Design Test

I hope you're all enjoying the higher image-to-chat ratio lately. Want more talk? Even more images? Leave a comment!

I figured I'd post these screens sooner rather than later, since it's been far too long since I've posted any 3D stuff. This was done as an evaluation test for a modeling/texturing job, and I just finished it today. It turned out to be more fun than I thought it would, especially since I haven't done any modeling or texturing for ages. It took me a little while to get back up to speed, but once I got over a couple of little stumbling points it was all aces and apple pie :D

The Thermometer/Clock is at just over 500 polys, has 3 1024x1024 texture maps (colour, specular, and normal), and was done over the course of 2 days in approximately 9-10 hours. I was shooting for 8 hours or less, but ended up spending more time re-familiarizing than I'd hoped.

Wish me luck on getting the gig!

P.S. Didn't get the gig :( Not to worry though, for it's on to the next challenge!

Skate or Die...or paint?

Welcome to another installment of...Art on the run: The Dave Dind Story! *cheering and hooting*

Thank you...thank you...*bows* On this week's episode, I bust out some pictures of an old skateboard which I decided to redesign while I was in college. Through the use of pencil crayon, I layed out the new design in preparation for final painting. The final step of paint has yet to be applied.

This thing was fun to do. I can't recall exactly what made me sand down this old board at the time, but it was really cool working on something other than paper, canvas, or a tablet. The design was done free-hand on the board itself in light pencil first, and then I jumped into the pencil crayon pass. I finished it to this point in about 2 days; I even brought it into college with me because so I could continue working on it!

I've since bought a 99% blank board that was on sale (there's a small logo on it) and have been planning on sanding it down. I may try a different method this time though, as I have a lot more paint now than I did at the time that I was doing the other board. Also, since I've been with my girlfriend, I've learned a lot about planning things out further than I was used to before. So I'll probably do more sketches this time rather than free-handing straight on the board.

That's all for now, but thanks for tuning in! The story continues in the next exciting episode of...Art on the run; The Dave Dind Story, Part II. (Disclaimer: Not an actual show. Pleaese do not write to management complaining of lack of a real show...but do leave a comment!)

P.S. The board in the pictures is a really crappy one that I got when I was about 15, so please try to ignore the horrible trucks ;)

Rocking out for love

Is this Chris Cornell or is it me in 10 years?

I wish this drawing had a cooler origin, but I like it so here it is anyway! I was chilling out waiting for some pasta to cook while my mom was watching Ozzy kicking ass at some sort of charity concert on the tele. She kept commenting that Ozzy looked like he was really, really enjoying himself on stage and for some reason I was inspired to attempt to draw a guy rocking out. I had only intended to draw a dude's head, but once I had the head done the drawing just 'screamed' to be added to. A few hours later and here's what I ended up with! I noticed some stuff that could be fixed a little, but I wanted to post it now since it's still fresh. I'll see about colouring it, since I'm trying to learn to paint digitally again. We'll see how things go...

In other news, my girlfriend's tooth has been bugging her lately and today in particular she isn't feeling so hot. Since she's asleep and I'm up I decided that I would do something cool for her and surprise her in the morning with it. But you know what? She rocks so hard that I had to spin this drawing into that cool something!

For the past two years Jeanette, my lovely, lovely girlfriend, has been like a gift from the cosmos. She came out of nowhere, seems to have all the answers that I need, and she just exudes love and kindness like no one I've met before. She's helped me in so many ways that I've lost count, and she continues to push me forward every single day in some way. She's my greatest inspiration and the driving force in my life at the moment. I love her with all my heart and I hope that the universe is planning to help her out with her tooth a.s.a.p so that nothing will stand in the way of her being happy again.

I love you Jeanette!

UPDATE: I still have a lot to learn about painting digitally (or painting traditionally for that matter). I'm not super fond of the background, but it wasn't supposed to be the focus of the whole thing. I still kind of prefer the sketch version...but...Ta-da!

Ewwww!

I'd like to welcome Teeny the tiny streaking goblin to the blog. Teeny, say hello to everyo...UGH! TEENY! PUT SOME CLOTHES ON! COME ON!

...I did this little guy for another blog called Line It Up, where a bunch of friends from Seneca will be posting art for monthly topics. The topic this month is Halloween, since the blog went up at the end of October. I'm already excited about the next topic! (Shhh...I might even do another one for the halloween post!)

That's all for now!

Halloween is the best time of year

The E-Card (click to enlarge and see it animate!)

The finished cards, ready for printing


Sketches!

I love the atmosphere in October. All of the trees are dying and seem to be on fire with their display of reds, yellows, and oranges; the air takes on a decayed yet refreshing scent of change; and all the little boils and ghouls come out to terrorize the place! Dispite not being a big horror fan in general, I love halloween and all things horrible and ghoulish, which is why I decided that starting next year I'm going to begin celebrating halloween come October 1st. I've been disappointed with my halloween experience for the last several years, and I really want to make halloween something fun to celebrate again. It struck me this year that most people don't put up decorations until at least half-way through October, and most only do it a week or so before the 31st! Since I love all things fall/halloween, I've decided to create a new holiday: OCTOBERWEEN! An entire month of halloween! Yay!

On to the halloween cards!

Every year I get a really cool hand-made card from some of my family in England, be it for Christmas, halloween, or Easter. When I recieved my halloween card this year I decided to send them back an equally cool, hand-made card. I mean, I'm supposed to be an artist and all! So, I purposed the idea to my girlfriend and she jumped on board with some really awesome ideas. We ended up going with a playing card set instead of the usual folded card that you find at Hallmark (shudder - I really dislike store bought cards, but that's a story for another time), to spice things up a bit. We figured it would be cool to mess around with the face cards in a deck, and put a halloween spin on them! So what you see above is the end result. I did the Joker and the Jack, as well as the little suit graphics, and Jeanette did the King and Queen along with the bicycle card style backing. The project turned out better than I expected and I can't wait for our next project.

Stay tuned for sneak peeks at our next project: christmas cards!

Lates!

P.S. This is mainly for my own notes, but I want to say that I've just changed authorship of this blog over to my other gmail account. Nothing should appear to change on the front end, but in case something screws up, it's probably because of the change.

Bees and Bears

Character Model sheets for final 2D Animation project

Our very last animation project in 2D animation was finished-keys-only. This meant that we didn't have to do a million in-between drawings but had to have very nice keys. Since by then I knew that I wasn't going to be a traditional animator, I was looking forward to this assignment because it allowed me more freedom to create the characters and put more effort into the keys, which was the one aspect of actually animating that I enjoyed. I was happy with the end result and had fun with the project. It was nice to have a final bit of inspiration/invigoration after less fulfilling animation projects. I might even scan in the frames and make a .gif animation so that you can see what it looked like in motion!

I stumbled on the images above on my external hard drive and figured that they might as well see the light of day instead of just sitting in the dark of my backup drive.

Au revoir!

Cocka-doodle-doo!

Rooster circa 2006-2007

This painting was done for my friend's mom. Sometime during summer of 2006 she surprised me with some art supplies that she'd picked up from a mega-sale. She didn't ask for anything in return save for maybe a small painting. I started it that same summer but wasn't able to complete it because I had to focus on my final year at college. At any rate, I finished it up the other day and gave it to her for her birthday. She liked it :) In fact, she wants another piece to go with this one. Since I'm currently in job-seeking/stomach-mending mode, I should have some spare time to actually finish it soon. The one above was only 8x10 inches, and I plan on doing the second one at the same size. So it shouldn't take forever.

I'd love to hear some comments from any painters out there. I really want to improve my painting ability, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

P.S. The image above is a scan of the painting, so it's a bit crappier looking than it does in person.

Read a mother*&$%ing book

Is this the future of my children's reading experience? Will they never know the love of a good old smelly print-based book? Screw-em'! E-books rule!

Long story short, I'm into E-Books. That's right; the man with the shelves buckling under the weight of his book collection scours the net for e-books. Free-books that is.

Sometime last week I stumbled into a forum chat titled "What are you reading?" and came away from it with a list of about 10 new, very interesting sounding books. Amoungst the list of books was one called Accelerando, which I found out is available to download as an e-book. Since the book sounded cool, I decided to check it out. A week later and I've stumbled into a wealth of copyright expired e-books! I tell ya, I'm in freakin' heaven.


There are even two still-living authors that have made some of their work available for free. And they are:

Peter Watts
Charles Stross (Accelerando Author)

Today I happened upon the daddy of all e-book sites, that I've found so far anyway, and it's called "Project Gutenberg", where there are over 20 000 copyright expired books! It's AMAZING.

All I need now is some kind of Palm Pilot or something similarly small and pocketable so I can take these new books with me wherever I go! Yay!

...I can't help but feel though that all of this is evil and will somehow spin out of control the way technology usually does in almost all of my favorite sci-fi books...I'm probably just reading too much Hard SF.

If anyone knows of a site that contains really good Hard SF or just general Sci-fi e-books, please let me know! I'm on the hunt :D

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In other news, I've changed my website around some since my last post, so if you're in the mood, head on over there. I even made a favicon today. I'm overwhelmed with emotion *sniffle*

Okay! I'm out again for now! Lates!

P.S. I might be moving my blog over to my host soon, but I'm not sure if I actually will or not. I have to do some research first. Check back soon!

Brand New Website

I went and did it: I've got myself a REAL fancy-shmancy website! Of course I couldn't have done it without my wonderful girlfriend, who spent hours creating the code that would actually make it exist at all! Check it out here, or follow the link to the right in the future.

I'll still be posting work to this blog, since my official site is more of a portfolio for now, but check the new site often as I might add work there that doesn't end up here.

If you do drop by the new site, please drop me a line (in a comment here or email me) and let me know what you think! I'm going to be adding to and improving it over the next while, so all critiques are welcome.

I hope everyone's having a great summer!

Catch ya later!

Dave Guest stars on the Simpsons!

The fellow above is supposedly what I look like as a simpsons character. It's missing some stuff, but it was the closest I could get from the choices on the Simpsons movie site. I only wish I had a badass 3-eyed fish shirt in real life! Turn yourself into a Simpsons character!

I have some odd doodles that I can post up here, but I have to scan them first. I hadn't really thought that far ahead with this post :D

I'll see what I can do, especially since I didn't post anything after John Nevarez linked me off of his blog! Vas und honour! Thanks Monsiour Nevarez!

Bye-bye for now!

Franklin Booth

My Tribute to Franklin Booth

Well...I'm finally done with Animation at Seneca! It's been really tough at times, but I mangaged to make it through. I've learned a lot about art, animation, myself, and people in general over the past few years. My final "year" was 3D Game Design, which meant that almost all of my time was spent in front of a computer staring at either Maya or Unreal Editor 2 (yay both!). However, that left little time for me to sit down and draw like I used to in 2D. Since I'm done and (sort of) have time to myself, I managed to sit still for about an hour or so with my girlfriend out in the backyard and do some drawing. She was painting and I wanted to try to be like Franklin Booth, an American illustrator that I found out about on the Lines and Colours blog a while ago. His work was all done in pen, and he has been praised with the ability to "paint" with a pen. I happened on a book of his at The Beguiling, a great comic shop here in Toronto, last week. Check him out, you won't be sorry!

Instead of sitting around waiting for companies to call me with a job offer so I can work on a game, I decided that since I'd already been part of a Mod, why not do another one! I've rallied together some of my classmates and we should have a project set within the next 2 weeks with any luck. I really can't wait to get back into production!

Speaking of mods, we've been having some issues with creating the UMOD installer, but it should be totally finished by next week. We'll have a site up shortly after that, which I'll link to here, so that you can check it out for yourself! Huzzah!

Catch you later!

Demo Reel

Abstract 3.0

Abstraction

The past week has been fairly traumatic brain-cell wise. We've just started the wheels rolling on a major project at school, and by Friday I was out of it. I took some time off to chill on Saturday, and then today's been about trying to get stuff done for the project...

To help cool down the mush in my skull, I did a couple of digital abstracts in Open Canvas 1.1. I was on the BlueSky Challenge Blog the other day and one of the challenges was to do an abstract. I guess the idea stuck in my brain. Although I've also been reading Life with Pablo, which is about the ten years that Francoise Gilot spent with Pablo Picaso. So old Pab has been in my brain lately too.




These were pretty fun to do, so I might do some more soon if I can. I took a lot of inspiration from Andrew (Andriod) Jones for the first one. It also followed a theme that I've enjoyed doing in the past; sharp circles.
The second one was inspired by a the colour of a picture I took a while ago. Also had a bit of Andriod in there as well with the 'buildings'.

Comments are welcome as always!

Lates!

Kicking off the New Year

This post is mainly for my Dad (who is a Drummer/musician), but everyone else will probably enjoy this video too. So Dad, IF you manage to access my blog again, I hope that you get a kick (buh dum bum) out of this video!


More art coming soon!!


Happy Christmas to all, and to all a Happy New Year!