Sketch

 I have some encouraging progress on Project Apricot.  I've been struggling to settle on a style for the story and characters.  Mainly because I don't have a style of my own.  But recently I discovered the art of a talented artist who goes by Toi, and fell in love with the style of her characters and their subtle expressions.  And I knew this was the style I wanted for Project Apricot.

https://toixx.tumblr.com/

https://www.instagram.com/toixx/

 I've reached out to ask about commissions and freelance work, but haven't heard back.  In the meantime, I'm trying to learn her style of drawing characters.  Here's an attempt to understand the way she does faces and an exploration of some looks for the character of Fang.

 

Project Apricot - Kong sketch

A sketch of Kong, the gymnast of the group.

Tomorrow I'll try to refine the clothing, and add a background.  This is him during the first misadventure of when he meets Iris.

sketch dump

A few more sketches from a few weeks ago.  I want to buckle down and do something more polished, but it's been very hard to find the time lately.  Maybe this weekend.

Fan Development in Unity

I recently got a real drawing monitor and have been trying to take one of my recent sketches to the next level.  But it's been a real struggle to hit the shapes I want at the complexity I want.  

Argh... this is getting nowhere...

So I figured, why not work to my strengths?  I busted out Unity to create a little 3D fan rig.  Here are a few gifs from the progress.  The basic rig is done, but can use some refinement.

Testing one segment

Full fan rig

There's still some work to be done, but I think I'm on my way to creating the layout I want.  Maybe I'll put this code up on github later.

Project Apricot sketches

I have a bunch more sketches, but going back over them now, these are the only two I don’t hate.

Sketch Dump

Here are a few more sketches.  I've been trying to work on adding color to some of these sketches.   But I suck at color, so I took a step back and I'm working on getting value/brightness right first.  I watched a youtube video for a refresher on color theory a few days ago and it was illuminating.  I'll probably go back and redo the color for my doodle of Oliver and Dynamite.

Project Apricot logos

I've been playing with some possible logos/title images for Project Apricot.  Here are the front runners so far in terms of font.  I may tweak the O's some more, but I'm happy enough with them so far.  These are still just mockups.  Once I figure out exactly what I want to do, I'll purchase the corresponding font and clean up the designs.

Sketch Dump

I've gotten into the habit lately where I'd sketch on my phone when I have a few spare minutes.  As a result, I've accumulated a handful of sketches.  I'm pretty happy with the amount of extra practice I've gotten in.  Nothing is very polished here, but I've been able to push myself on posing, action shots, and more interesting camera angles.

Practice practice practice.  Must get better.

Infinite Canvas - Milestone 2

This one latest update on the infinite canvas app took a while longer, partly because it was a lot of work and partly because I haven't had as much free time to work on it.  But I'm so happy it's done!

I now have an editor page that lets me do basic edits (and has features) like the following:

• create a new map
• add an image
• drag and drop to reposition an image
• save out map
• maintain regioning information and keep it up-to-date
• mouse-over highlights images
• dirtied images are highlighted in magenta
• grid lines to show regioning sections for debugging

The interface looks like this for now.  Extra UI elements are minimal to keep the interface clean and simple and very similar to the viewing page.

Using the new edit page I'm experimenting with laying out the 4 comics I have for "Official Kitty Cat Business".  See the comic map here!

Next stage:

• I may revisit some of the design choices I made this time.  In milestone 1, I made more use of cached images and regions.  In milestone 2, I'm forcing more queries to the datastore so the app is guaranteed to have fresher data, but it has started feeling a bit more sluggish. 
• add delete functionality
• add user permisions
• add arrow keys controls
•  get DanAnh, Hoyt or Mari to play with it a bit

That's enough on the tech end of this for a while.  Now the basics are here, I can start using it to put together thumbnails for Project Apricot and put up more comics for Official Kitty Cat Business.  I'll focus more on the artistic side for the next few months.  Yay!

sketch - carrying a mandolin

Doing a bunch of sketching for Project Apricot.  Liked this pair pretty well.  A mandolin musician.  Her on a good day and then again at the end of a rough day.

Updates and Inspirations

I have not had much to post lately even though I've been keeping busy with projects.  Here are some updates.

"What's New in SAND 1.5" comic
So I can't actually post it here, but I essentially completed my very first comic.  We completed version 1.5 of SAND at work and were asked to give a presentation of it to the TD sup's and leads.  We put together an outline of the material we wanted to cover and then I decided to put it into a comic form!  It took a few late nights at home, but it turned out really well!  (It was received really well at the meeting and word spread about it.)  I'm quite proud of it and it works really well as a proof of concept for communicating very technical things in a visual, accessible way.  I've been wanting to do that for a while and have some other ideas on where to go next :)

Avatar: The Last Airbender - thumbnailing
I finished up thumbnailing episode 2, but since I started in the middle of it, I decided I should thumbnail the first part too.  So I wrapped back around and still have about a third of the episode to thumbnail.  Oyy... still learning a lot, but some days it's pretty monotonous.  Will scan them up soon.


20th Century Boys - thumbnailing
In case I haven't mentioned it before,  I've also been thumbnailing the pages of 20th Century Boys, currently my favorite manga.  I'm also learning a lot here and getting a better sense of pacing in the comic form and how much dialogue you can get away with and how to keep it interesting.  Progress has been slower on this though because I'm working much smaller and it feels even more tedious.  Will scan some up soon.

Project Apricot
I haven't made much more progress on thumbnailing and have spent more time working on the two studies above.  Though honestly I've probably been using the two studies above as excuses to not work on my own stuff some days.  I need to readjust my goals and motivate myself to just do it.  New goal:  thumbnail for an hour for Project Apricot every week; outline for an hour for Project Apricot every week.

Concept Art 
Haven't done much in that regard lately, but following the posts of my talented friend Patrick Jensen, I found and joined a great facebook group where an amazing collection of super talented concept artists from the industry post 30 minute paintings inspired by topics of the day.  Daily Spitpaint is simultaneously inspiring and makes me want to pick up my tablet, and also intimidating because I have so far to go and no time lately to follow down this new path.  New goal:  Do at least one daily spitpaint challenge a week.

Artists to watch
Since my last post, I've gone to APE (Alternative Press Expo) again and though we were rushed this year because of time constraints and other engagements, we saw a lot of amazing artists, and I've compiled a list of links to blogs and websites that I will frequent for inspiration.  Here's the list:

artist blogs

e t e l o i s

Rad's blog

d3capmode

gheehappy

Greg Peltz

Brittney Lee

Francis Vallejo | blog

Josh Kao's blog

Nathan Fowkes Art

LIBRA BEAR

Charicreatures.com :: The Art of Genevieve Tsai

Charicreatures Blog :: Genevieve Tsai

The Art of Eunjung June Kim

Tuna Bora

Scribbles For Sweetpea

cake-o

Keiko Murayama - Online Portfolio

Everyday Love – the art of Nidhi Chanani – Home

Everyday Love

LITTLE BITS

Nhu Q Diep - Home

Waffles the Cat | Home | Online Store Powered by Storenvy

Pickle - The little bird who doesn't Tweet!

Hediun's Atelier by hediun on Etsy

Thousand Skies

tonybuifanclub

♥Cindy Chen♥

Pin Illustration

Hula Bunny - Cute Animation - Dress Up Games - Sketches - Art

Berkeley Mews -

Animated Shorts
I've also been playing with the idea of making some shorts out of the Prairie Rabbits universe.  This has gotten me researching shorts and digging up my favorites again.  Here are a few:

Mirage (which I've shared before)

Mirage from Iker & Dana on Vimeo.

Oktapodi (Octopus love)
 

Paperman (currently not available online because it's being considered for an Oscar)

Carn (visually striking and haunting)

The Wedding (perfectly neurotic and just a bit poignant and just a bit profound)

I found some of these from a site called shortoftheweek.com.  Great collections of animated shorts.  I'm still making my way through.  A lot of good stuff here.
http://www.shortoftheweek.com/category/style/animation/
http://www.shortoftheweek.com/category/style/3d-animation/

Wow.  That's enough for now I guess.  Not much to show, but there's definitely a lot happening.

Concept Sketch Practice

Tried another exercise in concept thumbnail sketches.  These are both rough scene explorations for two characters from Project Apricot, namely the two twin goddess whose powers can manipulate sound.  (I did a really rough sketch of these characters early, here.)

The bottom one is looking up from the inside of a tall tower, with a figure flying up.  This was a tricky perspective to do and I modeled it after this picture of the Inverted tower in Portugal: 

It still needs a lot of work.  The colors on both look flat, but the textures required are really challenging.  Ugh.  It sucks, but I'll keep trying.

Project Apricot Thumbnailing

Alright!  Thumbnailing for Project Apricot.  This is an exciting and terrifying first step because this is the farthest I've ever gone with this project and also this is the closest these ideas have ever come to fruition.  And what if it sucks?

Well, Rad told us expect it to suck the first time.  It's more important to make progress and iterate, than to keep preparing before going forward.  So here is the first attempt at a forest scene.

Well that wasn't too horrible... maybe.  But after thumbnailing Avatar - The Last Airbender for about two weeks, and thumbnailing various forest photos, I gave it another shot and here's how it looks so far.

 It feels more interesting and more in context. It still has a long way to go, but it's encouraging that I'm moving in the right direction.  It just goes to show that there's no replacement for practice.

Here are a few more thumbnail sequences.  (Not edited yet, so it's not entirely coherent.)

Vis dev art for Project Apricot

After being freshly inspired and motivated from the comics workshop, Mari, DanAnh and I have been doing daily sketch time together!  It's amazing what a regular habit of sketching for 15-30 minutes each day can do to further vis dev which had been a blocker for me for a while. 

The camaraderie is also a really remarkable motivating factor.  It's wonderful to be working side-by-side with these talented ladies who are also passionate about storytelling and really want to bring to life their creative vision.  The only thing better than making progress on my project is also seeing Mari and DanAnh make progress on their projects.  I am so eager to see what wonderful things they will create.

Here is a compilation of some of the sketches I've done over the last week or so.  They are mostly character sketches.  I finally hit a stride with the character faces.  While these are not all finalized, I'm pretty pleased to see that some of them really match what I was envisioning for the characters.

I'm simultaneously proud of the progress and thankful for it.  Inspiration doesn't come just through effort.  Every bit of it feels like a gift.  Here's to inching towards our dreams.