Drawing Sessions

Recent storms brought in the best snow I've ever seen at Lake Tahoe this past weekend (lots of tree riding at Squaw!); unfortunately it also brought blinding 120mph gusts of wind, which closed the roads out of the mountains and stranded Mark, Mahyar and I for an unexpected Sunday night at the Cal Neva bar. We woke up at 4am Monday morning to chase a small window of potential freeway re-openings, and made it back to Oakland in time for work.

As for drawing: I got a pretty good note in class to look more for the abstract shape of a pose before committing to even the limbs of a character. Will try to push for that more in the next session...

Gesture Drawing

Coachella's lineup was announced today... I'm thinking about it, but leaning away this year. Roger Waters would be cool, but for the $500 it takes for me to make the trip, this new lineup just seems to fall a little short. Keeping me in the game is a review of some of my favorite 2007 shows streaming fresh off the 'nano: Rodrigo y Gabriela, Of Montreal, Hot Chip, Metric, and Gotan Project.

Meanwhile, back at gesture drawing:

Drawing Sessions (From the Stack)

I usually bring all my drawings home from class and toss them in a growing stack of newsprint paper. When I have time, I take a few pages from the top of the stack, re-drawing poses in a sketchbook and taking a second look at successes and failures. Here are a few interesting ones from December that had been buried...

Drawing Sessions

Drawing Sessions

While I've spent most of my weeknights lately battling a major outbreak of buzzing flies in my house, I have to admit there's a strange satisfaction once you reach a letter of flyswatter aptitude where you can take down the little pests in mid-air, on their own turf. Anyhow, here are a few drawings from class in my first week back:

Google Reader & Homepage

This might not be news to everyone, but just a quick shout out for everyone else: I've only recently been able to sit down and fully explore the cool new Google Web apps available, and I have to recommend that you Google users out there at home give Reader and Homepage a spin (available through the menus at the top of Gmail and Google search). As a pair these have largely streamlined my daily web browsing: I get RSS summaries of all the websites, blogs, and columns I read as they're updated, and my homepage lists my email, chat, weather, stocks, and news. The new and evolving Reader sharing feature, by which you can see your friends' favorite articles and web findings, is a lot more fun than Digg.com - so get on there, Google friends! You can also see my shared items to the right on this blog if you use a different reader.

Only downside is that I've already subscribed to too many things! That, and the fact that Google now knows far too much about me and could probably replace me entirely by 2021 when it releases "Google Replicant".

Comic: Family Tech Support

Do you live far from your parents, finding yourself doing a little tech support regularly on your visits? Usually it isn't anything impossibly complex, but the generational gap when it comes to computers is always amusing, so when I found my afternoon free yesterday I decided to draw up a quick comic:

It was fun to try this, though the process was glacially slow since I'm not used to doing it! I used a generic Dad caricature for the sake of getting the drawings done quickly.

Sketchbook

In lieu of a shiny 3G iphone from the future, I'm trying to get in the habit of carrying a sketchbook... here are a few quick pages I threw down while waiting on planes/trains on the way to New York. Riding the Hudson Line opened up this whole train of thought on Yetis, Sewer Rats and Demons... a little odd, yes, but I'm going somewhere with it. Really.

Gesture Drawing (Rudy Giuliani)

Just got back from a nice 10-day trip home to New York. On the return flight, I recalled a Gesture Drawing session from a few months back where I tried cartooning "Mr. 9/11" himself into the model's poses. The model was not informed of this insult. Here are a couple of painted results:

Drawing - "Dancer"

One of my goals for the new year is to make drawing more of a habit, hopefully finding a more entertaining purpose for keeping at it than class alone. A co-worker of mine suggested that a good way to improve after a drawing session is to revisit the day's work, and re-draw everything with a fresh critical eye. So this series of drawings is an attempt to breathe some life into what was originally a particularly lousy day of gesture drawing class for me, using the original drawings from class as inspiration for fresh ones that pushed the poses further and had a little more detail.

One Month Off

For the next four weeks, I'll be free from work, unimpeded from writing, reading and sketching all day, working on my pro basketball career, or busting some dewey decimals at the local library. Though I'll be in New York between December 18-28, my real intention is not to travel or rest, but to take some time to focus on defining new goals and enabling more satisfaction in everyday life. Look for a much-needed resurgence in Art posts coming this way!

For now, check out this TEDTalk on creativity and education; A fringe product of very intense academia myself, I'm inclined to agree with much of what the speaker has to say. Most notably, I do now realize that the biggest challenge I face in every day is not only accepting but embracing and enjoying the idea of screwing up in the interest of trying new things... This sort of perfectionism - which I think a lot of former strong students experience - is exactly what our education system too often demands.

The Custodian

Ninja Parade

Ninja Parade Slips Through Town Unnoticed Once Again

James Jordan Photography

PIMP
Originally uploaded by JamesJordan

My friend James has clearly been hard at work over the past couple of months exploring his photography interests. He has some incredible portraits (see Cathy's in particular, and the newer ones with Eric are pretty funny), but I'm curious to see where he's going with this new, playful angle...

www.jjordanphotography.com

Drawing Inspiration

An amusing nod to animation history from the depths of the internets...

I have been doing a fair amount of drawing lately, but haven't been home much to scan & post... will get something up later this week!

William & Mary Alumni Magazine Interview

Look Mom, I'm almost as cool as Patton Oswalt!

The Fall edition of William & Mary Alumni Magazine includes brief interviews with comedian Patton Oswalt and myself regarding Ratatouille and our common background at the school. A related article covers Jen Becker, of my same class. This is such a step up from that time the AP interviewed the 1999-2000 W&M SIN directors but never even mentioned me in the article! :)

Dan Rather's CBS Lawsuit

"Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news."

story with video from Larry King interview

Gesture Drawing - Now in Glorious Technicolor!

It's been a nice, quiet weekend at home for once, so I've started scanning in some unused Gesture Drawings and experimenting with some painting techniques in photoshop. I think the textured patterns (shirt, background) are something I'll be exploring a lot more in figuring out what I like. For now, here's a start!

Drawing Inspiration

As I've been re-learning how to draw over the past two years, moving from a more clean, precise architectural approach to something more organic and gestural, I've hit a point where I need to figure out exactly where I want to go with it all. Aside from knowing that I need to draw more, I'm really not sure... so I'm going to start collecting inspiration on this blog as I come across it, and see where it leads.

I know next to nothing about painting in photoshop. Traditional painting was never that appealing to me, since it seemed to clash with my more obsessive-compuslive habits. Seeing artists using photoshop at work, however, certainly has me curious about its versatility... even if I just try to apply something much simpler and cartoony to my own drawings.

Here's a video from MAD Magazine artist Tom Richmond where he describes his painting technique as part of a series on digital coloring:



Though the subject matter of a bikini octopus woman might seem a little juvenile to some, here's a pretty cool time-lapse video of a surprisingly simple photoshop painting technique:



Amazing that people are out there sharing stuff like this!

Life Update

My blog will live! This post is intended mostly as a friends & family update on where I've been all this time...

Over the past month I took a trip to San Diego for the SIGGRAPH Conference and a little exploring with friends, and I backpacked Half Dome at Yosemite. It was on the latter trip that I met a superhero, who demonstrated that people can, in fact, fly.

If you've never heard of "Birdman", take a look at this video. With a winged suit and parachute, Birdman (let's just say there's only one) can take an extended glide down mountains and across the sky before deploying a parachute for a soft landing. I thought this was strictly the stuff of Warren Miller films and insane Austrians, but little did I know...

Exhausted from the hike to our campground atop Vernal and Nevada Falls in Yosemite National Park, my camping group (Karen, Joey, Jenn, Troy, Mahyar, Andy and myself) decided to call it an early night on Saturday evening in preparation for a 3am night hike up the side of Half Dome. The timing would allow us to avoid the infamous summer crowds on that route, and arrive in time for sunrise over Yosemite Valley below.

The hike went very well: On time and with no bear encounters to stop us, we caught our first glimpse of Half Dome as a huge, monochromatic, arching shape reaching upward into the starred sky, with a short line of headlamps from other early risers slowly working their way up the steep cable climb. Sunrise at the top was beautiful (see pics linked above), and we relaxed up there for over an hour with a dozen or so other people, who gradually trickled off after sticking their heads out over the 5,000 foot tall cliff edge over the valley floor and braving up for the cable hike back down.


Eventually, only four from my group and a couple remained on the rock, finishing our packed breakfasts and preparing to make our own descents. The only person looking towards the valley at a time where everyone else just happened to be turning their SLRs to the sun, I was startled when, out of nowhere (my first thought: A climber?), a man in a helmet, goggles, and a bright red and yellow suit calmly walked to the outermost extreme of the cliff edge, about 25 yards away with a rock outcropping somewhat between us. He seemed perfectly at home standing at the edge, and as he turned to adjust his suit I caught the sight of his backpack. "A base Jumper!" I whispered and signaled to everyone else, keeping quiet such as not to startle the guy before he was all set. "He's going to jump!"

All six of us on the Dome got on our stomachs and crawled towards the cliff edge, holding our cameras out to get sight of the jumper as he made his final preparations. He didn't seem to mind us at all while he adjusted his goggles and some sort of camera on his helmet, and as we watched him we began to realize that this brightly colored suit was nothing ordinary at all: it had wings connecting his legs and armpits!

After a number of goggle tweaks, the man, who seemed about 40, turned to us for the first time and, with a thick European accent, said:

"Hey guys! Don't tell anyone about this, okay? It's a very severe penalty!"

I'm going to assume he was talking about the Park Rangers or Police so I can continue the story here. We all gave Birdman a flurry of support in reply, and he turned back to the cliff, toes to the edge. Then a one bounce, two, three, and... THE GUY JUMPED HEAD-FIRST OFF THE SIDE OF HALF DOME! WOW! He quickly fell out of sight, but that was immediately followed by a loud fluttering sound... at which point the Birdman absolutely soared out across Yosemite Valley, wings opened, flying far away from us before making a broad turn around a central rock face. He disappeared from view behind that face for a few anxious seconds, but re-appeared with parachute opened just in time to land in a small clearing in the forest at the opposite side. Within seconds, he was packed up and gone. His route expertly planned and executed, the Birdman showed off the closest thing I've ever seen to superpowers.


The four of us who witnessed this stunt wouldn't shut up about this for the rest of the day. Hopefully this explains why I questioned what actually caused the lunar eclipse that night...

Back on Earth (err...), I've also wrapped on my third (!) feature film assignment at work. My time on WALL-E's Characters Team felt extremely brief after spending two and a half years on Ratatouille (just a half year or so in this case) and it's too early to get into details, but it was great to be a part of something so unique. WALL-E will be a stunning film and I'm very curious to see how people will react as they learn more! Since wrapping on that project two weeks ago, I've joined the very small crew of the short film that will accompany it. It's been a while since I was in shorts (JackJack Attack on the Incredibles DVD, where my role was fairly small) so I haven't yet decided whether I should be terrified or excited over my very intense production schedule there now. Fortunately I do know that the film is gonna be sweet! :)

There's a small stack of drawings sitting on my desk that I'll try to scan in and share this weekend. If you know of any good getting-started web references for photoshop painting on top of drawings, I'd love to see them!


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