poké dump

Work has been consuming me but I've been trying to keep drawing for myself on the side when I have the time and energy (now I'm on vacation though so I should have a lot more time to art!). Over on my tumblr I've decided to take up some drawing/fandom challenges, and the topic of the month for December is my old friend Pokémon!! It's cool to revisit some of these old designs I've been familiar with for over ten years, with a new set of skills and ideas.

Here's a collage of what I have for about half the month. I've been trying to do something different with each one. It's fun to experiment!

Samurai Chinchilla - Ringo Animation Test

Go figure, the day I start planning to do some projects of my own some unexpected stuff happens and throws everything for a loop. x_x Long story short: I was forced to move on very short notice and the past month and a half since my last post on blogger have been occupied with finding a new place to live and settling in. Thankfully the worst is over and I can finally get back to things like Skyrimdrawing for myself again!

First though I'm very excited and happy to finally be able to share this! I've been working on a project helmed by the talented aficionado of all things cute and cuddly, Kristine Marsh - her pitch pilot for Samurai Chinchilla, which will hopefully become an animated series in the future! This has been in development for quite a while and now it's all happily starting to come together.

This is an animation test that I did so that Kristine could try out the look and style of the cartoon. I love the concept and Kristine's character designs are too much fun to draw, so it was a pleasure to animate the main character Ringo! His voice actor provided a great performance and gave me a lot I could work with. :) I did the test in Flash - I work digitally these days for the efficiency and convenience. Here is the rough version:

And here's the finished test! I did clean up the drawings myself, but Kristine and her team polished it and added shadows. Also featuring a fabulous background drawn by my boyfriend Giorgio! Hooray for collaborations :D

If you like what you see and would like to support this idea, VOTE for Samurai Chinchilla in the 2012 Animation Magazine Pitch Party! And if you use Facebook, do visit Samurai Chinchilla's page and 'like' it to be kept in the loop for updates - a Kickstarter campaign and an artbook are in the works! Kristine is currently having an open fanart call for the artbook, so if you're inspired enough to draw fanart, feel free to send it her way (her contact info should be on the facebook page, but let me know if you need it). I hope to see little Ringo and his friends someday make it to the small screen for the kids of the future (and adults alike) to enjoy :)

MOTORCITY PREMIERE

Quick 'n dirty fanart of Mike and Chuck in honour of MOTORCITY premiering tomorrow!! I've been busy lately doing cleanup on this show and am proud and happy to be able to call myself part of the team along with no shortage of talented and hardworking people. :D

I'll be drawing the rest of the characters eventually but this will do for now. WATCH THIS SHOW GUYS, it is beautifully animated and a lot of fun, and the first episode is available for free download on the iTunes store!

I'm struggling to make drawing for myself a habit again (before I was unmotivated because I was stressed and not very happy, and now I'm just really busy), but I think I'm settled in enough at my job to start trying new things of my own again. Excitement!

Vote for Wishful Drinking!

The film that my friends and I made, Wishful Drinking, is now online! We made it in about twelve days for the 2012 Animation Race competition, and I'm pleased to announce that we're among the top six and eligible for the audience's choice award. :D If you watched the film and liked it, please VOTE FOR US! The other films can be viewed here.

a rain of rabbits

The developers of the Naughty Rabbits iPhone game have given me permission to post art done for the game online! I thought it might be fun to do a post showing the progression of the designs, so here we go.
Here's my first pass at trying to pin down a design style for the basic 'baby' rabbit. The client told me to have fun with it and I tried to vary the styles. I think the second one (light purple-blue) is probably closest to 'my' style on this!

The third design (light blue) was eventually chosen to be developed further.

After some back-and-forth, a pose was settled on and eventually worked into the final design. Working so that the designs would still look good at a tiny size and keeping the overall design as 'square' as possible was a challenge, but a suggested fix to the ears did the trick.

Some ideas for the 'Zippy' rabbit character. Since the other rabbit designs are very curvy (and I draw mainly with curves and round shapes in general), I tried to do something different by making this one more angular and pointy. This design was rejected for something more 'cute', but I still quite like these. The little guy on the bottom was made into the 'Happy' rabbit character, and I hardly made any changes to him at all.

A 'cuter' Zippy design, plus some ideas for the Greedy and Sleepy rabbits. Greedy Rabbit was supposed to have sticky fur with sugar and sweets stuck to it. Definitely a challenge to try to convey that at a small resolution!

Final design for Zippy, trying out various ways to place the Chinese character ('flight', both traditional and simplified). They went with the one on the far right.

More final ideas for Sleepy Rabbit:

Final designs for Greedy Rabbit. I gave him a mooncake to munch on since those are sticky, Chinese, and connected with the moon, much like rabbits are in Chinese folklore. Final-final design is on the right; though the pose and such on the left were approved, I thought he could look more appealing so I 'cuted' him up a bit.

And here are the finished designs all vectored up, plus the logo/title of the game:

hold my heart

Valentine's Day seemed like a good enough excuse to doodle up a quickie of a couple much-loved characters that I hadn't drawn in a while. :) ♥ I hope you got to spend it with someone that loves you and that you love, no matter what your relationship might be.

yummy bunny

Okay, one more new year's dragon picture because I'm just that happy it's here. I won't miss you, 2011, and I know for a fact I'm not the only one!

dragon splash

Hooray, new updated layout and blog address! I've thought it was time for a change for some time now, so the new year seemed as good a time to get that going as any. I wanted to draw something for the year of the Water Dragon and I felt like using real media, so here's a quickie:

I don't think I announced it here, but I have a tumblr blog now! It's pretty much going to be exclusively fanart and fan-imation. I'll probably still post the odd fanart piece here if I'm proud enough of it, but the majority of it will end up over there. I'm not that fond of how tumblr is set up, but I figure it's a good place for fan-stuff.

I also sent my Sketchbook Project sketchbook off today! My theme was 'Prehistoric' and it's going to be digitized and displayed at the Brooklyn Art Library. Since it's going to be scanned and made viewable online I didn't scan all the pages, but here's the cover and a baby Protoceratops as a sample!

That's all for now, but I have a feeling this year is going to be a good one for art and animation. :)