Progression of mobile ecosystems in space Concept

Cintiq 22hd

I have been drooling over the Cintiq for a few years now. It is the perfect bridge between traditional pencil/canvas drawing and tablet/PS. The only thing you can’t do with it, that you can with pencil/paint and canvas is move around the house with it.

Here’s the thing, xmas came early for me, and I need drool no more!  Santa Baby got me a Cintiq dtk 2200!!!

Here is my first finished Cintiq project. A portrait. I referenced an old black and white photo which made creating skin tones slightly more difficult than expected. Designing the hair and cloths were my favorite parts.

Playing Pretend

I’m on an animal illustration kick and having sooo much fun with it. It’s like being 7 again. Playing house, choosing who gets to be who or what.

When my sisters and I were little, like most kids, we played house. We used to create our character’s out loud to one another…you know, get the background on our supposed friends or enemies in the game so we knew who we were talking to. This was always my favorite part.

It wasn’t always sugarplums and lollipops though. We would argue over who got to be the singer or the figure skater. Sometimes one of us would choose to be a famous person, then the rest of use would struggle to think of our own famous person to be… it wouldn’t be long before we each had 3 different professions or a really hot boyfriend, a kickass job, and of course lots of money.

We had the most awesome collection of costumes. It makes my wardrobe today look tiny in comparison. There were 80′s prom and wedding dresses, cat and clown costumes, little house on the prairie clothes, and outfits from my old dance recitals.

Well, now I’m all grown up and I still get to dress up and play pretend, just in a slightly different way. Meet Mear the meerkat. He’s an explorer and thinker with a burning desire to get down to the bottom of things.

Today he is on an archaeological hunt with a messenger bag, his own design, specifically for these missions of discovery! The bag contains very important tools including a bucket, sifter, brush, hand pick, containers and pouches for organizing fossils and dirt samples, as well as a pouch for his colorful one of a kind glasses, made specifically for dating his findings in the field.

More characters like Mear are on their way, so keep on the look out.

Storyboards From A Writer/Director/Artist POV

I am working on a project in which I am the storyboard artist as well as the writer and director. Creating boards for a director who knows what he wants is an entirely different experience than creating them for yourself. The mental work involved multiplies drastically when you’re the one figuring out what the shot should look like. It can be daunting. Like staring into a blank canvas or computer screen before writing the first words of a story. There are so many possibilities and it’s up to you to decide which ones will fill the void.

To lighten the mental overload a bit I try to focus less on the film as a whole, and more on each individual scene. Breaking the project up into small goals.

Once I have knocked out one or two scenes I feel better about the project.  Having that visual foundation can simultaneously inspire and block the flow of goodness. Sometimes all I want to do is visit the finished boards. This makes drawing new boards with any real potential near impossible because I’m focused on a different scene. Sometimes the best answer is to forbid myself from looking at the finished boards so I can focus on the scene at hand.

Questions I ask myself while creating my shots and storyboards.

What do I want to say with this scene? Which characters are in the scene and how does their personality influence the mood of the scene? Who is most important in the shot and how can I position the less important characters so to draw more attention to the main character in the shot.

This is the first project I have story-boarded without using pencil and paper. Instead I am using PS and my new Intuos4! I highly recommend using PS to storyboard with. The tools are a real time saver. Layers, ctr z, lasso, and scaling. Before I got the Wacom, I used a Genius tablet. It was a great starter tablet but very limited and I couldn’t get myself to storyboard using it. There wasn’t enough pressure variance. The Wacom is very close to drawing with pencil and paper. Getting over the initial weirdness of looking at the screen instead of at your hand when you draw is the hardest part, but taking the time to get over the weirdness is worth it.

I begin each board with a very rough sketch or organized scribble. When I like the sketched composition I either create a new layer and draw the finished version over the top or if I really like the sketch, I might clean it up a little and call it done. There are times when a perspective is difficult to achieve. In those cases I take and use reference photos of a willing model. The fine artist in me considers this cheating, but the digital artist in me says back off, it’s brilliant!

Contest Art

A piece I submitted to a deviantArt contest! I was given a few guidelines… there must be a pie, panda, and light in the finished art resembling the stock images they provided, and the theme is Something’s Gone Wrong. Click on the image to get a look at the full size version…. lots of detail in there.