A Lark in the Park

I lucked out this year with the most awesome film team. Marc Thompson animated the blue bookworm, and Jon Gardner animated the big guy with the butterfly net. They were a joy to work with. While none of us have any strong ambitions to do hand-drawn animation for a living, our project still came out pretty well.

We were given a limited set of character designs to chose from, and the beginning of a scenario: one character is wooing another, and the third gets in the way. How, where, and why any of that happens was up to the team to decide. All the frames were drawn by hand, scanned, and then colored in Toon Boom. I animated the purple woman and painted the background in Photoshop.

Will Fain Model

Well, here's how my first human in 3DS Max came out. A lot of learning happened, that's for sure.

Phorbas of Argos, Armored Satyr

The idea here was that the creatures of Greek myth stuck around and were simply incorporated into the societies which developed in the Mediterranean after the fall of Rome. I placed this guy roughly in the period of the early Crusades, which gave me some liberty to mix and match periods of armor. He's a mercenary with a collection of pieces picked up along his journeys. 

When it came to the animal anatomy, the biggest challenge was getting the right mechanic without making him look dainty and unstable. He's supposed to be a warrior, after all. For that, I looked at the chunky hoofs of Clydesdales and beefed up the leg muscles accordingly.  

Polly Watson

My inspiration for Polly was the golden era of movie musicals, specifically a book I'd been reading about the backstage culture on the sets. As opposed to the typically quiet and good-natured backup dancers, "the knitters," whose body shapes and measurements are all uniform within a very specific range, Polly is a leading lady, and her forms are more extreme and exaggerated. As soon as she walks into a room, you can tell that she'd never fit in with the chorus line. Despite her talents as a dancer, her career will not last long because of her spoiled diva attitude, racy costume choices (Bare navel! In the 1930's! Scandal!) and tumultuous attempts to seduce the film's producer. 

Will Fain Concept Art

This is the concept art for my first human character to be modeled in 3DS Max. The face and proportions are modeled after my friend Will, and the character design was inspired by the story and world-building of Janelle Monáe's albums, The ArchAndroid and Metropolis. It is a retro-future in which it is possible for an android to be persecuted for falling in love with a human. While I didn't invent the concept of an electro-dagger, it was fun to imagine what one would look like.  

Character Design of Joni Johnston

This character design is based off a good friend of mine. I wanted to play with proportions and shapes while clearly expressing her personality and style.  

Sparky the Digger

Library Table

Spooky Castle Matte Painting

Day-to-night.

Alien!

 

I referenced various of bugs and creepy-crawlies to design an alien that would wig me out if I were the one trapped alone with it on a spaceship. I also had fun with custom brushes and grungy textures for the worn industrial interior.

Armored Snout Badger

I set out to design a fictional but mechanically-plausible digger, so I mashed up features from some of the world's best dirt-movers: the mole, pangolin, anteater, and badger.

Pen & Ink Costume Portrait

One of my cosplayer friends was gracious enough to pose for me. 

Maskerade

Golden Beets

Watercolor over Gesso

White Charcoal Pencil on Black Paper

We got these gorgeous golden beets in our weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share, and I was way more excited about painting them than eating them.

I did the white-over-black gesso underpainting first, intending to add color over the top. But then I liked in it black and white so much that I did an extra white charcoal drawing on black paper so I could have it both ways. 

White Gesso over Black Gesso on Illustration Board - Underpainting

Fuchsia

Model Stairs

Check out these fun stairs! I used to do a lot of scale model work back when I was a scenic designer, but these I made on a whim just to play with geometry in space. 

1/4" = 1" scale. 2 1/4" tall. Balsa wood struts, cardboard plus card stock base, and the treads are made from the frosted plastic cover of an old notebook.

Tree Rescue Pencil Test

Here's a pencil test I did with Ariel Gitomer. We collaborated on the story and split up the characters. She designed and animated the little girl, and I did the cat doll.

Bananas

Some Fun

Look, I'm a walrus!

Fear & Sadness

Fear 17" x 9 1/2"

These from-life self-portraits were meant to depict the specific emotions of fear and tragedy. Fear went fairly well, but I just couldn't get a handle on tragedy. My drawing only expressed sadness. 

Later it dawned on me: I had failed to sufficiently define and understand my terms. Tragedy is a concept that can only apply to circumstances or situations. An event within a narrative can be tragic, or the whole narrative can be tragic. One can have an emotional reaction (like sadness or catharsis) to tragic event, or feel emotions (like self-pity, despair, or anger) about falling victim to tragic circumstances, but tragedy itself is not an emotion. It is a characteristic of a narrative. Without a story, there can be no tragedy.

So without a narrative, my drawing was doomed to fall short of "tragedy" and became "sadness" instead. So there it is. Enjoy.

Sadness 17" x 11"

A Tale of Two Tealights

I wanted to tell a story with my props, so I ended up recreating that scene from Titanic with candles.

Lampshade with Vase

Ian's Feet

Chopsticks

Shadow Puppets

Skin Tone Painting Challenge

I'd been doing exceedingly well in painting class, so the professor pulled me into her office one day and told me to really stretch and challenge myself on the next assignment, our first color study of skin tones. I ended up spending something like 8 hours shriveling in the bath.

This was a challenging painting for many reasons:
1. While I support the idea that if you're going to regularly ask someone else to pose nude for you, you should be willing to pose nude for yourself at least once, I was also very aware that I'd have to present it to a class of my peers. Bad body image and insecurity about whether that was an appropriate choice for a professional environment plagued me the whole time. I purposefully didn't leave myself enough time to do a second painting to ensure that I'd follow through with my original plan.

2. Any painting where a subject of that scale starts that close to the eye is going to be a perspective nightmare. It is pretty much impossible to use the standard proportion-measuring tools, and it is really easy to get a wrong impression about relative sizes due to the fact that you're translating spherical vision to a flat canvas. This isn't as much of an issue when the subject is further away because you're dealing with less distortion: the smaller the picture plane relative to the total surface area of the visual sphere, the more it resembles a flat plane.

3. To further complicate things, I wanted to play with warm and cools to set up contrast between the wet and dry bits. I started with hot water so that my skin would warm up, both literally and in color terms, but I was in there so long that my water kept cooling off, which would change the skin color.

4. Physical limitations of painting in the bath. I'd secured the bottom two corners of my painting board to either side of the tub, and I ran a big duct tape loop up the back and fitted over the tap. I had a whole set-up of tubes and mixing trays along the edge of the tub and on boxes within reach, and I tried really hard not to splash or drip when getting in or out of the water.

While I don't think I'll be doing any more paintings like this again, I'm glad I tackled it this one time.

Fun with Apples

Bath Time

Anatomy of the Hand

Egg with Pyramids

Stylized Self-Portrait

Happy Thanksgiving!

Enjoy this tasty mixed-media cheesecake.

Old Main

This is a top-floor room in Old Main, a building on the Macalester College Campus in St. Paul, MN.