First of all, you may notice that my reel is now bigger and has much better, non-ear-injuring sound.

It’s all thanks to my good friend Michaelle who is a Final Cut ninja. She’s helped me a lot, and provided me with my own copy of FCP which I must now learn to use.

Secondly, I’ve graduated from AM, but that doesn’t mean I’m out of the club. I’ve been peer buddying students in the program this term and continuing to participate in the forums, events, etc…including the weekly theme sketch. I feel like I’m really starting to get into the groove of these weekly sketches, so I’m going to share the ones I’ve done so far even though there are still several weeks left to go.

This week my friend Glenn and his friend Matt took me on a drawing excursion in the wilds of the East Bay. By wilds I mean they took me to this great little kid’s petting zoo called the Little Farm where we sketched for a few hours and I got real sunburned. Hopefully we’ll do it again sometime.

A couple of months ago Project Rooftop announced a Wolverine re-design contest. I had never entered one of their contests and thought Wolvie would be a good place to start, so I sketched a bit but never came up with any stellar ideas before the deadline, just this little drawing which I have now colored in. The winners have just been announced; the grand and first prize entries are drawn in completely different styles yet both are very awesome. You can see them here. Congrats to the winners!

As a way to warm up in the mornings before I start animating I’ve been doing these facial studies from the tv. I’ve been trying to keep it to 5 minutes a drawing, my goal being to get it down to 2 minutes each pretty soon here. All done in black colored pencil or china marker so I can’t cheat and erase.

It’s actually been quite an education on how shadows and the imperfections that give a person’s face it’s character can be exaggerated, downplayed, or completely obliterated depending on how lighting and make up are used in television and film.

I was scanner-less for the last couple of weeks. Now my new scanner has arrived, and I’ve got to get to scanning- expect massive sketch dumping!

This term at Animation Mentor Amanda organized a weekly themed drawing in the forums and I managed to scratch something out every week.  Jason, Matt, the other Matt, Bo, Alex, Adam, and Albert also participated regularly. It was a really nice break from laying out my short film and trying to get my head around how to light and render in Maya. I did a combination of drawing and digital work, and I tried to stretch myself a bit style wise without spending very much time on any one piece. Here’s a couple of the better ones: