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!)