Painting downstairs

Now that I have no studio to go to work, and with a home environment that is far too distracting during the day; I have been very very lucky to be offered to jam in solitude at my friend's place when they're gone during the day. This has been an awesome setup since I started settling in this week. The apartment is actually my neighbor's Susanna + Sebastian's right down stairs from mine. Traveling time to work is now about 20 secs, having lunch with the family is as easy as going up stairs, and the place is quiet and cozy with their two cats, Miso + Ming, keeping me company. So far so good!

That aside, based off the NDA situation with the artworks I've done the past year, it leaves me with nothing to post unless I sit down and generate new personal works. It's portfolio time for me as well, so the motivation is working out quite nicely. I merely want to take advantage of my free time before I start getting busy with client work again.

For this set:
I've been jamming on a set of images that I want to belong in one direction and universe. My objective is mainly to showcase how I would handle science fiction worlds.

Here's the first one from yesterday's sitting!



*I'll be updating this post as the images get finished, if all goes well, I'm aiming for one a day.

Leap of Faith

After a long tour of duty with my most recent project, I've decided to make a bold change in my life and give freelancing and contracting concept artworks a try.
A leap of faith to strive for a creative space and livelihood that I ultimately would like to obtain.

For now, I have lots to learn and experience with the business end. I’ve already got my first experience of what the waiting head space, finalizing contracts, scheduling to best help the one's who’ve shown support feels like. Something I’ll need to get used to for sure, time management, accounting, and all the other elements freshly discovered.

All of this simply stems back to my creative appetite to try a hand at different problem statements on the regular and allow time to mature my own artistic voice on the side. I had a set-up such as what I’m describing a few years ago, where I was part of a central concept art group for EA. I had many opportunities to touch different games with-in short time frames, always changing it up, keeping fresh. I really enjoyed it, and is what’s appealing in these next steps to constantly challenge myself.

The inexperienced side of my situation does make me feel honestly nervous about it all, being responsible for my family’s livelihood is quite heavy.
Luckily my lovely partner Shari and a few others from the industry have been very supportive of my decision, and it does ease my butterflies quite a bit.
If in fact I’m not suited for freelance work after trying it out, I’ll go back to working fulltime. But at least I would have gave it a good shot and gain that experience in life.

Where does the time go?

Wow! I haven't posted anything since January!
Quite telling how occupied I've been the past six months.
Where does the time go?

I've been feeling simply overwhelmed with work loads and home responsibilities that it seems to be always a catch up game, and a battle for free time.
I'm sure this is common for most artist's working in the field who have also entered parenthood for the first time.
Quite shocking to think of when we once had so much time we were thinking of ways to kill time.

Regardless, I need to make an bigger effort to free myself up to chase ideas that I've been bouncing for personal projects. The soul's hungry for it.
Ultimately talk is cheap, so lets see what I actually do about it.

Space Ship Dump

These images were done early 2007. Mostly inspired by spaceship sci-fi illustrators, I wanted to try out a few of they're techniques to help generate art works for a subject matter that I haven't explored. Good learning's and fun all around.

Speed paint jams

While busy working on art works for clients and projects, it's such a nice break every now and then to have free for all sketching and digital painting sessions. Speed painting is a great exercise to speed up the painting process, being bold with brush strokes, and being light on your feet constantly changing the sketch as it progresses. When painting as an collaboration, it's even more fun! bouncing the image back and forth every couple of minutes to see what others and myself would add and change. All in all good ol' fun with Photoshop and a tablet.

Here are some that a good friend, Daryl Mandryk and myself have done in the past when we both worked at Propaganda Games. I'll continue to update when we jam some more.

Cartoon bits

A few sketches of cartoon bits for a friend of mine Justin in Toronto. On this assignment, I had the joy of coming up with different art directions/styles for the show, allowing myself to freely construct images in a few different looks that felt appropriate for the objective. Most of these I remember where done late at night after Adelaide was fast asleep.

Life drawings from college

Found some life drawings from Sheridan and studies done shortly after getting settled in from moving to Vancouver. Kept as part of an older portfolio I showed when interviewing for digital animation at VFS.

SSX On Tour

SSX on Tour was probaly the most fun I've had on a project to date. Their art team asked me to help give the presentation of the product a hand with art works that resembled a high school rocker wannabe glam shredder!

My friend Rich Curren was the art director responsible for pushing such a daring flavor to this franchise and to the gaming world. Like it or not, we all went for it!
Now we got to remember that at the time when this product came out, there was nothing like it yet towards presentation in gaming. The loosely drawn day dreaming skart style was already an progressive art movement from skate artists, graffiti artists, and to do justice, my own personal voice and friends I grew up with, had not reached the malls yet.
Speaking of which, I actually got my friend Dennis Chow aka GLAM, a true school rocker with a knack for this type of artwork to jam with me and Rich!
I remember rifling off sketch book after sketch book packed with funny little doodles in all types of styles in wacky dispositions. Even took the time at the end to layout an art book for all the drawings!

Heres a few pages from that book.






Below is the intro movie for the game. Some how, I ended up doing all the drawings, poses, initial boards and provided any other 2D support to pull this off. Luckily the best video team I've worked with had a blast animating it all! Props go to Clint Jorgenson, Craig McKewin, Rich Curren, Mark Raham for putting this and the many many other movies together with their magic! We were known as the band. Now a days we're all so busy working on separate projects and places we barely see one another anymore. I guess we'll always have our memories!

Street Smart

While mostly solving production design problems with drawing and digital paintings these days, there's still the side of my resume where I once pursued the art of animation, both hand drawn and digital. I'm not entirely sure where my student film from Sheridan college lives at this moment, might be tucked away at my mother's place somewhere? (If I find it I'll update) However, I do have an digital copy of Street Smart, an animated short I made in 2002-2003 during my studies in digital animation at Vancouver Film School. Below are a few concept sketches, production stills, and 3D model turn arounds that survived from the project.

The movie below is a story board reel used to time out my scenes and animation keys. I remember spending a good chunk of my time tweaking and figuring this out before any 3D animation was touched. Ultimately it made the 3D production a lot easier to manage and execute on with a solid plan done cheap with pencil and paper. No duh sort of speak :)

Ultimately, I ended up with a short film titled Street Smart after months of scratching my head trying to get the software problems solved on top of artistic issues. At the time, it was shown in the 2004 Hiroshima film festival for best student film! Was very flattered to say the least. Here's the demo reel version that was packaged for employers. I ended up taking the first job I got offered and never got a chance to shop around. I sometimes wonder where I could have ended up if I kept my options opened and sent out demo reels. Regardless, I could'nt be any happier than I am today, working professionally doing what I love :)

Cheers to the VFS faculty and classmates for the experience, and a special thanks to William Bates, Paul Tanner, and Diego Bergia "the animation bandit" for getting me through towards the end of the project.

Sketchy skates

Here's a few pencil, pen and digital sketches dug out from a skate project from 2004.
When looking back here, the design inspirations, completely prejudice and guilty of it, crept into these sketches. Lots of fun and enthusiasm to be simply allowed to experiment with all sorts of looks before an art direction was authorized.

Pirates

Here's a few pirate sketches done a couple years back.
I remember truly having fun with these back then, embraced different Photoshop rendering techniques to accommodate the subject matter the best I could.