Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Good luck to everyone in 2014! :)

Film Backgrounds

Some film backgrounds! I'm having a ton of fun painting these.

Newt O' Clay

We made sculptures in color&design class, and I chose to make my film character to get a better sense of how he looks in 3D. Makes animating the lil guy a lot easier!

Film Stylization

Experimenting with the style of my film.

Night

Inspired by the nighttime scenery in CA

Do The Gere-neck

A little animated loop I made for this month's loop-de-loop theme, "dance!"

Film Ideas

Ideas for my first year film. Working on it is incredibly fun and scary!

What I Eat, Where I Live

Quick, little gouache paintings for color & design using limited color palettes.

Flour Sack Animation Test

Another little animation test! I combined 2 assignments for this one-- animating a cape and animating a flour sack jumping with anticipation. There are still a lot of flaws in my animation, but I'm having a lot of fun figuring it all out. So much to learn still!

Check out the video here!

Candyland

This Thursday is the gallery show for us character animators at CalArts! For this event, Kirsten and I are sharing a space on the wall, so we came up with a theme for our art. we were a bit ambitious (like usual) & decided to create a series of illustrations based on the board game Candyland. We re-designed a few characters and places from the game, and topped it off with candy-inspired caricatures of each other.
This was a crazy amount of work (all done in two days!), but it was super fun! Especially after being paralyzed by the plague that hit CalArts last week. Rejoicing with candy is always good though.

The image above is my re-design of Queen Frostine. I had the most fun compositionally with this one.

Here's Princess Lolly! The newer versions of her in the board game made her disgustingly Barbie-like and overly glitzy, which doesn't fit her character at all. I tried to recreate her as a goofy, curious girl who just happens to be a princess.

Here's the setting that Princess Lolly resides in-- Lollypop Woods. I kinda went crazy with saturated colors.

Quick sketches I did while trying to figure out what Gloppy should look like. I didn't get a chance to do as many presentable sketches for the other characters since our time was so limited. But here's a few I did have for the lovable, chocolatey, amorphous glob.

And here's the final design for Gloppy!

Mama Gingertree. It's surprisingly difficult designing a motherly-looking tree made of gingerbread.

I experimented a bit style-wise with this sketch of Ice Cream Sea.

And finally, here's the caricature I did of Kirsten! We created candy-inspired caricatures of each other to hang up next to our names.

Animation!

We're starting to animate full characters now, and I'm getting addicted to it. Above is a still from a lil animation test for 2D animation class that you can see: here!

And here's another still from another quick test made in AfterEffects for digital methods. See it: here!

Ideas, ideas

Business Cards!

Finally got my very own business cards! I'll be at CTN this year, so I put together this design super quickly just in case I need to hand somethin out! :)

(I censored out my number for privacy, hence the ugly blur!)

Breakfast

Wish I could be healthier around here-- Need more time to cook!

Mermaids

Life drawing today! We drew mermaids

Corgs

Just experimentin'... trying out new techniques on a cute corgi.

Monster

Designed a monster for Digital Methods! I prefer my monsters cuddly.

As part of my life drawing class, yesterday we went to the Los Angeles Zoo to draw some animals. I ran into some awesome animation peeps and drew some pretty lazy animals. And of course the best part was seeing the beloved gerenuks in person. Ahh, gerenuks. <3

Sprinkle Cookies

I keep having weird dreams. Last night’s weird dream involved creepy star-shaped sprinkle cookies.

Accordion Fly

A few days ago in 2D animation class, we heard the song of an accordion being played from the cubes, followed by the noise of a giant fly. It’s safe to assume that these noises were coming from a giant fly serenading us with an emotion-filled accordion tune.

(Some say these noises were actually coming from someone’s computer in the cubes, but I think that’s nonsense.)

Room With A View

I’m so incredibly grateful I get to wake up and see this beautiful view from my dorm every morning. California scenery is something I'll never be able to take for granted!

I Dreamed a Dream

A doodle of a dream I had recently. I always dream really strange dreams, but this one was particularly vivid. My entire neighborhood was being sucked into a giant green hurricane that a bunch of wizards had created in protest of not letting them rob my house. Giant, evil green blobby creatures rose out of the green hurricane threatening to attack me while I stood on my porch. I won the battle by popping the blobs like bubbles.

I’m pretty sure my dreams are prophetic.

(This was also featured on the Tumblr Radar! Pretty awesome.)

Self Portrait

I was in need of a new icon for my various social media abodes, so here's a simple self portrait!

EDIT: Slight update!

Lemon Lemon

I told this joke to my coworkers and nobody laughed

Pasta Appreciation Post

I love food...

Giant Elephant Shrew

This year's incoming class at CalArts has started up a doodle blog, and we're starting out with a 30 day challenge. This is from challenge #2: your favorite animal. One of mine's the ironically named giant elephant shrew; their little wiggly noses are so comical.

Check out the blog here!: http://calarts17.tumblr.com/

Microorganisms!

A year or two ago I gained a fascination for microorganisms, or anything under a microscope really. In science class a couple years back, whenever we observed some tiny, little microorganisms squirming around, I always imagined them having personalities. So I brought that to life with these doodles!

NYC!

It's been a while since I last posted-- things have been busy! Prom, graduation... and I just got back from NYC for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards! New York is an exciting place, and Central Park is absolutely gorgeous. The ceremony for the Scholastic A&W Awards was also pretty crazy; Sarah Jessica Parker and Usher gave lil speeches, and I got to know a bunch of fellow seniors also going to art school this year. Fun times.

This drawing was inspired by a road on the way to Central Park. I remembered walking down the same path when I was 8 and in NY, so it's a bit nostalgic for me. It's so gorgeous in person; hopefully my drawing does it justice.

And that thing on the ground is my Gold Key medal from the Awards.

Hopefully I'll start posting more frequently now that things are starting to settle down... for now!

Eep

I recently discovered the inhabitants of my future home. As I've never met a spider bigger than 1 inch in size, I'm not looking forward to meeting the black widow spiders in Southern California...

Hopefully they're friendly... and hopefully not all of them eat their husbands....

Missing summer... and the awkward booties in your face at music festivals…

Ah!

Accepted to CalArts! I'm super excited! :)

War Zone

Originally inspired by a photograph I took of an interesting-looking tree in Burbank, but the final illustration ended up looking nothing like it, hah. So here are some squirrels fighting for a beloved acorn.