Well you guys, break is upon us. CalArts is now a ghost town. I'll be heading out soon myself, and since none of my destinations have scanners, and I have nothing showy and fun and new to post right now (I've been working on my animatic, and animatic drawings are not too interesting all by themselves) here's some old not-so-good stuff to make up for the next few weeks of no posts.



Oooh look, snow.



Oooh look, a tree and snow.



There was a smelly kid in my third grade class named Carly. She picked her nose in class and had these really ugly transparent plastic aviator glasses. She drew butts all over her papers.

And here's some oofy bears. I did them last year kinda quick as something to fill up my portfolio. Cause you know, people looooove color!






Well it's better than nothing, isn't it?

Did I mention I'm going to Japan?? Spending the New Year across the sea. I'll take LOTS of pictures.

This is Sticky, the cat. Sean is lending his voice to Sticky. He makes very good cat sounds. This is as close to a crossover character as I've got this year, since there was a cat in my last year film too. See, I get all attached to my characters and then I want to use them over and over. In my first year film I had a robot girl, who was then transmitted into my second year film with the duck, who then flew on a giant cat with Milo last year, and now...well, here's Sticky. He's lumpy.

It's the end of the semester! Everything is crazy crazy crazy. I have big piles of papers to write, but that's okay, I'll have a very small pile of papers to write next semester when I'm FREAKING OUT trying to finish my film. I'm supposed to be done with my animatic by winter break...that's not happening. I'll just have to wait and work on it over break too, I suppose. The bulk of the film will probably remain in mostly animatic form, with some utterly lovely limited animation where it is absolutely neccessary. I drove myself to the edges of my sanity last year trying to animate a kid walking, a kid running, a kid walking in perspective (I apologize everyday to the Brigette of last year for putting her through such tortures). The only really fun thing to animate was, incidentally, the flying cat.

ALSO! I switched the setting that regulates who can leave me comments, so if you are my glorious friend Vanessa, or smelly Alex Hirsch, or my parents, or Sean Jimenez, you can now leave me a comment even though you don't have a blog yourself. But I would strongly suggest you get a blog anyway since you're all really cool.

It's cold outside. Like, WOW, really cold, like, let's go buy some sweaters cold, thermal underwear cold, big puffer jacket cold. Well, maybe not but in any case it's not meant to get so frosty in the goddamn desert! All right, anywho, here is the second character from my film, a Captain Scratchy Beard. Good natured old cap'n!





Unfortunately, I didn't manage to sneak any mermaids into my film although it is a sea-faring voyage, but here's a mermaid anyway. I love mermaids! She's got funny little boobies...they look like banana halves with spiral nipples!



There is one thing which I know will haunt me for the rest of my days, and that one thing is this DUCK! He made his world premiere in my second year student film, 'duck and robot' (if you're curious, it's worth a watch: http://film.calarts.edu/main/streaming/2005/charanim.html). More than once people have forgotten my name but remembered "the duck!" I'd love to expand on these characters, I'm definitly attached to them, but it's hard! I always get ideas for scenarios and then start to draw them out, and then they don't go anywhere. Can YOU think of a good ending for this little scenario?!

This is one of my characters for my film this year, a crabby little girl. I like her feet. And her head.

I hope everyone had a grand Thanksgiving weekend! I did. I went to the De Young museum in Golden Gate park...wow. It was really cool. And I saw my favorite cat, and I hung out with my favorite dad! And I was cold the whole time. I'm asking for lots of wool socks for Christmas.

These are little color tests for my film this year. I did them all quick and yucky in photoshop, right on top of my boards, to see what would work. I really hate the way the photoshop brushes look, super sloppy, but it went so FAST! I can't complain about that...I would have been mucking around with paint and comitting way too much time to each test if I hadn't done it this way! Whoa. I will, however, be painting the real bg's with real paint, never fear. The tactile qualities of physical pigment are calling to me! These little boards are all out of order, so it's a bit of a sneak peak, but it doesn't give away much. These aren't finalized color schemes either, but definitly getting closer...

Onward!

Character design time! These lovely ladies are supposed to be from the 1920's, where the ideal silhouette was either a long skinny rectangle or a long skinny inverted triangle. Everything was belted on the hips to make the torso look longer, and people LOOOOVED fur. Anybody who was anybody seems to have had a fur coat or a coat with fur on it.

This lady came out looking a bit like Myrna Loy.



...while this gal has some serious attitude...








Lillian Gish-ish.



I like this girls personality a lot but for some reason I have a hard time drawing her. She's all goofy.



Thouroughly Modern Milly?



I keep hitting dead ends in a lot of these drawings, that is, I feel like I keep doing the same drawing over and over again. Maybe it's because I've been looking at photos for costume reference, and pretty much everybody looks like this:



Coming soon: Men of the 1920's!

It's a sketch parade! Whoa!

Here's some miscellaneous character designs for my film. Everybody seems to respond to that first little boy a lot. Hmm.




Library doodle. It's Lady Earl Grey, like the tea. I think I'll paint her up one of these days when I feel like procrastinating some important Critical Studies paper, like I'm doing right now.



And las but not least, here's Bert. Good old Bert. His reaction to this drawing was, "Do I really look that mean??"




Thanks a bunch to everybody who leaves me comments! It's really hard to know if anybody is actually looking at this stuff, and I know that not everyone who looks will comment, but it's encouraging just the same! Thanks guys!

More character designs later, and hopefully some color stuff too.

That's the last of them. I still like these backgrounds, even though they look like a big, naive color explosion to me now. I was really excited about painting, what can I say. They were fun to make, since I was kinda trying to paint like a little kid (very hard after spending so many years trying NOT to draw like a six year old). Hopefully, I'll have some character designs up soon, and some bg's from this year's film. I don't want to give to much away, but I'll definitly put some sneak peaks. I'm still trying to think of an appropriate title...I think "Captain Scratchy Beard" is the working title, if that tells you anything.

Now for a tea party at Ed's house!

First of all, this is my Halloween costume (with me inside it):







Backgrounds! Backgrounds!

Well, I don't know why, but Mr. Blog is having a really hard time uploading images right now. I was going to make an extensive post of all the bg's from Milo, but it looks like I can only put this one up for the moment. Phooey.

In other news! Halloween festivities are in full swing around here. The CalArts Halloween party was Friday , and it was the crappiest party yet, I'm sad to say. But I needed an excuse to make a bird costume, which I did! And that was fun. Last night Sean and I went to Dia de Los Muertos at Hollywood Forever Cemetary...it was REALLY cool. I'd reccomend it to anyone. We got to eat burritos in a cemetery you guys! And people were dressed at skeletons everywhere!

OK, I'm off to finish my story reel. Wish me luck.

This is the flyer for character animation's first 'Scare Anim' party! Yay! Yes that is Sean as the creepy flying thing, and yes he is holding a platter with Erik Fountain's decapitated head on it. I spent a long time working on this when I should have been doing almost anything else...homework, my film, laundry.

Alex Hirsch said I should scan my whole sketchbook and put it on my blog. Instead I'm just putting a couple of my favorite pages, full of sketchy-doodles and mess ups and scribbles. These will probably end up being background characters in my film this year. Fun fun fun!

Here are some art nouveau ladies from John Mahoney's (he's so cool) illustration class. I think I killed the second one with the stars...oh well. And there will be some of my background paintings from last year's film "Milo", because I think Sean will have a heart attack if I don't post them, but I can't right now, cause they're huge files, and they'll explode the internet if I don't shrink them down first.

So here's the beginning of my blog! This is a picture of Sean, as a vampire, riding a spooky skateboard. It was his birthday card.

Just checking.