Black Widow

I had a spooky dream about this broad so i took an hour and doodled it

Rainy Monday

I am the sappiest human being on the planet right now.

California Trees

Some super speedy digital studies of some of the trees I see around Beverly Hills

Skull Studies

I've been slacking, I know
I've actually been doing tons of gesture drawings at starbucks still, just nothing worth showing.
Yesterday I made a trip to the LA Museum of Natural History to do some skull studies of the ice age mammals exhibit.
They were pretty quick, 20 minutes each just to get basic form and proportion and such

How Much is that Bugatti in the Window?

oh not much... just 1.7 million dollars.

Hali to Cali: Texas

Hali to Cali: Grand Canyon

Finished up 2/12, Grand Canyon!

This was such a great day



you know you're having a good week when you end up making a slew of pieces all good enough to replace what's in your portfolio.

Grand Canyon WIP

working on illustration 2 of a 12 part series of sequential style illustrations for the road trip my sister and I took through the US this summer.
I am going to cap both ends with small illustrations but I think I'm done with this middle part for now



Also, here's the first one I did, which was for vegas:

Stuff from This Week

Work is starting to slow down a little on a game project I'm working on and CTN portfolio deadline is fast approaching. October 15th! also the deadline for the game to be finished, so holy crap! hahaha.. great client though, so I'm not concerned...oddly enough a good client who's not a pushy jerk will make me work faster and better than one who's constantly like "DO THIS RIGHT NOW" and is a wiener about it. Stubbornness... it's a curse.

Anyways, here's some stuff I've done the past week:

A couple illustrations inspired by Lunenburg Nova Scotia. It started out just as fall because Lunenburg is quite pretty in the fall, and LA doesn't have that season it seems. But then I played around with it and got winter, and now I don't know which one I like better... which is funny because I don't know whether I like Lunenburg's winter or fall better, they are both really pretty.




Rain in LA, because I find it so incredibly funny how worked up about the rain they all get. this was drawn from the window of a starbucks on the one day it poured here. I hear they get like... one or two days a year, and I experienced it. It was very comforting, and reminded me of home:



Animal silhouettes and sketches. These are for that game I'm working on. I have final versions of all of these, but I don't want to post them yet, out of respect for the client. He gave me the go ahead to use them in my portfolio, so I'll use it for my personal CTN stuff, but I don't like posting final game assets on the internet prior to the game getting released. So now you all have to buy the game to see what they look like finished haha... and tons of other stuff I've done!





Girls love puppies... just for fun



I also edited the birds to make the composition a bit better:



and that's it! Working on a giant illustration today and potentially on and off for the rest of the week.
I also have a whole sketchbook full of studies from this week from the zoo and starbucks
hitting starbucks every day for warmup drawings, it's like having super fast figure drawing sessions every day. Definitely paying off to warm up I think.

Driftwood

Home-inspired little illustration from tonight

east coast is the best coast :)

Starbucks drawing

Some drawings from Starbucks in Beverly Hills (La Cienega and Willshire)

More inky things

I did more inky things
another burglar sketch, and some older drawings from the zoo inked up
so fun!

Drawing Club: Burglar

Went to one of Bob Kato's drawing club sessions.
It was so fun! It was this tiny little old man dressed as burglar with tons of fun props, it was great. I decided to try something a little out of my comfort zone, so i went with brush and ink and some watercolor on top.
It's a lot looser and more free than my regular stuff, I like it, I'll have to do more for sure.

LA Zoo: Sept 14th

I bought a membership to the LA zoo, and went for the second time yesterday before my class.
I got a few okay sketches out of it, I really need to loosen up, start paying more attention to the gesture, less attention to the hairs and details.
These were all better than the first round though, i was super rusty the first day, it was awful.
I really like how the lioness in this set was in the same pose as the mountain lion from my day at shubie a few months ago.
Lions love sleeping with their butts in your face.

Animation Academy: Assignment 1

So I made it to LA in one piece!
And I started my course with the animation academy on character design.
So far it's going great, here's some bits and pieces from the first assignment which was to basically do 5 pages of head shots for a character development.
I'm doing a sort of take on Beauty and the Beast using a really ugly dog as Beast, and his owner, a young pretty girl as Beauty.

Happy Shark Week

I love Shark Week, so I made a drawing of Peggy's Cove while I had some downtime today

Happy Shark Week!

Bus Ghost

Often I'll come up with an idea for a drawing I want to do, but I don't feel I'm good enough yet to manage it, so I put it off, and it pops into my head every now and again, but I try to ignore it. This is one of those drawings. I thought about this about a year ago, and have doodled it like a thousand times in my sketchbook and just this weekend decided to take a break from working to tackle it.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out I guess, I'm sure I could change some things. I HATE how the baby is dead centred, I tried to find ways to fix it that didn't mess the whole thing up and I couldn't, so I just gave in and accepted that it's not perfect, oh well!

I like the thought that babies can see ghosts.

Inspiration: Darwyn Cooke

To be honest, I've never been interested in being a comic artist. The task always seemed way too daunting. I think Darwyn Cooke may have cemented in my mind forever that I would never ever be able to do what he does.
I mean... okay I can't even talk about it, I can't really put it into words, but Will brought over a copy of the man with the getaway face and I've just been staring at it completely dumbfounded.
I took a pic of one page that really blew my mind:



Seriously... I can't... really? GOD.

Even the cover is so incredibly SIMPLE but disgustingly gorgeous:



BAAARRRRRFFFF
LOOK AT THIS!!!! (this is from Parker)



I think this may be the most perfect opening page I've ever seen in a comic!

If you don't own anything by Darwyn Cooke, you should correct this immediately.

For Christmas a couple years back I bought Ryan one of his original pages from New Frontiers. Apparently the pages for man with the getaway face are up for grabs, and honestly? I think I might have to drop the 300 bucks, because I am completely in love with the visuals in this comic.

also... his name is Darwyn... like...Charles Darwin my favourite human being who has ever lived.
I need to name my kid some spelling of that name
it apparently is the path to instant awesome.

Inspiration: Canadian Inuit Art

Another huge inspiration to me is the art of the Inuit people of Canada.
They are best known for soap stone sculptures, but I find the prints and paintings absolutely stunning.
They're always simple, usually using no more than three colors, bold patterns and lines:

Inspiration: Xavier Atencio

Xavier Atencio is one of my biggest influences from Disney.
He was an animator, character designer and Imagineer from 1938-1984
The first time I saw his work, I honestly didn't realize how great it was, but I LOVED the Old Mac short as a kid:



now looking at it, it's easy to see why, the character design and colour choices (done by none other than Eyvind Earle) are brilliant.

but even more impressive than that is this:


all stop motion paper cut outs. (ridiculously racist as well but oh man the character design!)

Shubenacadie Wildlife Park

Oh no I made another blog! Hopefully this time I'll actually keep posting in it.

Here's some sketches of animals from the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park. I swear some of them were posing for me. Like the raccoons. The bear just peeked at me from a little den he had dug, it was pretty cute