BLAST + other work

BLAST, another book with Scott Robertson, Danny Gardner and myself is finished and off to press. Unlike DRIVE we did not work on this full-time. Instead it took our evenings and weekends between jobs to finish it over the past year.
While DRIVE focused on land vehicles- this book focuses on spaceships. We did not limit ourselves to anything specific as a guideline for the book (aside from spaceships) and it was to be whatever direction we each wanted to pursue. There is no collaboration in this book and it is an interpretation from the three of us separated into three different chapters. I think each of us brought something different to the table, adding diversity to the book. Not to mention that Scott is featuring amazing guest artists in the last chapter and also gave them free reign.
Reserve your copy here!
Here is a sneak-peek at some of my work in the book:

More to come!
Here are a select few pieces from my 5th term at Art Center.

Boris + The Beatles

Here's an animation I did a few weeks ago. A little rough but I got much out of it that I wanted to accomplish. The assignment was to create a 15 second animation... so it's a little fast. If I have time, i would go back and stretch out some of the timing to give it a little room to breathe.
It was based off the song "The long and winding road" by the Beatles. I took some of the lyrics and created frames/text to match the moods. A story I've been developing on a little guy named Boris and his love for Dina. In this small version, Dina has broken his heart and he's running toward her house over a span of a day and night.

credits:
lyrics: The beatles, "the long and winding road"
music: by Aldo   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm9_ywA4uNw


For this animation, I wanted to animate Boris running. It was my first drawn out frame by frame animation and took forever to figure out. But I learned much from it. His running is still awkward and the weight distribution isn't really there at all... but it's enough for now. Here it is:

And here is my concept-art that I developed for all of this. It was a little bit of unnecessary design work for this specific scene, but I wanted to treat it with as thoroughly as I could within the time I had. Plus it's always fun to flesh out a design and it's details.

 

Steampunk Countdown

The main big goal was to create a countdown. I had a few smaller goals which included having an animated character in there and some other things (smoke, etc).
It was painted in photoshop and then animated in after effects.The color kind of went wonky in the transition from PS to AE. Will have a closer look when I get the chance.
I will upload the design/thumbnail sketches as I get the chance.

It is a little rough as the painting to the final animation took about 14-18 hours in total. A rush exercise.

Term 5: Motion / BLAST

Finally back in school for my 5th term. I'm focusing more on animation and motion this term and probably for the rest of my art center career. Here are the fruits of some of the recent weeks.

Note: I am working on a new book with Scott Robertson and Danny Gardner named BLAST. Some of this work (the sci-fi stuff) is related to that and a work in progress. So stay tuned for related work..
head over to Scott Robertson's ( http://drawthrough.blogspot.com/ ) blog for updates on it.

TedX event

Recently helped out Nick Pugh on his TedX Talk in Long Beach last weekend. He asked a few of us to come paint on site to help demonstrate the idea of digital plein-air painting. Everyone was super talented and did a great job of showing the subject matter and execution. These are my paintings from the day.

Following are just some of many half hour evening studies as of late with one turned into a concept painting over 2 hours.

ImagineFX #70 & Nevada Museum of Art

I recently worked for the Nevada Museum of Art on their upcoming exhibition on mummies. They wanted a sketch of a futuristic egypt to accompany the exhibition. I did sketches on paper, scanned them in, blew them to about 30 feet and detailed them as much as I could. The final size for the wall was 14ft (high) x 87 feet (wide). Definitely a daunting number and it took about a week to draw it with chalk onto the wall in the museum with my assistant Annie. Exhibition opens from June 11-September 14. Link is here: http://www.nevadaart.org/ . So if you're ever in Reno in that time: definitely go check it out.
These are just WIP (work in progress) shots. I will post better pictures of the whole mural that the Museum should be taking soon. These will suffice for now.

People to thank and without whom this would have been an utter disaster:
-Nik Haafermaas for some great art direction
-Annie Hooker( http://anniehooker.com/)  for being an awesome helper in applying it and a great artist.
-Celeste Byers for some great advice
-And the museum staff, especially Eric for setting up all the projections.


Some new photos by Nik Haafermaas:

The museum took some photographs of the exhibition with finalized lighting and mummies on the sketch. It's still not a photograph of the whole sketch I did- only 1/3 or so. Hoping that somehow the whole thing can be photographed. Here they are:

In other news, I have been working on the Tron tv series to be released in a year or so. Doing Vehicles/environments under the genius art direction of Alberto Mielgo. Definitely a great learning experience.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sakyg8srKU

It's been a while since an update. I have been doing personal stuff, but all of it is geared towards an upcoming book that Scott Robertson, Danny Gardner and I are pushing to get done.
So, first thing is an imaginefx walkthrough/tutorial illustration I squeezed in during school/work last term. Pretty last minute- about a day or so. So I didn't have much time to spend on it. You can check out the whole walkthrough in their latest issue #70.