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