Music

This is the image I came up with for the challenge "music" posted on Illustration Friday this week.

Sketchbook

These are two recent sketches in my book. The top one is colored with gouache. I usually have a bunch of paints laying around my desk so sometimes I throw color on my doodles, and I liked the pastel colors on this one. The second comic sketch of the little guy taking a hike I just threw some digital color behind it to pop out the values a little.

Blur

So this illustration was supposed to be for the Illustration Friday challenge "blur". I didn't get in done in time during the week, and did not post it for the challenge. But I spent some time on it today and posted it here anyway. I like the series "Afro Samurai" and I thought I'd do an image where he is a bit blurred during a move. The red version is the one that I did for "blur". Then I kept going and recolored it just for fun. I like the way the face looked so I included a detail.

Thank You Card

I wanted to send a thank you card to to guys at Pixar who met with me and showed me around, and also the guy from Dreamworks who met with me. So I drew up this, I cut the card out in the shape of the border. Just a quick doodle really but it was fun to do. Apparently I'm a little fixated on robots, because as I look back through my posts there are quite a few robots.

Pixar and Dreamworks Visit

This last week my brother and sister in-law from San Francisco invited me and my wife to come out and visit them. The best part of this invitation is they offered to connect me with some of their friends, one works for Pixar and the other for Dreamworks. I was absolutely stoked to take them up on their offer, and could not wait to fly out and meet with these guys.

So on Monday I drove out to Emeryville and pulled up to the gates of Pixar. The security guard gave me the badge from the picture above and opened the gates for me to pull in. I went inside and met Jacob Speirs who is the Character TD at Pixar. He is a super nice guy. We ate lunch at the Pixar cafe, which is really pretty good food for cheap prices. Jacob invited his friends Lou, and Matt Nolte. Both super nice guys to. All three of them gave me a lot of great insight as to how they arrived at Pixar. After which Jacob gave me a tour around the studio a little bit. The building they have built for all these artist to come to work everyday and make these films is truly an amazing building. It just feels good in there. Visiting these guys at Pixar was a really cool experience.

On Tuesday I drove down to Redwood City and visited Greg Hart at PDI Dreamworks. He is the FX Lead. I went inside and signed in and the security gave me the badge from the picture above. I was also struck by the same feeling in this building. It felt like a great place to come to work. So I ate lunch with Greg at their cafe. Dreamworks food is really good and all free to. Greg is a really nice guy and he gave me a lot of great information about the industry, about working for Dreamworks specifically, and about how he arrived there. After we ate lunch he gave me a good tour of all the different departments, which was awesome because I got to see each departments workspaces. I especially enjoyed seeing the visual development art department where they had a ton of amazing process artwork on the walls.

I feel really stimulated by getting this chance to not only go inside Pixar, but Dreamworks too! It was really inspiring to see the homes for the creation process of the amazing films these studios make. And I really hope that someday I can work for a good company like one of these. Based on what they all told me it takes a lot of persistence and hard work to get there.

Flash Frames

These are single frames from both a walk and a run that I animated in flash a little while back. The actual animations bit the dust when my hard drive crashed along with a whole bunch of other things that I had not backed up yet. At least I found this snapshot of the designs.

The Breakdance

This is an old 3D animation short I did about 2 years ago now. It's not very good, the timing is all wrong, and the animation is fairly choppy (even considering he's a robot). But I spent quite a bit of time on it so I figured why not share it. Let me know what you think of it.

Unknown Soldier

I had this daydream about the fact that there are so many unknown soldiers, victims of war and such in our history. And I started sketching this spaceship with that thought in mind. I'm kinda a sci-fi nerd. When it comes to movies this genre is my favorite. I would really like to explore a short story of an unknown soldier (where possibly you never see his face), and have it be in a future sci-fi setting. Maybe someday.