Here's a quick post: This little guy is my first crack at coloring something using nothing but photoshop. And Neysa made these little stamp swatches of fabrics (she's a fashion student) and I used the denim one for the jeans. It was pretty fun, and you can undo all your boo-boo's. Yay!

Well, I guess this is what's happening: even though I KNOW I should be working on my film there is a big TRIBE of awesome, rad, bitchin' character designers coming to our school within like, a week of each other. So here I am spending one million hours in the lab trying to make my scribbly-poop drawings look pretty, so I can actually get advice from people who KNOW what they're doing! And construct a decent portfolio from the rubble of tiny pieces of paper that are pinned up all over my cube! Because you see, to date, as of this moment, the highlight of my career as any kind of character designer is this: eating Joe Moshier's hashbrowns and Cheny Yi Chang's coleslaw at Denny's late on a Wednesday night. That's it for me.




These are INSANELY old. They're from second year, when Alex Kirwan came and gave us a little character design workshop in Shane's class. I had so much fun!! The only redeeming quality of these two are their names: Twiggy and Chubbers. Alex Hirsch loves this junk.

And El Deatho, the villian counterpart to Twig and Chubs...


This is NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART! Submarella is a grotesque, yucky creation that was the result of a conversation between myself and Alex Hirsch. She's yucka. I know. She's a mermaid manatee, or WOMANatee, if you will. When explorers from Europe first saw manatees in tropical waters, they thought they were mermaids. How could they make such a mistake?? Beats me. Perhaps they were Adrian Molina's Spanish ancestors, which would explain his obsession with her.

WELL this isn't a boy's only post, but it's at least an equal number of boys and girls. Next one, I promise!



I colored this rather slap-dash-edly in photoshop. But I made it small so you can't see all my screw ups. I'll fix all the boo boo's for portfolio time...UGH. 18th century clothing is SO cool...the shapes that people contort their bodies into for fashion are completely exaggerated and mostly wierd (that said, I should have exaggerated them a little more now that I look at it). But that goes for the whole history of fashion, I guess. More than anything I noticed that in the 18th century people look bored and slightly annoyed. I guess that was the "cool" look, opposed to todays 'cool' look of bored and slightly drugged. I guess I'd be intensely bored and annoyed if I had to stand still for one million hours to get my portrait painted, though.



Okay, it's not Valentine's Day anymore, I know. Whatever. Here's the card I made for Sean. I think it looks like him. He said I made him look like a fat cat. "You think I'm fat, don't you? I'm FAT aren't I?!" No! I don't ! I can't say that the ginger tabby looks a lot like me but that's what it's supposed to be. I've been told I'd be a siamese. Us as cats. Anthropophormism, away!

To start out with, here's what my little plot in the char anim show looked like. Those elaborate, beautiful golden flowery branches are from my Oma's house. She doesn't know I stole them. Don't tell her! It's sideways, sorry. Oops.



So, it's been a while. I always start to feel guilty when I don't post often as I can. I don't have a whole lot to show though, because I've been hammering away at old Scratchy Beard (the film) all week! Here are some sketches which have been dolled up with photoshop, because color always illicits a more emotional reaction.

Stewardesses from my sketchbook...










This hula hoop drawing was meant to become a painting but it never made it, cause I ran out of time. Someday! It was going to be part of a triptych, which is fancy artist speak for three paintings hung up next to each other. The other two were going to be "loop de loop" and "chupa chup", like the delicious sucker.


I love historical costume...and screwing around in photoshop late at night. I wanted to give her a full color treatment buuuutt...it's late and I'm sleepy!

I think I need to draw boys more. My inclination is always towards drawing girls, since I grew up thinking boys were gross and stupid and that girls are pretty and nice. I think guys have an equally difficult time drawing girls, since they spend their childhoods trying to draw every muscle on He-man or whatever. Okay. I'll try to draw more dudes. Maybe the next post will be guy-drawings only.

That's all for now, folks. I'm taking the day off tomorrow. I'm pooped.

What better way to spend your weekend than lying in bed, sick as a dog? Ugh. I'm definitly in recovery now, but even a gentle touch of the flu pretty much knocks you on your butt. Better now than in the middle of crunch time though. To mark my triumphant return to life and school, here are the rest of the pieces that I put in the show last week!


Pink trees. The corner is missing, because I had some trouble scanning it...it's kinda big. Acrylic on cardboard.

Goauche, pencil and rhinestones. On cardboard!

Tiny self portrait...

Tiny portrait...

Tiny record player!

Now to catch up with everything that got away from me this weekend...wish me luck!

Ooh la la! A top secret post from my top secret files...this is an actual scene from my film, all colored and stuff.

I get these fine art inklings...the urge to make an image that doesn't really have anything to do with anything, but it's still pretty to look at. I've been doing that lately for the CharAnim show. These are little painting/collages on little peices of cardboard. They're not supposed to mean anything. They're just exercises in composing and messing around. I dug into my ancient box of tiny scraps of paper (I keep such a box because I guess I have a hard time letting go of construction paper scraps, old stickers, rhinestones and ticket stubs, etc.) and used some of those gems to construct THESE!

Whoa whoa whoa! It's Tokyo Disneyland!


Main St, USA (much larger than the original).

Inside the Alice in Wonderland themed restuarant! I didn't eat there. Even though I wanted to. Really bad.

The lanterns in the tea cup ride! The ride is covered in Japan, I guess because they have such yucka weather.

The Mickey Mouse Revue Theatre, apparantly designed by Eyvind Earle. It was a popular show! There was a huge line outside.

THE CASTLE! It was very gothic. I guess it's supposed to be Cinderella's castle though, which is odd because I thought that movie took place in the late 1800's...uh, I don't know. But it was a HUGE castle, makes the one here look real puny, and it had an amazing mosaic on the inside that I had a really hard time getting a good photo of (it was dark and there were people walking in front of it.)

Here's a blurry image of part of the mosaic...it was the Cinderella story, but in the style of Sleeping Beauty. Wierd. But beautiful!

Electrical parade! I was so excited I RAN when I heard it coming.



Mmmm...curry popcorn.

Inside Small World! The one here is better.

Detail of the afore mentioned mosaic. Whoever did this did a really good job.

The covered Main St. This is pretty much the first thing you see when you enter the park.



Yay! Meanwhile, back at school, I'm just flipping out as usual, trying to figure out if I should spend my time working on my film, my portfolio, my character designs, paintings for the upcoming show, my cooking skills, or if I should waste more time screwing around with my blog.

WELL, it's been a while, but I'm back! Gearing up for the last semester PLUS recovering from my recent travels. We're having a show for the Character Animation department this month, and the big opening is on the 25th. I didn't participate last year but I'm definitly in this year, so here are a couple of doodly paintings I did just for the occasion:




You know, it's Gidget and Moondoggy. Gouache on that cardboard that comes from the back of a pad of paper.

And here are some photographs direct from my camera! Yes a REAL camera, with film and complex internal mechanisms and f-stops! This is Ueno Park, Tokyo. I spent a long time wondering through this park, hungry. I was hungry most of the time I was there (Japan is, contrary to popular belief, not at all vegetarian friendly, a problem that is only further complicated if you speak zero Japanese...) But the park itself was huge, and lovely, and full of shrines and playgrounds and manx cats and museums.

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.