Recent freelance job

Finished this last month, for client www.bar1nyc.com
It was originally a radio ad. They decided, along with many of their other ads, that they wanted an animated version to put on their website, and contacted me.

I tried to do a storyboard first to get an idea down, but it wasn't working. I needed to create the characters first. The dialogue in the audio moves the story along, I thought, so I needed to put faces to the voices first before doing anything else. I had to get past many ideas before settling on the final design, and I had to please my client.

The biggest hurdle was getting past myself. At the beginning I was just thinking too hard about it, I was putting too much of my own biases in it. (I just kinda detested the mayor character. I wanted to make him as ugly as possible, or as stupid as possible.) In the end I am pleased with his design. He's not ugly, per se, but he's sumg. And a little dumb. (left vs. right hand). He's looks like a mix between Nixon and a Kennedy. He was certainly fun to animate, I loved drawing his facial expressions.

Early in the design phase, I had a hand-puppet motif going on, which is why it's mostly heads. The animation would have looked pretty much the same except the characters would have arms sticking out of their bums. I decided it was just simpler to have them as people. Again, I was thinking too hard about it.

The female character was a bit easier to design. I figured her purpose (visually) was to make the mayor look bad. The rhino is probably my favorite unused design. I just love the idea of an adorable little rhino reporter with a sawed-off horn. The oxpecker (bird) on her back would have fulfilled the mic's duty in the animation.

Another school project

THis one in particular was an open ended assignment, so i decided to create a model sheet of sorts for this one charcter I've been kicking around for a year or so. It's not much of a character yet, but I love his/her design. It's a half man, half bird thing which excels in the creepy department. I have some other sketches of him in some sketchbook, I would have to dig it out. Included are also scenes he/she could reside in. I had fun designing those, trying to leave little details like bones and crap. Birds of prey don't just toss their left over bones over the side of the nest, they pretty much just eat them and wait for them to come out, or they just leave them there and it becomes another part of the nest. However, I do feel this creature is more vulture like than anything else, so it may not kill too much prey. But i did create a terrible (It's not that bad, just not enough time was put into it) animated film about it feeding a baby, which was fun to do in less than a month of class time (about twelve to thirteen hours total, i think).

Here is the aforementioned animation. I posted months ago, but I'll repost it again for the sake of the convenience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9CK1j2yOYI

I really need to get back into animating. It's fun and cathartic to do sometimes. I've been just so focused on drawing drawing and painting, lately, I haven't been able to do it. Buth this summer, I will animate!!

It's that time again, is it?

I've reached and surpassed a school year's end, to find myself a graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Hooray!! I will now post my some of my favorite pieces and sketches. I've always been fond of sketching, and my dream job is to just fill a moleskin sketchbook a day. I would love that more than anything.

Mentor Project

This was a fun project. I had to choose an illustrator as a mentor, and I chose the talented Allan Norico. This semester we helped flesh out this non-existent cartoon featuring space cowboys, desert planets, and other cool nonsense. This particular project I had to design a scene with a bartender, some bottles, and other props.

I truly had the most fun designing everything for it. The characters, the bottles, even other types of props that I did not end up using. I like the final product, but I still feel it's missing something, I just don't know what. Maybe some little extra details to set it into that particular type of universe. I was going for a "wild west" feel, with some sense of hodge-podge technology. I think that comes out better in another project I did for my mentor, which was designing guns for the characters in this universe, but that will be for another post. Enjoy the concept sketches for this illustration below.