Animal Drawing Workshop

Hey cats!
For those of you that are unfamiliar with David Colman, here is his blog:

http://davidcolman.blogspot.com/

In case you couldn't tell, he's really f'n good! He's also a great teacher and he's holding an animal drawing workshop on January 30th and 31st. It's $200, $175 if you're one of the first five people to register.

Anyway, I've taken his class twice and his animal workshop once and I say it's totally worth it. Not only is it good practice, but one-on-one time with David is priceless. He'll point out exactly what's wrong with your work and show you the best way to fix it.

The improvement in my art since leaving LMU is 80% because of Colman (20% Kevin Chen, who is also awesome). So in case I was too subtle, you should sign in to David's workshop! If you're interested, shoot him an email at dcolman27@hotmail.com

-JJ

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! [Even if you don't celebrate it!]

-Lis

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Hope everyone has an awesome holiday and eats lots of candy!

(Sorry for the double post for those of you who also check my blog!)

A tough act to follow

Yes, I know, I know. Down to the wire and last minute, but MERRY CHRISTMAS kids! Know that all you LMU peeps inspire me on a daily basis so THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! So keep it up and digital hugs all around.

Some Christmas Shit 4 U...

So I actually did this illustration about a year ago as a commissioned piece for my friend/coworker, Sam Schoeman. It serves the purpose of being his family's Christmas card. I know it's super hokey, but Scott Schweigert insisted that I post Christmas thing on my blog. Actually it turned out he wanted more than just that, but here's my half-ass response to his request. Merry fuckn' Christmas, Schweigert.

vision impeared

digital doodle

had some free time at work and made this

Awesome movie score blog...

I found this really cool blog that posts nothing but movie score pieces each day. Ya might find it useful or inspiring - I hope, one or the other, you do!

Movie Score(s) a Day Blog

Peace.

While we're at it...

Dave posted John K's new blog lessons, and I thought since we're on John K, I thought I'd share with you one of his past posts I found very useful and eye opening...Hope you can get something out of it :)

-J

Something to take a look at

So John K. put together another blog. This one is just a collection of his lessons from the other blog. Check it out.

http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/

Hey guys!
Here's what I turned in for my Character Design final project.

As I said before, I decided to re-design the Power Rangers for a Steampunk world. Enjoy!






Please leave me some feedback!

-JJ

Will post something less morbid next time :)

A few days ago, I accidentally swallowed a detergent chemical (long, boring story) and for about 3 minutes, the hardest, most surreal 3 minutes of my life, I thought "shit, this is it (?!)"

My initial ignorance about what I swallowed definitely made it more acute. Turns out it was just a shampoo mix (and that makes me feel like a sissy.)

The worst that happened was an upset stomach. And this little thing I drew the day after, when I was trying to put some form to that surreal feeling. Words couldn't describe it as well as the image - how true that seems to be most of the time...

I miss you all, I hope you're kicking ass @ school and otherwise :)

(p.s. I didn't pray for my life so I guess that might settle that "foxhole" question (?) )

There's something you should know...

its been a long time...

Worried about finding a job?

Hey everyone should check out this motivational story from Sherm Cohen. He has been doing storyboarding professionally for years and I had the luck of taking his class a few years ago..which helped me get my first job.


http://cartoonsnap.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-i-got-started-as-professional.html

If your feeling worried about finding a job read this.

-Mike

WIP: Character Design Final Project

Hey all!
Here's my work-in-progress Character Design final project. We had to choose a "fable" and put it into a different world. Some people are doing Hansel and Gretel in the Stone Age. Some are doing Frankenstein in the Medieval times. I asked if I could do something different, so I'm doing Steampunk Power Rangers.

I'll be doing three characters. Of the six Power Rangers I chose Tommy the Green Ranger and Kimberly the Pink Ranger. I figured that I'll be able to get the most character out of their interaction, since they're in love and all.

So far I've been focusing mostly on the two Power Rangers, feeling out that line where they're recognizable as Power Rangers but still very much steam punk.

A final note: these pictures represent me feeling out the idea, fleshing out the concept. That's why nobody is on model and why each drawing is different. It's kind of my thought process.






Finally here's a teaser for my third character:



Let me know what you think!

-JJ

No, I can't draw anything else.

Boom. Fbook Profile pic.



facebook.com/davidhammerfist

I just know you'll love this :)

A blog featuring pencil tests!

http://www.penciltestdepot.com/

Enjoy! :)

This isn't animated... I know, I'm shameless.

Admittedly this has NO ANIMATION in it whatsoever, BUT the video distortion effect was filmed off of one of the monitors in COM 118 back when I was a senior and there were crummy VCRs hooked up to them. I aimed a video camera at the TV screen while I messed with the BNC cables. I hope that satisfies anyone who might think I'm a total jerk for posting a video I threw together without ever touching pencil to paper... :D



I love all of you. I really don't see you guys enough anymore. 8{{

Oh and to Marni, there is a couple references to classical literature/mythology in this. Can you find them?!?!

Character Design Midterm

Hey chaps,
Here's my midterm work for Character Design class. I'm re-taking the class because it was so awesome, and I decided to re-work the characters I had for LAST term's assignment. Those can be seen here:

http://lmuanimators.blogspot.com/2009/08/character-design-projects.html

Big improvement, huh?












-JJ

Helpful

Hey guys. I found this to be helpful and I thought I'd share!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EsT-9crriY&annotation_id=annotation_420663&feature=iv

Swamped at work

Sorry for never posting, I've been swamped at work!! here is a cute girl head.

HAPPY HALLOWEEEEN!!!

So, Julio wanted to know how I put myself in a spider's web...
Easy!
...but stupidly time consuming.

First off, I had the idea.
Then I went around my parents house trying to film a black widow in it's web. Unfortunately they don't like people or lights so they all retreated to their hidey holes before I could get a camera close enough to them to video what I wanted. When I pulled apart one of their webs I flushed one out and it began climbing up the wall it's web was built at the base of. I managed to get a couple of really close up stills of it on the wall...

I thought ^this^ shot looked cool, so I decided that instead of using video of a spider I would make a puppet out of this image and move it around in after effects. I very carefully separated the spider from the background in photoshop.

I think little details are endlessly beautiful so I really took my time with this. These details never quite made it into the video because I ended up having render at draft quality in order to get it done in time, but I don't care because I really enjoyed this process. The front legs and pedipalps and mandibles were broken up into layers for animating in after effects.

Now I needed a web. Fortunately my mom had an old bag of fake spider web in her halloween decorations box. I stole it, stretched it in front of my bluescreen (which was already set up because I'm in the middle of shooting stuff for that bagpipe music video), shot a couple stills, and then wrapped some of it around a rolled up t-shirt for a cocoon.

The final element was me. This should've been lit better as it didn't key very well, but I was in a hurry and ultimately I just didn't care enough. Anyway here I am in front of the bluescreen, spider webs and blood on face, quietly lip-synching while my parents sleep blissfully and unaware of their weirdo son pretending to be eaten by a giant spider a few rooms over...

In after effects the webs were keyed and matted and layered to create the cocoon web environment that the spider and I would be dropped on top of. I later exported this background as a single photoshop layer to reduce render time (you know, so that after effects isn't running through the process of keying the SAME image for every frame of the video)

The plate of me was also keyed (crappily), matted, and layered in with the spider webs, with a couple layers over me to help blend it all in. The spider was animated with some really basic movement of the front legs and mandibles. I also goofed around with the puppet pin tool to give the other legs and the body some squirmy munchy movements, but I ultimately had to turn that effect off because the puppet pin tool vastly increases render times. So all you really see in the finished vid are some really basic front legs movements done by just rotating the layers at the joints.

The final step was layering on some other photos with good color texture to give everything that nice halloweeny orange/black lighting feel. I used this spider picture,

and this picture of the glaze from one of my pieces of ceramics,

The layers were both brightness/contrast and hue/saturation adjusted, the top one was set to 'multiply color mode', while the ceramic glaze one was set to 'classic color dodge color mode', and their opacity was animated (to make the lighting seem to flicker). Another almost white color solid was then layered on to highlight my face. The final color/lighting result looked like this:

Up until this point I'd been working in a big composition (1900x1700) so as to allow enough room to work with the hi-res stills. This big composition was then dropped into a DV-Ntsc comp and framed up. Unfortunately because I had removed all my puppet-pin animation on the spider the spider movement looked really simple and crappy, so I decided to frame tight so as not to show all the badness.

This comp was then exported while I slept for a few hours. When I woke up I took what was done rendering and edited it into my FinalCut sequence with all the footage of me tromping around in the park.

Hope you enjoy!

Whugh. Long post. Sorry to anyone who gets bumped off the front page by it. Hrm...

B.Ki! Animation

Hi Everyone!

We now have a blog for our thesis film! If you guys would like to see what we're up to, check it out. Not much is there now, but we'll have the animatic up very soon...We hope to also post pencil tests, concept art, and other good stuff. You can "follow" us and we'll try not to disappoint!

http://www.bkianimation.blogspot.com/

Thanks guys,

Kiki and Brendan

Gannondorf

I tried drawing Gannondorf from memory a few weeks ago at a dailies meeting. Not sure if this is right but i liked him...weird pig wizard

Dick Cheney

Just in time for Halloween, I present to you a MONSTER!!! I have also been people watching alot lately as well and even some animal watching (although sometimes I have a hard time distinguishing the two).

People Watching

Hey all,
I'm taking a character design class, and we had to do ten pages of people watching drawings. Here are some of my favorites!






For most of these I just plopped down at the Coffee Bean in Manhattan Beach. Is anyone interested in people watching next week?

-JJ

Figure Drawings!

Hey!

So the first class of David Colman's character design class was tonight. I'm taking it again cause it rocks so hard. We had a model for this first class, just to get us in the mood for drawing characters from life. This character happened to be dressed as a cowboy. It ruled. Here are some of my better pics from the night:

I've got some animals that I still need to upload, but a lot more are up at my deviantart:

http://jjconway.deviantart.com/

Lemme know what you guys think!

-JJ