Sketch Blog Week 4 and 5

 Week 5-Monster

"Cheers To A Job Well Done"

I have hardly ever used watercolors or sharpies, so I decided to try them both.  Together!

Week 4-Worst Case Scenario

This theme was really hard for me to come up with an idea for.  I just ended up doing something really quickly in pen.

Sketch Blog Week 3-Cute Overload

The theme for this week was 'cute overload' so I decided to take it literally.

Kitties really are the best defense against killer robots.

And if kitties don't work, just show them this...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kradKo2rrlY

It's definitely one of the cutest things I've ever seen.

Sketch Blog week 2-Villain

Too Much Makeup Lady

Full of old lady sass (and not the good kind), the dastardly TMML (Too Much Makeup Lady) is not to be trifled with. One of her favourite pastimes is lurking around department stores and spraying unsuspecting shoppers with very strong perfume samples causing them to instantly get a headache. Her weapon of choice though, is the makeup gun (or the ‘Fixer-Upper’ as she calls it). She shoots people in the face with it and they instantly look like they have just stepped out of an 80’s music video. There is always a ready supply of garish lipstick colors on her ammo belt so that she is ready in any situation. She finds Mimi from the Drew Carey Show to be an inspiration.

Sketch Blog Week 1 - Worst Hero

So I recently joined a Sketch Blog with some of my soon to be fellow students from the online animation school, Animation Mentor.  Every week we are given a new drawing challenge (which is voted on by the blog members) and then we have to come up with something delightful for it.  The first week's challenge was Worst Hero.



The Worst Hero that I submitted was Swordface.

Name: Swordface!

Superpower: Cutting things. With his face.

Weaknesses: Hats, doorways that aren’t very high.

In his spare time Swordface likes to chop up vegetables and sharpen and polish his face. When not cutting bad guys down to size (pun intended), he wears a pair of magnetic clip-on sunglasses to conceal his identity.


I came up with a second Worst Hero idea, but didn't end up posting it on the blog, so here it is!

Name: Sardine Man

Sardine Man can shoot Omega 3 Fatty Acids out of his fin-hands at bad guys, but it acually just makes them healthier...He is also extremely oily, which makes catching bad guys quite difficult.  They usually end up just slipping through his fin-gers.  When Sardine Man actually does catch the bad guys he packs them up nice and tight in his special Sardine Tin and delivers them to the police.  He also has a very distinct odor, which makes him not the most popular of heros.



Cake-o-rama

So I thought that I would post some pictures of some of the ridiculous cakes that I have made both on my own and at work mostly because I have been making an excessive amount of them lately...

I made this cake for my friend Murray's birthday. He likes Ferrari's.

He also likes Jackie Chan. Enough to kidnap him.

I made this cake for my friend's Kirk and Kendall for their birthday. It was Scooby Doo themed.

I also made them a Scooby Doo to take on all of their mystery solving adventures.

I made this cake for a little mermaid watching party.

This cake was also for Kirk and Kendall's birthday, but from the year before. It features the lovely Leslie Hall. I hope to one day witness her live in all of her razzle dazzle glory. The cake itself was made using a Hulk Hogan cake pan.

If you don't know who Leslie Hall is, then prepare to have your life changed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8WoyPEVRFo

The next series of pictures are of cakes that I decorated at work. They are all ice cream cakes.

I did this one while I was really bored at work. It's the swamp thing!

A customer wanted to order a Jacob cake, but our edible image printer was broken. My manager challenged me to put him on a cake and make it actually recognizable as him. I love a good challenge.

He had very shiny abs.

Here's the photo comparison.

I made this one for my mom. I put her favorite child on the cake.

Sometimes the white whippy pail is a little bit haunted...

I did this one for my friend's birthday. It has the robot unicorn on it!!!! And Mario.

"Always, I want to be with you. And make believe with you. And live in harmony, harmony..."

There was a picture of a giraffe in the cake area, but it was lifting it's front leg for some reason. I decided that it was to step on a detonator. I called it, "Diabolical Giraffe".

Then I added in some flying chunks of debris for effect.

I called this one, "Worm Dance Party".

And this one, "BFF's"

This one was a cake order featuring Arnold.

BFF's Volume 2

"World Domination"

"Dinosaur Party"

I did this one for a friend at work. His first mistake was telling me to do whatever I wanted on the cake. So I put a duck and a hula hooping dinosaur wearing sunglasses dancing to technotronic.

The Royal Brawl Opening

So I've been working on my student film for quite a while now and I finally have some bits that are colored and near completion. I finally got the beginning multiplane pan thing working, so I thought that I would post it to make myself feel like I'm actually getting some of it done. I still need to do some tweaking and fix some parts, and there are a couple of uncolored/unfinished scene's in there as well but this is what I have done so far. Let me know what you think!

Sorry about the quality of the video...the file was pretty huge so I had to render it at half the resolution.

The Multiplane Forest

So at my art show a friend of mine saw one of my pieces and wanted to know how I did it. And because sharing my crafty knowledge is one of my favorite things to do, I decided to dedicate a blog post to it! This one's for you Brittany!

So the piece that Brittany was wondering about was actually a multiplane camera move from my student animated film. I wanted to somehow incorporate some animation into my show, because I had kind of been working on it for pretty much forever and I thought that maybe I should showcase it somehow. I took one of the few colored bits of my film, and because it is a multi layered animation background, I decided to make it into a multi layered piece of arty goodness. The first picture is the actual digital copy that I colored in photoshop. It in of itself is made up of probably at least a hundred different layers...

I printed each layer of the background out on multipurpose transparency film (which was freaking expensive by the way!). This is layer #2.

When I had printed out each layer I discovered that when they say transparency they really mean it, and you could see through each layer...

I decided to paint the back of each layer with white acrylic paint so that you wouldn't be able to see through the actual artwork. There were a lot of very tiny details, so this was definitely the part that took the longest amount of time.

I then broke out my super crafty powers and my secret weapon-fun foam. Using photo mounting squares I stuck a couple of squares together to add some thickness to them.

I then strategically placed them in between two of the layers so that they would be separated slightly.

I did it for each layer, and added extra squares at the top of the transparencies to help keep them straight.

When all of the layers were attached it looked a little something like this.

And the back looked a little something like this.

I placed a piece of white paper over the back to serve as the very bottom layer and the sky.

And then it looked like this!

I had a mat cut to cover the edges of the transparencies and to hide all of the foam squares.

I stuck it to the mat with more photo mounting squares and put a piece of black construction paper over the back to help block out any light that might come in from behind and show the foam squares. The frame that I had bought for it was actually a shadow box that had glass both in the front and the back, so if you were using a normal frame you probably wouldn't need the construction paper.

And here it is with the frame! (sorry for the blurry picture...)

I also made a paper version as a thank you card, but painting in all of the tiny branches was a whole lot easier than cutting them out with an exacto knife...