Hooray! More animation magic from the team that brought you Wishful Drinking!

We originally made this to submit to an online sketch show, but it didn't quite make the cut (although we were told it made a lot of people laugh). It belongs to the internet now. Enjoy.

TEAM FRIENDSHIP IS:
Brian Kaufman
Natasha Fishman
Giorgio Renna
Tris Waples
Mallory Coronado
Emmanuel Espinal
and yours truly!

Women in Animation is hosting a Samurai Chinchilla event! I won't be in NY in time to attend, but if you're in the area, you should stop by. RSVP to Lisa Goldman at lisaggoldman@yahoo.com by Friday, May 3rd if you plan on showing up. Everyone is welcome, though a $10 donation is asked if you're not a WIA member. And do like or subscribe to Samurai Chinchilla on facebook to keep tabs on the project!

SamuChilla kickstarter goes live in May! I couldn't be more excited about working on this story and working with this crew. :D

I've been busy as of late freelancin' away and spending some quality time with my family! It's a little overwhelming to be self-employed after almost a year of working full-time, but I plan on making the most of it, beefing up my skills and starting some projects of my own if I can.

Here's something I've been working on for Little Fireface Project, the slow loris conservation group that I mentioned in an earlier post. They're putting together a children's book to educate young kids about lorises and the part they play in their native ecosystem, and I'll be illustrating it! The plight of the lorises is something I've grown to care a lot about, so I'm pleased that I get to help out these animals in my own way.

Follow Little Fireface on facebook to keep tabs on their efforts (book included)! They are an amazingly dedicated diverse group of people and are doing great things for these cool little primates.

Print I made for my animator friend Kaukab's kittie fundraiser! She and her husband have been actively going out of their way to rescue and place the many stray cats that roam their neighbourhood for years now, and because they will be relocating soon they have been raising money to send the entire colony to a cat sanctuary where they will be cared for. If that's not dedication I don't know what is!

They actually made their funding goal within a couple of days, which is astounding, but any additional funds donated at this point will go towards vet visits for the cats/be donated to the cat sanctuary itself, so - still a good cause, and you can snag yourself some awesome art to boot!

:)

Happy World Pangolin Day :DD !

Pangolins, as some of you may know, are an animal near and dear to my heart and one even starred in my college final-year animation short film. They're also known as 'scaly anteaters' (though they are no relation), and defend themselves by curling into a ball with the scaly armour on the outside - the name comes from the Malay word 'pengguling' meaning 'to roll up'. They're also very endangered because this defense mechanism isn't all that effective against humans.

The folks at Little Fireface Project - a slow loris rehabilitation effort - have been showing their support for pangolins by posting cute pictures of lorises and pangolins on their facebook page, so I thought I'd include some lorises in my tribute too. Both animals are severely threatened by illegal wildlife trade (and in the loris' case, the pet trade as well - think twice about the 'cute loris' videos you see all over youtube). They are also both native (well... one species of pangolin at least) to my region of the world - Southeast Asia.

It's amazing what people are doing to help these animals and I encourage you to check out both Little Fireface and Project Pangolin to follow them in their work, and find out ways that you can help too! At some point in the future I would love to organize a fundraising effort, some kind of art sale probably.

It's a new reel for a new year! Life has taken a bit of an unexpected turn recently, but I won't let any of it stop me from being productive. Here's to having twice as much stuff on here the next time January rolls around :)

animation reel 2013 from Shelley Low on Vimeo.

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.