Useful links and whatnot

Running the animation club at my school the vice president and I thought it'd be fun to have an ice breaker drawing activity for the first meeting, so we had everyone write and animal object or emotion and it was drawn in pairs to get some crazy combinations, the time everyone had per was 5-10 minutes. These are the ones I doodled out. It was tons of fun and lots of silly characters appeared when you have to draw a pufferfish kick boxing kangaroo, rabid chicken elephant, philosophical platypus and tired turtle.

I'm also posting two illustration line art I did earlier this month. One was for my sister after we saw the Boondock Saints, the other was a world I thought up while waiting for a 3D animation to render.

 

Here's also some nifty links, and cool things to use.
City Generator for 3Ds Max

Swedish stop motion commercial

Making of the Swedish commercial

I've been studying German lately, after wanting to for some time, but I'm sad to find the site a friend told me about that was wonderful for studying is going to a subscription based service when it is user based content that's turned into study activities. It's already taught me a lot, reinforcing with the three modalities, so I'm debating whether or not to continue to use it. If you are interested it is iKnow.

Bike riding as a mode of transportation and enjoyment is something I fully support, it's wonderful to see the vast number of bikes lined in Europe as well as the bike lanes, but here it's somewhat prevalent, but wonderfully enough there is a Pittsburgh based organization who adds to the availability of bikes as well as how to take care of them.
Free Ride Pittsburgh

Projects galore!`

It's turing out to be a rather productive quarter, especially on the freelance front. I was asked to help with a number of outside projects from my teachers.

Mike Schwab, one of the animation teachers owns the Kensington Falls animation studio and hired me for a client based production as a background artist. It's tons of fun, and really good to do something different, since it's a very simple cartoony style. It's a secret project though so I can't post anything from it, sorry!

Another teacher, Jeffrey Condran asked me to illustrate for his (hopefully) soon to be published short story collection. A total of 9 short stories and one illustration for each. A great excuse to make something in traditional mediums again, I know I've been doing a ton of digital work and miss the fun of painting and colored pencils. Currently, I am creating the line art for them, after he approved the thumbnails.

Another, by a great old life drawing teacher who recently retired, Francis Pionati asked me to model an old fashion style pool table in 3D.

Keeping up with class and work is definitely a juggle, but one I have fun doing. Here's some recent creations.

Leitz Camera model for Digital compositing, I'm in the process of texturing it and prepping it to go into the scene.

 

Modular model of Pittsburgh's hot metal bridge

 

Concept and finished piece for our first ZBrush project to make a relief.

Possible site layout, working with different concepts, it'll definitely change from here.

Sketches of the New Year

Hallo and Happy New Year!
I hope everyone's holiday was wonderful, I was visiting my family last week just before the new school quarter started. So now it's time to be back in school for my 11th quarter at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

I'm taking Web animation, Digital Compositing, 3D character animation, and Digital Texturing and Sculpting. I'm real excited to see what adventures this quarter holds since the last was definitely quite the eventful and developmental time with tons of great projects and some good old networking at events. The highlight of them all was the Red Stick International Film Festival down in Baton Rouge, LA.

Here are some sketches from the past week that I picked out, a few drawn on my train ride home. Gotta love long scenic train rides through PA.