Worm Tail Title Page, Support Characters, and Story Boards

It looks like Worm Tail has everything I need in order to pitch it. The only thing I think I can do for it, aside from animating the entire story, is to put the story boards into a video format with voice overs. I hope ya'll digs.

Worm Tail + Environment

a little something

I'm fairly sure no one reads the body text, so I think I'll copy/paste some bad poetry here. YARR!
What is Liquid?
All that doth flow we cannot liquid name
Or else would fire and water be the same;
But that is liquid which is moist and wet
Fire that property can never get.
Then 'tis not cold that doth the fire put out
But 'tis the wet that makes it die, no doubt.

Margaret Cavendish.

mixed media FTW!

I've come up with a story I'm calling Worm Tail. basically, it's about a worm who cuts himself in half a bunch in order to make friends. I decided that I'm going to use this story for my character design, storyboarding, and digital painting classes and I'm hoping this will be the vehicle that takes me into the wonderful world of skilled labor.
This here is what I'm using for my digital painting class, and I decided to take a different approach to digital painting than what I normally do, namely sculpting.

Thanksgiving, Colors!

so I went to my Grandma's place for Thanksgiving, and most of my cousins were away and/or busy, which gave me plenty of bonding time with my DS, so I decided to whip out colors and experiment around with it.
On an unrelated note, I got to see my cousin in a high school adaptation of Grease. I was completely and utterly baffled. Basically, a girl falls in love with a jerk who takes her on a date after they win a dance competition and then gets scared off after he tries to make out with her, so she decides to put on sexy pants and everything ends happily ever after. Yeah.

my best character design of the semester

I've finally made a breakthrough and gotten away from drawing purely realistically. It feels like I've suddenly opened up to new ways of drawing.

character designs

here are some animal character designs I'm doing for my character design class. in judging our works, the teacher has us divide them up into good wall, medium wall, and "needs improvement" wall. I was really excited to see that these turned out as well as they did, and I'm praying that one of them will finally make the good wall; also, I'm praying for a skilled labor job after I graduate next month.

classes

yep, I've got some work-intensive classes this semester. here's some work I've been doing for them. The big monster was done for digital painting class, and the B&W ones are for storyboarding.

lightsaber-chucks

painter class

the new semester has begun and I've got quite the schedule. I only need two art history classes to graduate, but I need a whole lot more skill to get a job, so I'm taking storyboard and character design - the two most intensive classes in the animation program, along with a Corel Painter class. I'll be graduating in December. I'm 85% scared and 15% excited about it. Graduation means that I'm being pushed into a job market I don't know I can compete in.

color, style, emulation

Here's what I've been doing for the last week. I decided to emulate a couple styles. the first is a very girly style from female illustrator J. Gheduzzi and the second is Cheeks. I'm pretty disappointed with what I'm doing at the moment. I really want to be making stuff that brings a character to life and tells a story...

Colors! homebrew for the DS

I talked to Adam Ford from avalanche and asked him what I need to work on in order to get accepted to work with their company. Basically, his answer was that I needed to give them a lot more of a wow factor, and then he broke it down into what I have to work on to create this kind of a wow factor:
-Place more emphasis on volume. Draw around the figure instead of concentrating on value. Draw high detail areas first and then the rest of it will work itself out.
-Work more with color. show more narrative pieces that convey character instead of just doing studies.
-Be aware of composition and how your composition contributes to the meaning/story of a piece.
-Show your experience with digital media. Companies want to see that you can use them.

And so, I pulled out my nintendo DS and used a homebrew app called colors! tried to work on using digital media and color at the same time. I was not aware that these colors were so saturated until I saw them on my computer screen.

Level grinding, only with paint

okay, I'm a sucker for crappy movies, and I was feeling rather uninspired whilst looking for subject matter to paint. here we have Torgo from "Manos" the Hands of Fate, and Zed from Zardoz, along with an attempt at character design and another attempt at stylization/caricature.

Rejection, change, and sketchbook club

In the month since I last posted, I have:
Gotten rejected from the BYU animation program
moved to Seattle
went through a couple weeks of crippling self-doubt
went out and drew hobos to overcome said self-doubt
started up a sketchbook club.

The rejection was a huge blow to my self-concept; I thought that all of my figure drawings were perfectly solid. Apparently they weren't good enough. Also, I'm going to have to get creative about how to get employment after my eminent graduation. I've had a dreadful feeling for the longest time that I might still be waiting tables after I've graduated from one of the top 100 schools in the country. Ewww...
I had just watched Batman Begins right before I got the painfully short letter from the visual arts department, and in my head I've got a little Michael Cain asking "why do we fall down? So we might learn to pick ourselves up again." So in order to get myself out of a rut, I decided to go out and start drawing again, so I went hobo hunting and just drew the first guy I found drinking near a bus stop.
I also started up my sketchbook club, and had our first meeting on Thursday. Drawing moving people is a pretty new and big challenge for me, and I'm trying to be able to make my sketchbooking stuff look less two dimensional.

Improvement and Progression: round one.

A few things I've learned about the use of guache: to mix paints more easily, spray your paints with water first. It'll soften them up. Start things off by laying down flat wash. mop brushes are ideal for doing washes because they can store such a large amount of pigment/water.
Also, I finally put a decent amount of effort into one of these instead of trying to do the painting equivalent of a gesture drawing.the painting of the woman took about three hours and i started it off with one large flat layer of orange using the mop brush, then layered a burnt sienna/aliz. crimson/cad red/titanium white mixture to make the darker skin tones, adding yellow ochre to some of the more yellow parts of the face, and then I had to layer thick layers of white on top of forehead/nose/cheek bones and then blend the white back into the darker layers using a fan brush. The hair is mostly a diox purple/yellow ochre mix with some raw sienna doing a gradient from dark to light with some of the orange still showing through.
As far as the self-portrait goes, I've been spending time in front of the mirror trying to figure out what makes my body type distinctive. Also, ten points for anyone who can guess the original source for the painting of the buff dude.

Where I am Right Now

half my purpose in doing this is to show a bunch of my crappy drawings and paintings that I churn out on a daily basis; the times when I take chances and fall flat on my face. I feel that maybe some other people will be able to look at what I'm doing and relate to where I am as far as my skillset goes, and possibly others will be able to see the kinds of experiments I'm trying and learn from my mistakes and successes. Here are some of my paintings that I'm doing right now.
At the moment, I feel I have zero talent as a colorist/painter, so I've been doing a bunch of quick color studies in guache. I'm planning on doing a ton of portraits with guache over the summer when I'll be in Seattle, so I'm getting in some practice head studies.