Nerdy Giraffe

Hipster Giraffe: I wanted to mess with watercolors a little more, so I tried to stay within only using a few colors while I got used to it. Therefore a giraffe seemed like the perfect subject. He needed a little spark, so I gave him a bow tie and some glasses.

Machu Picchu

A concept painting, painted digitally with my wacom table in photoshop. We had to paint out a scene that we were going to model in 3d for a class assignment. I chose to do Machu Picchu in Peru. I got a book of pictures of the village, and I became obsessed with it. Now all I want to do is go there and hike the Incan trail. I might have to train for that first...

Nude 18

A nude created in my figure drawing class with brown charcoal. I'm in love with the dynamics in this one. The contortion of the body was very appealing to me. I even stopped halfway through the 3 mins, to imagine it from another angle and draw it all over again.

Nude 17

A nude created in my figure drawing class with brown charcoal. This picture is also appealing to me in the motion aspect. In the bottom drawing, I like the curve of the body, and the contradictory angles of the hips and the shoulders. The top one shows a lot of weight to it with the strong contrapasso stance.

Nude 16

A nude created in my figure drawing class with green charcoal. I started out with the even tone of green to show color, darkened in the shadows, and erased out the highlights. In order to also show light against the background, I colored in outside of the body to see where the most highlighted areas were.

Nude 20

A nude created in my figure drawing class with red charcoal. The image on the left shows motion and therefore I like it much better than the one on the right. It also has a much stronger line of action and fluidity to it. It's hard to get much emotion out of a standing figure, even though he allows for it by use of the hand gesture.

Nude 15

A nude created in my figure drawing class with pen. This one was tough because of the foreshortening on her right leg. She's sitting on it, and since you can't see much of the leg, the weight shift feels off. Same with the right arm. It's hard to get a ground plane feeling to it.

Nude 14

A nude created in my figure drawing class with charcoal. This was another example of covering the whole paper with charcoal in order to get the flat even lighting. From there, I add in dark for shadows, and erase for the highlights. The darkness of the background brings out the even tone, to show where in the environment the light is coming from.

Nude 13

A nude created in my figure drawing class with charcoal. This one was a 20 minute pose so I got to add in more detail. I covered the paper in charcoal, and went to town from there. After getting the basic gesture, and angles. I shade in by either adding more charcoal, or pulling out by erasing. This is another example of how foreshortening can be difficult because of the legs.

Nude 12

A nude created in my figure drawing class with orange charcoal. I am loving the squash on his behind in this one. It brings out the weight. What I would change though, would be his lean. His body is curved away from the chair with the line of action, but it doesn't show that he is actually leaning on the back of it for support.

Nude 11

This is a nude created in my figure drawing class that I made with charcoal. I really like this one, because of the foreshortening on his legs, and the angles that they create against each other. The arms still need some work though, but I like how the weight is distributed through this guy.

Nude 10

A nude created in my figure drawing class with a charcoal pencil. This one looks pretty rough in terms of proportions. Especially with the left arm. But I started to pull out the darks and lights by shading in more shadows.

Nude 9

A nude created in my figure drawing class using charcoal. This one has a nice line of action that flows down through the head and all the way to the tip of the foot. I like the curve of the spine verses the sharp angles of the legs. Now if only he had a chair...

Nude 7

A nude created in my figure drawing class with orange charcoal. The pose is pretty linear, so I chose to focus on the contours of the body more so than the form and action. While focusing on those, I started to see more of where the lights and darks were hitting, and the sharp edges of those as well.

Nude 6

A nude created in my figure drawing class with green charcoal. I really like this one for the angle of her head. The pose came out very poised, and it has a nice curve to it, even though she's sitting up straight. The foreshortening on the legs and arms seem like they're working pretty well for me too.

Nude 5

A nude created in my figure drawing class with pen and marker. I use different colored markers to show variations in the shadows on her body. The proportions came out a little wonky, so I'd need to work on that some more. But for this one, I wanted to focus more so on shading and contrasting the lights and darks, to make the body shape come from the inside hues, rather than the contours of her body.

Nude 4

A nude created in my figure drawing class with orange charcoal. This one appears to have a lot of stretch from the legs, up to the upper body. I like the tilt of her shoulders, and the negative space that her arms make. There is a lot of weight showing in this one, and the angle of her head contrasts with the angle of her body, but it still works.

Nude 3

A nude I created in my figure drawing class with pen. This one was tough to distribute the weight, because even though she was propped on the stool and looked like she was sitting, most of her weight was on her right hand, holding herself up.

Nude 2

A nude of a girl sitting. Created in my figure drawing class with pen. I like the bottom one because of  her line of action through the torso. Even though it's a side view, she still has depth and rotation. I started to run out of paper at the bottom, so her legs appear to be a bit short. But the angle of her head in both poses is what has the most appeal to me.

Matte Painting

A quick, work in progress of a matte painting for my animated short student film. A matte painting is placed in the background of a shot, so you don't have to model an entire world, to give it more depth. I created this digitally with photoshop on a wacom tablet. I basically had an image behind it, and pulled form the colors, and the shape of the mountain range. Then I painted on top of it to get all the proportions looking good. I went ham on the sponge and blur tool if you couldn't tell.

Crystal Prop 04

These are all different views of a crystal stuck in a rock I had to create for my animated student film. The film is titled Celestial, and it's about a man who lives in a Nebula and creates planets. In the nebula, these rock crystal structures are scattered all around. I used maya to build the basic shape,  and mud box to sculpt out and paint the textures for this prop. I am trying out different techniques to see which one matches the overall style of the film the best. It's pretty tough because I am not a modeler, and I haven't modeled in a long time. Especially with organic objects. So reference was my best friend. I tried to go straight off the model sheets, but I found those were lacking a lot of detail, and I couldn't get a basis for what they were meant to look like. Especially with the sharp jagged edges, and the all of the polygonal faces. I also needed to get the texture to interact correctly with the lighting. The light needed to pass through the crystals, but also highlight all of the jagged edges and indentations. With the texture I did, they kind of just look like giant candies to me. We will definately be hiding these guys behind pillars of clouds.

Crystal Prop 03

These are all different views of a crystal stuck in a rock I had to create for my animated student film. It takes place in a nebula environment, and these are scattered all around. I used maya and mud box for this prop. I am trying out different techniques to see which one matches our style the best. This one was a little tougher with the lighting inside of it. For this specific one, I was thinking about the opening scene where a star is formed in space, and the light flickers through the nebula clouds, and shines through and lights up the entire workshop. For that to look believable with the props, we needed the light to refract and shine through the crystals. I got the angular shape and sharp corners down, but they are too perfect, and are lacking cracks, dings, and natural deformations that crystals have. But with the light added, the details on the rocks look too washed out and saturated, and there's no depth to them really.

Crystal Prop 02

These are all different views of a crystal stuck in a rock I had to create for my animated student film. It takes place in a nebula environment, and these are scattered all around. I used maya and mud box for this prop. I am trying out different techniques to see which one matches our style the best. I decided to add a little more purple to this one, since they are floating through out the purple clouds. It makes it look like it's covered more in the nebula particles.

Crystal Prop 01

These are all different views of a crystal stuck in a rock, I had to create for my animated student film. It takes place in a nebula environment, and these are scattered all around. I used maya and mud box for this prop. I am trying out different techniques to see which one matches the overall style of the film the best. With this one, the light shines through it harder, and it gives it more transparency. I also added more colors to the rock, so it would look like it had more depth and more of a natural feel to it.

Gan Color Script.

A color script of a shot for my animated student film called Celestial. A color script is a concept painting of one of the shots in the movie, to figure out color for the scene. This is a shot of our main character trying to recreate a star using crystals. He uses his powers to morph crystals, rock, and nebula cloud to make planets. Then he charges these planets with energy to look like the star. He doesn't realize that he is making planets however, and destroying all of the life on them, because he is too big to see that detail. We need the color to portray the mood of the scene, so by painting out a colorscript, we can see how the mood evolves during key scenes of the movie. I painted this digitally in photoshop with a wacom tablet.

Star Color Script

A color script of a shot for my animated student film called Celestial. A color script is a concept painting of one of the shots in the movie, to figure out color for the scene. When you have them all thumbnailed together, you can see how the color and lighting shift over time to go with the emotional arc of the story. This is a shot of a star forming. I created this digitally in photoshop with a Wacom tablet. In this shot, a star is forming, and there is a close up on it. The entire storyline is based off of the star, and so it's a very important part to the structure of everything. We originally wanted it to have more of a blue tint, the focus being on it, and then dust particles being lit in the foreground. It was tough to emulate the structure of the star being born, because we weren't sure of the look of the effect we were going to use on it yet.

Llama Mini

A painting of a llama from my mini animal series. Created with acrylic and pen on a mini canvas. I got this idea from my book, "The Weatherly Guide to Drawing Animals". This mini canvas is for sale at my etsy shop, http://www.etsy.com/shop/designbylj What drew me to the picture was all of the angular lines, and the scrathiness of the hay and fur.

Rhino Mini

A rhino, from my mini animal series. Created with acrylic and pen on a mini canvas. I got this idea from my book, "The Weatherly Guide to Drawing Animals". This mini canvas is for sale at my etsy shop, http://www.etsy.com/shop/designbylj 

Peacock Mini

A peacock, part of the mini animal series. Created with acrylic and pen on a mini canvas. This mini canvas is for sale at my etsy shop, http://www.etsy.com/shop/designbylj The paint colors came out a little dark, so you can't see the drawing as well on here, but I wanted to keep it within the same color palette as the feathers.

Comet Model

A 3d modeled and textured asset of a comet. Created with maya and mud box for an animated student film called Celestial. This is just showing the bump map for the asset, which is all of the textures minus color and shadows. We had to present all of our assets to the class, that we were making for our film. I had one of the easier ones, pieces of rock. And we have these scattered throughout space. Our satellite character flies through a path of destroyed planets, with rock chunks and pieces littering the scene. He takes pictures of these, and documents them all throughout his travels. This video shows just one rock, and what it looks like from all angles. 

Meteorite Model Test

This is a test of a  3d modeled asset for my animated student film. It is an asteroid because the movie takes place in space. It is created with maya and mud box for the texture. The uv's are a work in progress. The checkered pattern shows the uv layout. We then take that layout into photoshop, and paint the desired texture onto it. The seam is clearly visible here, and there are sections which are stretched. Because of that, the painted texture in photoshop will be stretched in those areas. With the seam, you have to match up the textures on both ends, so there's not a visible line going down the middle of it. 

Steampunk Octopus

A watercolor and ink of an octopus attacking a pirate ship. I wanted to try a different steampunk-esque style, and I'm obsessed with cephalopods, which are animals that have tentacles. This giant robot octopus is attacking and sinking a pirate ship. I used the watercolor to create a dripping, melting feeling, so you can feel the weight of the ship being pulled down. It would be great to try this again, but with the octopus machine to have a rusty orange palette to it.

Twitter Bath

Birds playing in a bird bath. From the mini twitter series. Created with acrylic, sharpie, and a mini canvas. This mini canvas is for sale at my etsy shop, http://www.etsy.com/shop/designbylj

Twitter Laundry

Birds sitting on a laundry line, from the mini twitter series. Created with acrylic and sharpie on a mini canvas. This mini canvas is for sale at my etsy shop, http://www.etsy.com/shop/designbylj

Twitter Love

Birds in love on a telephone wire, from the mini twitter series. Created with acrylic and canvas. This mini canvas is for sale at my etsy shop, http://www.etsy.com/shop/designbylj

Starry Twitter Birds

Twitter Birds with stars. Another mini from the twitter series. Created with acrylic and sharpie. This mini canvas is for sale at my etsy shop, http://www.etsy.com/shop/designbylj