Edward gets in the way

Can't stop thinking about Frankenstein!! It's terrible.
I just came up with the white-streaked idea for his hair. I think it's pretty cute. :3

A laboratory made for dangerous electrical equipment is just about the ideal playground for our Edward Hyde. (I guess Frankenstein is bringing some kind of ladybug back to life?)

No more character design homework....

This was the last assignment!
I think my computer coloring style is getting too polished-looking again. :\

I started work on a background for my film and I started to get nervous. What if I don't have enough time to finish everything???

I calmed down by drawing Frankenstein. I gave him a cute nose. :3

Underwater dinosaur

Sharks used to be my favorite animal, when I was in kindergarten.
All I would draw was sharks.
I'm sure I used to know their anatomy really well (no skeleton, just cartilage!)
They definitely didn't have mouths that look like this....

I always thought sharks were so cute.

Project: Learn how to draw good

In an effort to work a little bit on drawing less flat, graphic stuff, I was copying poses from the 1920 Jekyll and Hyde with John Barrymore.

I'm trying to get more of a range of expression into my Jekyll design. :|

I said no! please don't exist

At this time I would like to call out the school printer on its scheming schemes to make the colors on my storyboards look atrocious. They are. Not to say they look brilliant on the computer screen, but when printed out they look like they were painted using only primary blue and maybe some bright magenta. :(

I don't think I've ever posted boards here before! Well I finally got to posting them on my portfolio site:

So here they are :O

I went to the CTN Expo today! Conventions tire me out so much. 8| I'm not really built to be in big crowds each day, and I'm terrible at approaching people at booths at all, much less to shove portfolios rudely in their faces. If Reyna hadn't been there to shout down a retreating story artist, no way would I have talked to anyone at all. XD Although even without trotting around the showroom I got to swap portfolios with a lot of my classmates. :3 Having a bunch of Calarts people there made the atmosphere less scary for me....

But I did manage to get my confidence up enough to show my portfolio around! I got some good critique and surprisingly I felt my design portfolio got more critique than my story portfolio ffffffftwhut? D:

I'm gonna go ahead and attribute the lack of soul-searing criticism on my boards to beginner's luck. :| Granted, the only consistent critique I got for design was, "well, for our studio you'll want to have more characters with volume and less flat, graphic ones". I was like "ffffffffff I was TRYING for the past few months to work on that" and then I remembered that my largest design project for the summer was my Japanese sumi-e designs, which is like the flattest thing I've ever drawn, and I was like "oh".

The dumb thing is I don't think of my style as a terribly flat/graphic style. D: But I dunno, we had a great design lecture on Wednesday that focused on character design with an emphasis on strong draftsmanship so I dunno MAYBE I can work on improving that next.

Frankenstein's knitting club

A cute idea turned into a weird looking layout. D:



I think my problem with Mr. Hyde is that I'm too obsessed with how cool a character is to draw him properly. I end up doodling poses without putting any real thought into them, and then I have to make up the rest of the picture to fit.

BURD

Over the summer I had a brief sprint of designing a whole lot of birds, and I ran into a sort of wall where I just couldn't think up any more shapes--not that the ones I designed were so outstanding in shapes that they used up all the possibilities.....

But anyway, I was not terribly happy to get assigned birds for class, but I'm relatively satisfied with how these turned out. I'm not sure if I've improved much since the summer--I'm still having hella problems drawing owls. I don't know what it is with them. They come out looking all stiff when I try to draw them.

Knit knit knit

Somebody visiting this blog must think I only draw in black and white doodles.
This is not true.


I have actually been working on some drawings such as this:



but today
because it is Thursday
and life drawing is Thursday
and that zaps energy
today
I drew a certain scraggly old guy

He believes in a beauty

Quick Dionysus character design (as a girl). Dionysus is a girl because our model for figure drawing this week was a girl and I was being lazy. *cough*

Bjork's song "Venus as a Boy" is like my favorite song right now and I DON'T KNOW WHY. Maybe it's because I'm sick, but the odd mixing of Greek/Roman stuff and Indian sounding music is pretty right now.

DEAD OWL

Hey I'm posting the layout I did for my film this week and it's not in color because I suck and I didn't have time to finish it so that sucks.

That owl just went down. 8|
That owl is dead.
Mallory helped me make it look dead! (She draws dead things a lot.)

Unfortunately in making it look dead I'm afraid that it might have adopted a really weird silhouette. D: *confused*

I know we suffer for fashion, or whatever

I would be posting things from my film but I'm angry at Haruki (my main character) because he won't animate well not because his design won't work because his design is simple as hell but because I'm lame and can't translate what I see in my head onto paper (or Flash or whatever) and it looks like sucking!

So here's the lineup from my Jekyll and Hyde story, because that's apparently all I end up posting here. I would love to draw some scenes from the J+H roleplay I'm doing now, only my brain is too distracted by how much I suck at animation for me to think about that.

So in conclusion:

AGH ANIMATION. I don't GET it and the more that teacher tries to explain it to us (in that condescending way) the LESS I UNDERSTAND IT.

Aside from that, I have no outstanding complaints about this year. Madly busy, but it's mostly self-inflicted. Sewing my halloween costume this week on top of story homework, so let's hope I don't totally fail, eh?

DEAR GOLLY GOLASHAS

Oh hell, a lot to report. . . .

This week was mayhem! An unexpected drama during cube signups (and Joseph and my anniversary) luckily wielded a good result--Reyna and I got cube 36 (please visit us because we spend a lot of time painting it!)

Then there was SO MUCH MORE drama with the Freshmen cube sign-up . . . the upside of which was that I finally had those freshies in a captive area and could meet Sam and Mallory (whom I'd talked to before online) and also got to meet some other cool freshies. 83 I hope I manage to stay in touch with them because Lord knows how I tend to accidentally disappear into my hidey hole once the year gets underway.

Now. . . . as for classes.

I think I'm gonna have to drop Maki's. :\ I don't want to, since I want to improve my character design, but I took it already last semester, and the time spent in class tends to exhaust/depress me (some of those model sheets.....). Besides, I can always take it next semester. I'm considering just bugging one of a billion people I know into telling me their homework assignments so I can do them on the side.

BUT I don't feel comfortable doing that until I know what the heck is going on with Directing for Animators. Is it cancelled?? Is it not cancelled?? Dear God adjusting to new schedules freaks me out. I'm not sure if I should go searching out a replacement class but ack there's just another hassle.

I had a spaz attack this weekend because I was trying to do this thing where I would wait to do homework until I had time in my cube, but I started freaking out over the idea of not having homework finished.

So I saddled down and finished all my homework today at my computer because I am a nerd. 8| Also I had nothing else to do. Dear God I had nothing else to do, except perhaps spamming the boyfriend with increasingly whiny nervous text messages.

In lighter news, one of my layout class goals is to somehow design a layout for the first song in The Broken Bride: "I crashed before the birth of Christ, pterodactyls swarming. . . ."

Dream~

Just moved into my new place . . . not used to sleeping in new rooms, am feeling a bit homesick. D: Transition periods treat me badly, and I'm lucky if I can scratch out even little comfort doodles.

I DID feel better for a bit helping the boyfriend unpack and clean for his new apartment, so I did a cleaning!Awais doodle. :3
Awais reminds me of a rarely seen character of mine--Ookami (ironically HER name is wolf TOO wtf) She's Haruki's servant who is always in a state of distress. No one knows much about her.

Byyyyy your genetics~

Hey I'm working on a website update!
PLEASE CHECK IT OUT PLEASE

Hey I've just realized that the FIRST page of my portfolio includes a character lounging around in a pool of blood. 8| It's really the only gory thing in there at all, but does anyone know if this counts as:
1) display of originality
2) instant turn-off for the sort of people who would look at this portfolio?

I'm not entirely pleased with how the icons are interacting with the layout background. I feel like they should curve more around the circle thing, but I'm not sure how to code that without, like, make a new div layer for each line of images, which would be annoying.

I'm such a lazy web designer. XD I refuse to do anything that isn't completely easy.

Anyway these were some designs for the Japanese project that I liked and I don't think I posted it before.
I was just drawing a character who's supposed to be skinny enough that clothes sort of drape over and fall all over him, and I kept making the excuse, "But I'm not used to drawing clothes that don't fit!" and then I remembered I'd drawn THIS earlier this summer, which is the extreme of that--demons disguising themselves as beautiful women dissolve into smoke, leaving their kimono in a heap.

*wants to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies*

I think whenever I try to design Victorian clothes with high collars, it turns out Regency. Are your clothes choking you to death? You may be in a Jane Austen novel.

And now for some ridiculous song-inspired pictures

Because school is starting so I need to actually finish up all the random crap ideas I had over summer. D: Here's a Jekyll inspired by a Venetian plague doctor's mask....

And Hyde being terribly delirious on "yay! someone else's blood" vibes. Oh man that blood was fun to draw but it so looked like how I would normally draw my drippies. D: *not terribly creative with effects*

Soooo I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song Zero. It sounds like it's making fun of someone.

School talk and ghost girls

I was in San Fran on Wednesday and got to hang out with Reyna, Addie, Josh.... and we happened to run into Kei in Japantown. :3 It was pretty much exceedingly fun! I haven't been to that Nihonmachi in almost ten years, so already it has a somewhat nostalgic look to me.

Off-subject briefly: This is Riverside, a former Lady of Questionable Morals who finally retired..... after being shot through a bit in the heart. As a ghost, she's taken up residence in Soho, collecting bizarre and exotic trinkets for her hobby. She's also the tiniest bit addicted to a lovely formula that gives her the sensation of a beating heart (one thing she's missed about being alive..... she doesn't miss much else) which she purchases from our beloved Dr. Jekyll. :3

Inspired by Paris Hilton's character in Repo! The Genetic Opera. I think it's the most awesome thing ever that Paris is in that movie/thing.

Ahem, anyway....

Talking came along to the subject of Calarts (well, it would, wouldn't it?) and so of course I've been thinking about returning to school and How I Spent My Summer Vacation--most notably What I Drew On My Summer Vacation.

I haven't really gotten the impression that the school is trying to mold me into some sort of industry standard--but then again, I did come from a Catholic girls' school, where the assumption is that, if you're not being molded into something prim and polite, you aren't getting your money's worth.

The only thing is that I HAVE noticed over the summer that I'm constantly asking myself, "Is this worth drawing? Will this look good in my portfolio? Is this what the studios want to see?" It's really annoying, although I'm hoping it's largely due to what I've perceived as the Second-Year "I hate everything I draw" Syndrome. I guess the question is whether the atmosphere at Calarts has anything to do with it. If it does, then I really didn't feel it while actually at school--I generally thought the message of "we want to encourage personal style" was pretty well-enforced (failing that, people sure SAID it enough). I think the feeling began mostly after portfolio day, when you end up being sorted into "design", "story", or "animation" and you end up making new works with one of those three categories in mind.

My big problem is in design, as I have a much bigger ego about my character designs (er, not in general, but I'm pretty protective of the ones for my four major storylines) than I do about the way I make storyboards or the way I animate (especially how I animate, which is basically "do whatever"). I have a couple industry character design idols (I'm still busy staring at Shane and Shannon's Coraline arts) and in general I tend to prefer character designs made for animation. . . . but it gets to the point where, if I design something that would not be intended for animation, I doubt whether it's any good at all. I feel like I'm wasting my time.

I'm pretty sure that these funny insecurities aren't so much the school's fault as the industry. Um. And more than that, it's the trouble that I don't seem to have quite the ability to overcome whatever "pressures" are out there. Art and animation and story are pretty much my life, but I haven't gotten down to what I really enjoy about it. I just..... do.

Going to the Special hell

Qui's new persona-character Vincent, whom I promptly stole and turned into some kind of bishounen.

Small arts

It looks like the major events of summer are all over. Nothing to do but wait for school to start, ne?

Anyway, here's Beatrice Bee (she goes by Bee), ordinary human sent to Hell by mistake. She disguises herself as a demon in order to get home. :P

Some fun sketches from an RP I'm doing (yay!). My Jekyll/Hyde playing opposite her Icarus (previously drawn a few posts below). I'm not sure if information regarding Icarus is considered spoileriffic, so I won't say much. :x

Omg realistic drawing is hard. D:

Some Japanese monsters from Hell and I SWEAR that severed head looked better designed before I put it on the stake. *fume* These spirits seem to be called "ox-head" and "horse-head" (for.... obvious reasons) but damned if I can figure out what they're FOR. My understanding of Japanese demons is that every once in a while, someone would go:
"Hey, we haven't made enough creepy-looking crap lately. How about a guy with a mop for a head?"
And they make up the story afterward.

I'm not terribly attached to the colored versions. Since obviously it's the linework that ought to be the focus here, I'm wondering if I should really color them at all.

The demon lady's portrait

Trying to nail down the look of Ms. M, a powerful hell-demon of the House of Greed. (She's a long-standing character except that I recently made her female because she got boring as a guy.) Recently, though, she got in a mysterious accident that seems to have taken a lot of her memory and a good chunk of her mind as well. Now she cooks.

I was talking with an incoming freshman who has a lot of really great fully-rendered images..... and I felt bad that I didn't have any. :( So here's my attempt at it! Backlighting EVERYWHERE.

I'm not dead!

Although it would appear that someone is.
Mr. Hyde is a cute serial killer. :3 Yes you is. YES you is!

Summer blues

This was a small commission and I think it marks really the first thing that's been decent since I got back from Italy because well, the girl it was meant for liked it. XD Actually I like it too, as I am prone to do of anything new, but he does look a lot like Muntz, doesn't he? I really like Muntz (one of my favorite Pixar villains, I think), but I don't like the prospect that every skinny old guy I draw is likely to turn out looking like him. D:

Well, here's a kind of fat old guy?
A preview from the Japanese music video I'm working on, although really I'm beginning to lose confidence a little.... :x The idea was that I would focus on the design aspect and have more of a "moving image" rather than real animation. That's because the whole thing is 4 minutes long--originally it was a relatively small segment of animation and the rest was footage, but the situation has shifted rather out of my favor in that department. :x

I'm doubting my ability to do a proper job in the time allotted, and I'm wondering if it's going to pay off in the end. This leads to all kinds of troublesome contemplations.... am I wasting my summer? What am I supposed to be doing with summer, actually? What do most people do with summer? Why can't I think of anything better to draw (seriously)? To make matters worse I'm supposed to be seeing Thief and the Cobbler (Recobbled) with a friend this weekend, which is not exactly a movie that tells you, "Hard work will pay off in the end." (Well, not the movie itself, but the drama surrounding it.)

A nasty week.....

I got WICKED ILL the last few days. . . . I was fine, and then this cough started, and it's been downhill from there. . . .

I hadn't had the energy to draw at all. :( It's awful. Plus, just coming back from vacation, I had a lot of time to stew over what I'm not very good at. A lack of confidence seems to have driven back my design sense into the STONE AGE. . . . I finally drew a little today, but I couldn't hit anything on the nose, like "Ah! That's how I want it to look!"

But I did TRY. . . . A VAMPIRE!!
Oh btw, it's a creepy old vampire. :P And little Former, a much younger vampire, in cute bat form!!

I was rethinking an old character I had.... an old, very traditional vampire named Mr. Wilson who is like a mentor to little Former, who is so awkward he can't get close enough to a human to suck their blood. Wilson's new incarnation is an old classy charmer . . . however, on this first pass I'm getting a bit too much gayness. 8|

This iiiis the moment . . . when I collapse from exhaustion

Loads of things! Here's the last ten drawings from the artslam character challenge. :3 I was Jekyll and Hyde, obviously.

Updates on LIFE: I just finished a two-week design job (EEE!) and have gotten invited back to do work later in the summer. :D

I'm going to ITALY on a 10-day family vacation! BRB, ITALY.



MAKIN' UP A SONG ABOUT COOOORALIIIINE

1st year retrospective : D

My first-year film. :D I was lucky enough to have it included in the Producer's Show--actually a record number of freshmen got in this year. Watching the show is very surreal, though. The open show is very loud, which has the charm of removing the awkward to some extent--in the Producer's Show, a string of animations can go by with only a lukewarm applause at the end of each one, especially if you're lagging into the second half. I got intensely flustered about my position between three senior films and went spinning off somewhere and couldn't focus.

With that Show ended, the year is basically over. The only thing to do in Character Animation is to creep through abandoned cubes and go through the motions of trying to enjoy all the performances and shows you said you were going to go to once you were done with your film.

Here's some things I think I know:
1. As soon as you get to Calarts, the astounding achievement of having gotten into Calarts becomes immediately unimpressive.
2. Color and Design is a weird class. I'm still not sure I learned anything except how to follow strict instructions.
3. Story by Robert McKee was actually worth reading, but Story for Animators isn't so much worth taking.
4. Storyboarding is mysterious. So is storyboarding class.
5. Sometimes a bad rig happens.
6. Figure drawing is pretty creativity expression time, not learning time (unless you force yourself to learn).
7. BIGGEST REGRET: being stuck with the cafeteria food!! It's not awful, but the monotony of taste makes it absolutely unbearable.
8. Some people have REALLY GREAT music libraries.
9. If you went to CSSSA, the weather in the first three weeks and the last weeks of school will be very disorienting. It feels and smells much like CSSSA.
10. Interaction with other departments is optional.
11. Love Sushi has the cheapest, best sushi in possibly the whole world.
12. Getting out of critical studies classes is a good thing.
13. People are nice but it takes a long time to figure that out. It takes me a long time to figure that out.

Fake inkwork

Films done! Now to plan other films 8D
Some designs for a music video project. They're not done yet, lawl.

Apparently my mom ran into Ben Balistreri at the LA book fair without knowing it. @_@ She was saying, "So I ran into this guy at the comics section. He'd written this comic. He went to Calarts apparently...." And she bought the book and it was Seaweed and when I saw it I was like, "OMG YOU MET THAT GUY"

I missed his lecture at Calarts this year. D: Maybe he'll come back sometime.

Chickens!

A character design assignment I dreaded! Chickens, possibly the only animal I fear drawing more than squirrels. Why? Because they're viewed so typically in American animation as being "cartoony" that it's hard to come up with something that isn't cliche failure. :\ They're funny, but so overdone. Plus I was way too tired to do anything non-film related and sketched these out during my Maya class.

....and surprisingly I like them. : D Then, inevitably, whenever I draw anything I'm proud of for that class, no one shows up. 8|

In other news I am SO SICK OF AFTER EFFECTS. No matter how long I work on it there's always more to do. I have zero faith in my film right about now. :\

Superheroes!

An odd assignment about superheroes living in an apartment building. Used the opportunity to work on some designs I already had going. :P

On the top is Haruki, an 11-year-old supervillain I've had for a few years. I'm trying to rework his design to make his powers more specific--replacing his ability to control "small things" is a small army of magical bugs. He's the Bug Prince. :) When he has his costume on I'm still going for an attitude akin to the Digimon Kaizer (squeal!!)

On the bottom is a character I just started trying to draw (although she's been present in Haruki's world since the beginning). Apparently the term for her is "octomom" or something like that--one of those ungodly large families with 20 kids who have all those reality TV shows recently.

I came up with all this during the week so she's quite subject to change. :\

TOO MUCH J+H

Yeah, just too much. This totals 10 color images for this week's assignment.

In case you're interested, the blue image at the bottom left is a film idea in which Hyde discovers a little shining "soul" escaping from a girl he just killed. He chases it, for it is shiny.

Jekyll and Hyde (part 1)

Sooooo late for class but here are two of my Jekyll and Hyde designs for class!!

Skeletons!

Another character design assignment--skeletons! I decided to do skeletal designs of some of my characters . . . not an accurate skeleton per se, but one that reflects their personalities. On top, little Grendel and big Grendel. On the bottom, a random flapper girl, M'emo, Jekyll, Chance, and then Hyde.

Yeti and Monkeys

I tried doing designs on paper since those look cool when other people do it, but I really don't like how these turned out. D: So that explains the monkeys . . . I did more but those were HORRID, these are the only vaguely okay ones.

The yeti were from the previous week. It's one of those assignments where the options are so many that it's hard to really explore enough to come up with an original design. . . . I like the one at the bottom right.

Chance Again

I'm not liking how my digital things are coming out lately.
It looks a little too simplistic, doesn't it?

Figure drawing post. . . .

Today was reaaaallly slow for figure drawings. . . . by the end of the day I managed these two, but otherwise I was just feeling completely tired and depressed from the week. Not sure why. D: A harsh character design critique right before hand didn't help, I think.

A lot of the time I end up sitting behind the model since there's nowhere else to sit. >( I get so many back poses. . . . so this time I added an extra face. :O

My thought is that she could fit into my demon-verse as a half-witch (the mask face), half succubus. Witches are only awkwardly accepted in Hell, so the merging of the two would be some awful sign of demonic blood thinning. Lol. When the regular face is asleep, the witch-mask can control the body, but it has to do everything backwards--walking, gesturing, etc. I thought it would be fun to animate.

Dodgerrrrrrrrrrr

For a workshop on character design we got to draw characters from Oliver Twist. Glee! The Artful Dodger is my favorite character in all the land, so I was happy. The idea here is that Dodger beat up a lot of weak little rich kids and stole their clothes. He sewed on the badges of various boys' private schools like badges of honor: "I beat up some kid from this school and this school and this school. . . ." He has a hat for his hat.