CGMA Class!

So like I mentioned before, I've been taking James Paick's Environment Design for Entertainment 1 class.  It's been going pretty well and I've definitely been learning a lot and practicing things I would definitely not have practiced otherwise.  I thought I'd go ahead post up my first two homework assignments for you guys to see:

    It's been a struggle doing these outside of my normal job, but it's been insanely worth it.  The first two weeks have pretty much been focusing exclusively on composition, value distribution, and lighting.  I think I spectacularly failed in some of these areas and I think I succeeded in others.  I notice that I'm falling into comfort zones in terms of how I organize my values, but for now I'm going to try to just internalize the lessons and deal with repeating myself after I'm more comfortable with the material.

Training!

Been practicing a bit lately.  Nothing ultra sexy but I put together a 13 week lesson plan for myself, concentrating on studying a different topic each week.  In each week's folder I gathered the best tutorials, guides, demos and training videos I had to consolidate all the information in one place.  I'm more concerned with improving my drawing right now, way less concerned about painting.  It's been going pretty great  These are some of my Head and Hands studies!

Most of these faces look unfortunately dead and lifeless. I made the beginner mistake of sacrificing energy for the sake of attempting accuracy.

I drew over Glen Keane's Rapunzel sketches to try to get a good idea of how he was distorting the face to really get that powerful expression.  In some cases I altered what he drew depending on what I was feeling when I channeled the emotion of the expression, as opposed to just blindly tracing,

More dead faces. 

I think I learned my lesson a bit with the hands.  Still have a really long way to go but at least they don't look so mechanical and lifeless.

  I was planning on posting my progress every week, but my time to continue doing this will be limited because I just signed up for James Paick's Environment Design class!  The CGMA classes have a pretty good rep, and I've heard nothing but fantastic things about James Paick's class in particular, so I'm super excited to get started.  Ryan Lang highly recommended it in his demo, which pretty much was the final push for me to get on that. 

And finally, here's a random doodle that has inspired a whole new project!

This movie needs to be made!

Ever since I saw the concept trailer, I've been super excited for the Goon.  Adding the exciting idea of such a great comic being brought to life to the thought of David Fincher directing an animated movie, and I just can't help thinking" how can this movie NOT be made?"

I very strongly believe that if this movie gets the amount of funding it needs, it'll send a clear message to Hollywood studios that there IS a place for adult-focused animated feature films.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/624061548/the-goon-movie-lets-kickstart-this-

Experimenting

I just wanted to experiment with a more detailed but painterly rendering approach while retaining the exaggerated/stylized shapes.  I don't know why, but I get excited about painting rocks.  More experiments with this approach to come!

I bought a Cintiq!

I just bought a Cintiq and I wanted to take it for a test drive! I'm hoping this will mean a lot more art posting from now on! 

LEARNING HAPPENED (And another Justice League feature!)

Just trying to improve, slowly but sure. I've decided to do this exercise. I painted the face of an asian girl out of my imagination.

I knew I wanted her to have big lips and extremely prominent cheek bones, other than that I had nothin else in mind and went with whatever came to mind.

Next, I found photo reference and did a study of an Asian girl under similar lighting conditions. I used Grace Park because I'm a Battlestar Galactica nut.

Finally I did a third face, trying to apply what I learned from the study as much as possible. I think I learned a lot and I'm hoping the third face shows improvement from the first. I think this is a great exercise to directly apply what you learn from a study, and to help retain it by forcing yourself to see the flaws in your imaginative work and correct them.
I really recommend trying this out!  I'll be doing a LOT more of these


ALSO.  io9 posted about my JLA stuff, which is overwhelming me with geekout-ness.  There seem to be a lot of opinions about my stuff on there, for better or worse, but a lot of people have actually made some really good points about the flaws in my designs!  Anyway here's the article:

http://io9.com/concept-art/

Bleeding Cool News Feature!

I'm frantically posting this everywhere, not stopping to take a second to consider my lack of humility but I hope you guys will understand. My JLA designs just got featured on Bleeding Cool!  Being recognized on a site you've already been a gigantic fan of is a feeling I'm unfamiliar with, and I'm honored to see that the guys there and the forum posters seem to dig what I did.  A million thanks to everyone at Bleeding Cool for their appreciation!

The link to the feature