Video Games Live 2008

Holy crap! It's been nearly 2 months since my last post?! Yipes. Well, I have a couple of things that I have to post here soon, but first some pictures from the 2008 Video Games Live show!

I mentioned VGL to my girlfriend a couple of weeks before the show, and since my birthday was coming up shortly, she ended up buying 2 tickets for us. It was one of the cooler birthday presents that I can recall. The show itself was great...lots of laughs and familiar songs! It was a treat hearing Tommy Tallarico speak between songs, and possibly funnier than it should have been watching him play guitar. Apparently, he looks like I do when I play Guitar Hero at home.

The three guys in the third picture above are (left to right): Jack Wall, Tommy Tallarico, and Michael Salvatori, one of the composers of the Halo soundtrack. I was most excited to watch Jack Wall conduct, as I'm a big fan of the soundtrack to Myst III: Exile (still have to actually buy the Myst IV soundtrack). During the intermission they displayed a 'loading' screen, which you can see in the last picture above. It was a nice touch.

Anyway, I'll post some art up soon and try to get some video of the VGL show on here too.

P.S. It was my first time at Massey Hall. I'm in love with Massey Hall...Don't tell my girlfriend.

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!