicate a strong natural light source.

Six) I strengthen the hell out of that light source, ad I paint in a bit of sub surface scattering. I crank the SSS all the way up for his ears, because I always do that. I think I also paint a bit of ambient occlusion under his chin and in some of the other more recessed parts of his figure. I also start painting a subtle light source on his arm to flesh it out a bit

7) I don't even think there's a difference. What a stupid step.

Hachi) Smoothed his shirt and started defining his jeans.

9) Paint his hand and hair, continue refining things here and there. It's a little hard to narrow down what I did because after step 4, I'm spastic as hell with my approach.

Sixteen) I add minor touch-ups that nobody will notice, and add the claw scratch thingies cuz they're KOOOOOL. Annnnnnd I'm done. No wait, one more thing. Ok now I'm done.

Bed Time doodle

quick speedie of Darkseid before going to sleep.

Clever Blog Title

I keep forgetting I have a blog, but I promise I'll start updating more often for all two of you that follow this. I graduated a couple of months ago, and have remained gloriously unemployed since. As time passes, it gets more and more frustrating because the seeds of doubt keep growing. Doubts about whether or not I have what it takes to make it in any one of the entertainment industries that I want to be in. Lucky for me, my stubborn-ness outweighs my fear because I still keep drawing and applying to different places. I don't have much else to rant about, but there are a couple links that I thought I'd post up that have a wealth of information about concepting and painting.

Color/Light/Painting stuff - http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm

Design Stuff - http://www.autodestruct.com/thumbwar.htm

I have to go surf my friends' blogs now. Here's some art.

Sticking to what I'm bad at

Over the last 7 or 8 weeks I've had an unusually large number of people tell me how much I suck at characters and how much better my background work is. Most of these people suggested that I work on my characters less and focus on my backgrounds more. This advice was both logical and well intentioned. I mean if I'm going to send portfolios out to companies in the hopes of getting hired, then I better send them some beautiful depictions of the things that I'm best at right? So I decided to go ahead and do the exact opposite. While I DO see the logic in strengthening my oh so "well-developed background muscles", I would be doing my happiness a disservice by neglecting to strengthen my ability to design characters. I prefer to tackle my weaknesses and bring them as close as possible to my existing strengths before going back to the things I'm better at. Over the last month and a half or so, I've been consistently sketching characters in my sketchbook and hitting up the life drawing sessions as much as possible in hopes of strengthening my weaknesses, which I think is my responsiblity as an artist. Above are the fruits of my labors. While I'm not even CLOSE to the level I would like to be at in terms of arting awesome characters, I think I've made some significant improvements.