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!