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. :)

large flock guardian

More colour/background practice for what I've decided is going to be Colours And Backgrounds Month (am going to start picking something different to focus on every month so I can stay organized and on top of things)! I've started first doing underpaintings so I can figure out the general colour scheme of everything instead of getting overwhelmed when the time comes to fill it all in - seems a bit of a 'duhr' solution and it's a bit silly that I've only been trying it lately, but I'm glad I finally came around to it even if it took me a while. I've also become more brave about outlining background elements, I went in and refined the clouds after someone pointed out they looked a tad blurry.

The dog pictured is my Maremma Sheepdog character, Sirocco. I imagine he's scaring off a stray dog that got too close for his comfort, or something.



I should do some quick colour studies of photos and the view out my window and the like just to practice!

this is the life

First time I've completed a piece with these characters in it since... well, the thesis. My credits would have looked something like this if I hadn't been a sleepless apathetic wreck towards the end of it (or if I'd planned ahead a bit more effectively), little postcard-like images of Labu and the monkeys palling around the jungle. I've been actively trying to play more with colour palettes (since I've always been a bit tame with that) and push myself for more interesting images, and I'm proud of this one! Was good to revisit these guys again too (with an updated skillset!), even if I doubt I'll do much more with them.

More illustrations to come for sure, I still need more practice with them backgrounds and colours...

The Bunny That Fell To Earth

Tribute art based on Naughty Rabbits, an iPhone game that I designed the characters for!



If you have an iPhone or iPad, check this one out. It's based around the myth of the rabbit in the moon from traditional Chinese folklore - apparently that rabbit's extended family is misbehaving and attempting to free-fall down to earth, and you have to help them get back home! I can't post any concept art I did for the game just yet, but once I get the green light I will probably do so here!

I've been trying to get back into drawing full backgrounds, I realized I haven't really finished a picture with a background since my thesis, and that's a little sad! I have a work in progress that I'm thinking about livestreaming sometime tomorrow... I'll post on my otherwise rather dusty Twitter account when the time comes.

some days I am motivated to create nothing but tributes to my favourite things in the world. this was one of those days:





(someday I will have a more photogenic workspace. and/or a better camera.)


got the idea to make these smash balls a while back, the technique from a good friend that once gave me some gem-magnets as a birthday gift! I made this batch as an experiment that turned out surprisingly well, but I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with them all now. magnets, bracelets, hair accessories, paperweights, could sculpt some characters to hold them, I definitely want to make a necklace for myself from one - agh the possibilities!

making fan-stuff is good for pushing oneself out of a rut. :D

purrrow

my favourite beasts and characters updates will return, promise, when I'm feeling less overwhelmed.

until then, I'm glad that an art trade with my good friend Natasha Fishman has jerked me out of my art slump. I've been scribbling around producing nothing much I feel is worth showing, and it's possible I just needed to do some relatively meticulous Photoshop inking for a change of pace and concentrate on details which I don't do often. Natasha's character S'daza the spectrum demon is certainly good for giving me details to concentrate on. she's more than a little catlike in nature and that was what I drew on for the pose etc.:



the inking was meticulous enough, but I got lazy with the shading as I am wont to do these days and messed around with layer styles instead of being proper about it. e_e;

on a lighter note, I recently received my Sketchbook Project sketchbook in the mail! the theme I chose is 'prehistoric', and I look forward to doodling plenty of awesome primitive fish, mammals, and dinosaurs in the weeks to come. :) I've opted for my sketchbook to be digitized, makes sense since the people I hold dear span at least two continents, but I might post any pages I'm particularly proud of here.

chiquito

I've been busy with life things and really got behind on my animal/character of the week drawings! for now, have more sketchy impressions of my boyfriend's chihuahua, Gonzales. I coloured my favourites. maybe I'll make a little animated cycle for him sometime..

fiddlesticks

Fiddler crab, suggested by my good friend Tris. I've always loved these guys since I was a kid, definitely one of the most charming crab species out there. I really liked the colours on this one so I used that to choose a colour scheme. This one's a super quick Photoshop painting because I am having to prepare for a hurricane.



I'd love to draw more arthropods in the future, they've always intimidated me with their complex exoskeletons and I'd like to find a nice balance between realistic and cartoony for them. We'll see how that goes...

gourmet race

super quickie because I'm busy this week, but I'm happy with how it turned out. I don't normally get this bold with bright colours!



I was just going to be cheap this week and draw Kirby (for those who don't know - my favourite video game character of all time, and that is a big deal because I don't usually just have one favourite anything), but he's shown up in my blog/sketches so many times already it seemed pointless to use him for this project. I then figured I'd just draw a character from the Kirby series but I couldn't decide on whom. I like King Dedede and Meta Knight, of course, but wanted to pick someone that's less prominent in the franchise if I could. I like a lot of the enemy designs, but couldn't think of one that really stood out to me until I got to this guy!

I'm not really sure why I like Chef Kawasaki so much, honestly. He's an orange blob that can cook, great stuff. Oh, and when you eat him he gives you the power to destroy all enemies on screen by sucking them into a giant pot and cooking them up (sound familiar, Brawl fans?). That has to count for something.

have you ever seen a cephalopod fly?

Second entry in my Friday's Beast project, the aptly-named Dumbo Octopus, one of the most adorable molluscs in the world even by normal-people-that-don't-think-molluscs-are-cute standards:



Those "ear" fins aren't just for decoration of course - they help the octopus move around in the water. I'm assuming they can change colour like most cephalopods, since the images I found of them varied hugely in colour. I really liked the colouring this guy and this guy had, so I went with that for inspiration. Check out this video of one and you can really see why they picked the name. Adorable!


Not much is known about these creatures, like most deep-sea animals, but I hope that will change in the future. Deep-sea creatures are awesomely weird and I'll definitely be drawing more in the weeks to come!

you don't scare me

I was hoping to finish this game before I drew this but since that probably won't be for a while:



Here's little miss Sakamoto from Cave Story, who's already one of my favourites! I love how scrappy she comes across so I had to draw her all messed up but still ready for action. :D

If you don't know what Cave Story is, it's an indie 8-bit styled free-to-play platformer made completely by one man, Japanese developer and artist Pixel.. The designs are appealing, the story is really engaging, and it's just a lot of fun! I also think it's super cool that Pixel has kept it free to play online even though it's now out for download on the Wii, and soon to come to the 3DS (but I recommend playing it on the PC first and foremost, since Nintendo did change some things in their port and I'm always for experiencing something as the artist intended). If I've piqued your interest at all - and I hope I have - do check out the game here! I definitely recommend it.

I was trying to incorporate some background references to places in the game, but it wasn't working out so I went with my original simpler idea. Not the most interesting image in the world but I'm trying to make more complete images instead of just having a character on a blank background. Starting to get more into it, I think!

silky anteater

Fridays are now Draw An Unfamiliar Animal day, and for my first outing I've picked the Silky Anteater. Love these guys:



They hail from South America and are the world's smallest species of anteater - one can fit in your hand (so naturally I had to draw one with a Giant Anteater which is about the size of a large-ish dog, and also an Unfamiliar Animal so forgive its quick-n-dirty quality). They're nocturnal and arboreal (live in trees, you can tell by those feet and the prehensile tail and how tiny they are). They also supposedly camouflage themselves by living in silk-cotton trees and looking like the seedpods, because as their name suggests they're pretty fuzzy.

I love their little weird claw-hands! Here is a photo of one being cute (or not, depending on what you find cute. I find certain insects and baby Aliens cute over labrador puppies, so I'm willing to accept that my tastes might be a little weird). You can really see why one of their other names is 'two-toed anteater'.

I think my favourite drawings are the two on the bottom right corner, I think those capture the look of the animal best while still being a little stylized. I'm getting better at 'getting' an animal from references, though - the key thing for me is not to get too bogged down in details and try to get the shapes and proportions right first, as well as how the anatomy works - which is key for drawing different poses. Video reference would be the best thing for that, but that's hard to find for these guys since they're rarely seen as it is. :[

Anyway, I would very much like to finish a full image and make some better drawings of silky anteaters soon, but for now enjoy this quick sketchdump :)

ace spiritualist

What's up, internet! This week I've started a new personal project to get me to draw and post more, and I've designated Monday and Friday my special themed days for this (yes I know it's Tuesday, bear with me here. the hardest part of anything is getting started so better late than never x)).

Basically, every Monday I'll draw and put up a picture of one of my favourite fictional characters (well, ones I didn't create that is :B). Kicking off Monday's Character is Maya Fey from the Phoenix Wright games:



I like her because she's such a dork and likes food (both things that we have in common) and I like her design. She kind of annoyed me when I first 'met' her in the first Ace Attorney, but I've definitely warmed up to her since and it's weird whenever I have to solve a case without her. Her theme music is also lovely (♥), particularly when performed by an orchestra:


I do enjoy her and Phoenix's growing relationship (which I see as more sibling-type, btw, don't really buy the supposed romance... but then again I haven't played Apollo Justice yet, maybe I'll feel differently then. Also, please be a decent human being and don't spoil me). I love a lot of the characters from this series, so probably more will be upcoming on future Mondays.

Attempts at monochrome, hooray! This one's relatively 'normal' for me, but I'm hoping to get more experimental with these pictures in terms of colour, lighting, composition etc. which are things I'd like to play with more.

You guys can also feel free to suggest books/tv series/movies/games/comics etc. for me to draw from, and if it's something I haven't checked out yet I'd be happy to and see if I like anyone in it enough to draw them. What's in store for Fridays? Stay tuned... :B