But where be the rum?!

Ahoy, matey!

Take a gander through yer lookin' glass, and see! Yon there be another one o' them pirate ships!
Seems like I can never escape the pirate motif...haha, but then again, why would I want to?

This art is a sampling of pirate ships that I designed on behalf of Graham Oyoung, who is busy creating a wonderful animated thesis film for his final year at USC. The film stars father, son, and a homemade pirate ship consisting of household items!

His thesis is coming along really well--his story is clever and cute at the same time, he's got an excellent board artist on his team, and he's put together a great animatic of what's to come.
Check out his animatic here!

It was an absolute pleasure working with Graham, and I'm so excited to see how the final film turns out, ship and all!

Enjoy!
...and because this is a film about a child, there will, sadly, be no rum. Yarrr!

Here's the silhouette we worked off of (trying to combine household objects into something shipshape), and a construction sketch showing the shapes fitting together:

And a final drawing:

And this last sketch is one of several alternate designs, in which we explored different types of attitudes for the boat to have...this one was "whimsical, endearing, slow". Something about the droopiness of the sails and the momentum of the boat almost seeming to go backward...haha!

Sculpey Fun

My dear friend Amanda just recently got married, and she and her husband asked me to make the wedding cake toppers for her...two golden retrievers doggies walking through the snowy forest!

They are both dog lovers, and sent me reference photos of their two lovely golden retrievers to capture the personality!

Then the baker added them to a snowy scene on top of the gluten- egg- and dairy- free cake...a masterpiece of baking, if you ask me!

Here is a pic of the dog sculpture after coming out of the oven (it's sculpey), sitting on my MacBook, for scale:

And here they are with a coat of fresh paint:

And lastly, the glaze! I love sculpey glaze...it takes boring old plastic clay and makes it look like real ceramic! Haha, and it's WAY easier than buying a kiln ;)

Here they are, glazed, on top of the cake:

The Lost Fraulein

Yes, she belongs with the other characters from Mark McDonnell's gesture drawing class from 2012, but she was lost in the shuffle of papers decorating my bedroom floor.
Now, finally, she resurfaces.

Enjoy!

1-2 min poses:

5-10 min poses:

Hem Me In

Here's a new piece.
It's my interpretation of one of my favorite Bible passages. I've just been enjoying this same verse for like, 6 months now...

Psalm 139: "You hem me in, behind and before. You have laid your hand upon me."
Talking about God :)

This is probably one of the many, many nights I made ramen for dinner...or mac 'n cheese.
But God still loves me despite my failure as a chef!

A New Dress

Yes yes, I know, I've been gone for a while.

Newsflash!
I'm not starting at Art Center until January! Why, you ask? Before I start the crazy adventure of art school, I decided to take some time to let my inner artist relax, stretch out, and wiggle her toes in the sand for a few months...and then I'll be ready to jump into the rapids!

Other newsflash!
My printer died, taking my only way of scanning art with it. There's actually a huge stash of art sitting around waiting to be posted. Alas, will we ever see it online?
Until then, digital art only :(

Here's a sketch, inspired by Brittney Lee (what isn't?) and featuring a dress I bought at Goodwill for 8 dollars! YES 8 DOLLARS! HAHAHAHA!

Anyways, enjoy!

My Fair Lady

For this week at Gesture Drawing, you can see a clear progression in the drawings I did, since I stayed in the same medium the whole time.

The first few are more realistic, and I'm working out what the costume looks like, etc.

These ones look more like life-drawings:

After a while, I started experimenting more with the costume and contrast, and doing more character and story-based drawings. I could see how this kind of process would be helpful with character design...once you get comfortable with simply drawing a character's costumes and proportions, it would be easy to pose them and work with story.

Conan the Barbarian!

An excellent model this week at Mark's. His costume changed from Barbarian to pirate to gangster-in-a-speedo...?

10 minutes:

2 minutes:

5 minutes:

Sheriff

Self-explanatory

Palm Beach

For Will's class, we had to design a beach dwelling constructed by castaway French children during the 16th century...random!
Anyways, such seemingly random stipulations always make for fun combinations of ideas, and I ended up designing a couple different palm-tree-tents made from broken ship piece-parts.

The first one was inspired by the shape of the Eiffel Tower (which worked with the story until I realized that the tower wasn't around in the 16th century...)



Will's helpful feedback was that both the ship's wheel and the crow's nest were acting as focal points, and battled for primacy. The eye didn't know where to rest on this design.

To fix the problem, I chose to focus the eye on the crow's nest, and used upward-facing triangles and the smooth lines of tattered sails to help the eye skim over the bottom of the fort.
(Oh and also not finishing that part of the drawing definitely helps it look less interesting...haha)

And here's a sketch of the tent on the beach...complete with the castaway's abandoned lifeboat in the foreground. This one has yet to be painted, but who knows when that'll happen...

Rockin'

My dad loves to say "Rockin!"

So that's the title of this post.

These are some rock sketches I did to warm up for the Dino Dig layout posted earlier. I had no idea how to draw rocks...and then I came across the Animation Backgrounds blog...and found some amazing reference. After some copying, these are some of my shape ideas for the rocks in the cave.

Island Time!

The model for this week's class with Mark McDonnell was a Hawaiian, and gave us some great poses!

Aaaand for this one, all I had to do to finish the drawing was the girl's hands...but I was SO lazy that I just scanned it like this. Ha!