Fairies WIP

Just slinging more paint around -- Hoping to finish it in the next day or two!

Close-up detail of the caterpillar-fairy

Staple: Independent Media Expo!

One of my absolute favorite shows of the year is coming up a couple of weekends from now -- STAPLE! Austin! 

It's an art show glorifying the self-published, the creator-owned, the dark horses, the weird and the wonderful from all genres.   Over two days you get to shake hands with comic artists, game developers, filmmakers, animators, and podcasters in rockin' Austin -- And I'm pleased to report that I was able to squeeze into a table setup with my buddies at CCP Comics, booths 73 & 74, so come out and say hi if you can!

Other folks for watch for?  In addition to the awesome guest-artists Francesco Francovilla & Chip Zdarsky and the game-designers from the lauded (and local!) Stoic Studio, you should also keep an eye out for the amazing designer/illustrator J Hause (who's hosting a digital painting demo, I hear!), cartoonist and caricaturist Jeremy the Artist, the playful character-work of Jessi Jordan, Jamie Kinosian's lovely watercoloring, and Kevin T. Chin's all-around amazingness.

Also look to Toni Shelton, to Emily Rose Romano, to Mark Nasso with Doom Ranch 5000, and Isaiah Broussard of Brass Comics fame with Transyltown!

Sorry -- That's a lot'a links, but there are a lot of great people to meet.  Hope to see you there!

Austin Zoo Sketching!

More life-drawing to report today -- This time, however, with some very different models!  I went downtown with a few friends to spend a few hours at The Austin Zoo & Animal Sanctuary, which is a great place to support and a great place to draw.  Animal drawing is, if you'll pardon the expression, a very different beast from human figure drawing -- Along with having to analyze and teach yourself whole different configurations of anatomy, you have to work really quick because it's entirely coincidental on the animal's part if it holds a pose for you.  It's great practice for control and accuracy -- Both of which I still need way more practice in, but that's why I was there.  Here are some of the more decent sketches to come out of the afternoon -- Hope you enjoy!

One day I'll find a way for these Col-Erase pencils to survive scanning...

Drawn with a Prismacolor brush-tip marker.  There was a lot of snoozing goin' on around 1:00.

Fairies Painting WIP

More progress!  There's still more to do on the headdress/saddle and the fairies are still just blobs of magenta, but things are starting to come together...

Figure Drawing, 2/11

1-minute poses

1-minute poses

Fairies WIP

Progress ~!

Austin Motion Artists Group animates "Mmkit" by The Octopus Project!

This is a project that I had the pleasure to work on a couple'a weeks ago!  The Austin Motion Artists Group, wanting to showcase and celebrate the local animation scene, organized an event in which a bunch of talent was corraled, each one given a beginning-frame and end-frame, who then had 48 hours to animate ~12 seconds of animation.  The final product came out pretty amazingly:

Austin Anijam 2014 - The Octopus Project "Mmkit" from Austin Motion Artists Group on Vimeo.

It's passed 100,000 views and now been labeled a Staff Pick on Vimeo, which I really kinda can't believe.  Watch and enjoy!

I was part of the crew that produced the segment with the 2d-animated cyclops and octopus.  We all came up with the direction together and then Ryan Cullen animated the cyclops, Louie Granda animated the octopus, I made animate'able assets for the environments and the explosion, and Willis Bulliner did the compositing. Awesome job, guys!

Figure-Drawing, 2/4

All figure-drawings were done last night  at the Austin Visual Arts Association!

1-minute gesture drawings

More 1-minute gestures..

The top pose was 5 minutes, and the bottom one 10.

15 minutes.