It’s that time of year again! The Game Developer’s Convention is back in town. I’ll be there with the guys from Lost Concept Studios looking for artists (Environment, UI, Flash animation) and developers to add to our team, checking in with the Animation Mentor crew, and hopefully spending some time playing some new games and meeting lots of people. Say hi if you see me there and I’ll give you one of my super shiny new business cards.

I was a bit late getting out the holiday greetings this year, and then I forgot to post them on this site! Ah Nyquil, how foggy you make my brain. So even though we are almost into Valentine’s Day territory, let me take this opportunity to wish you all the best in the new year.

Christmas card 2010 from PixelMonkey on Vimeo.

Just a quick plug for some of the 2D work I’ve been doing lately-

The apps I recently worked on for Orange Design have been released to the wilds of the Apple store. They are great if you have young kids and are looking for something both entertaining and educational to put on your ipad. The other animators/illustrators on the project were leads Erika Lutz and Sean Talley, and the multi-talented Nathan Heigert

Here are some previews in order of age appropriateness-

…and a great plug the Clifford game got on GMA

Here’s some animation- attack, hit reaction, and death- I did earlier this year for a game that was going to be based in the Star Wars universe. It’s kind of a slug/snake/insect/carnivorous plant character. Since the low resolution rig was not going to be able to accommodate any movement of the mouth (where all the scary teeth were going to eventually go) and his front legs are T-Rex like in their tiny uselessness, I decided for the attack you see that he would just use his head as a blunt object. If this project is revived, perhaps the game designer will be able to put in some sort of headache meter to control how often he can use such a clearly self-injurious attack.

So one of the lectures I made it to at GDC was focused on concept art and art development for ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2. I was particularly interested in this because one of my AM classmates, and a super talented guy, Bobby Pontillas had been at ArenaNet when we were in class together. ArenaNet has now put the presentation on their YouTube channel. Embedding is disabled, so click HERE to go check it out.

Just a few quick things:

I went to GDC this year and it was a good experience. I’ll try and do a write up soon.

Last week I got the opportunity to go to an advance screening of Dreamwork’s “How to Train Your Dragon” and it was really great as a 2D film; everyone at DW did beautiful work and I’m looking forward to checking out the 3D version to see how it compares.

I’m now fully digitally outfitted with a brand new Android phone, Twitter account, and Deviant Art page. Between all of those things and Facebook and Flickr and Vimeo and this site, I’m still trying to sort out what content I post where and why. I sure feel like a real San Franciscan though.