SHUT UP YOU STUPID KID!!!Taxday

So this is my second little short starting the stupid kid. In this short stupid kid does his taxes and ends up feeling a little "light". Along with this short I am also including the original storyboard from my sketchbook and some development art as well as pencils sketches for the key poses. This is for another contest Channel Frederator is having so wish me luck !!.

ULTRAMAN!

Detail.

-DAY4-
I had two or three more sessions on this painting without updates to have a bigger leap from the last stage to the final painting. The background was the hardest element to figure out.
It was a challenge because I didn't want it to be too painterly and take away from the figures and I also didn't want it to be too graphic. The figures was just a process of building on the light areas and finally adding the final highlights and details. . I definitely wanted Ultraman to be the focus of the piece so he has the most details and strong bold colors. I made the background lighter so the silhouette of the figures could stand out. Now I need to find the right frame for the piece and varnish it when its all over. The varnish will bring out all the dull colors and unify the piece making it glossy and giving it that wonderful wet look. Hope you guys enjoy the final painting and I hope I didn't bore you too much with my rants about painting. I will start work on a new painting but this one will move a lot slower and it will be a fairly big piece. ENJOY AND DROP ME A LINE IF YOU DIG IT!!



-DAY3-
I worked on the piece for about 2 1/2 hours today. First I worked on the grey areas of Ultramans costume, keeping it simple and not trying to get too light or detailed. Then I worked in the red and got it pretty far along just needing the final touches and highlights/reflections. I established a neutral background color which I will later develop into maybe smoke or something that will give interest without taking too much from the figures. I want the final color of the background to be brighter as well, because I feel it will fit the subject matter better. I glazed in a violet color on the shadows of the monster and worked a bit more in the light areas defining them a bit further. I need to let this part dry so I can go in the piece and start defining areas better with more detail and color. I'm thinking one or two more days and the piece will be finished. I'm enjoying this piece and will hopefully carry momentum into more paintings, i need to paint more and maybe it will lead into a gallery show later down the line.

On another note I saw "The History of Pixar" at the Cleveland film festival and it was amazing and inspirational. If you have a chance to check out this film please do, it's a must for any artist with a need to create quality original material.



-DAY2-
This part is where the fun really begins. Now my focus is on applying my basic light areas on the monster and a dark tone of red on some areas of the ultraman figure. Note that the light areas on the monster are very loose and I let the brush do a lot of the work for me. My objective is not to scrub paint but let the paint dictate what it wants to do. This part of the process gives the monster an organic feel and it creates crevices and other fun things that will later guide me when I am refining the light areas. Also note that the light color is still very much a mid tone just to define my lights and darks. Now I let this stage dry overnight.

I don't mean to ramble on but I figure it would be nice to share my painting process, hope you enjoy it!



-DAY1-
Day 1 was a short day of work on this painting because of pesky freelance jobs. I was basically just able to put down my acrylic base coat and once that was dry, my basic figures in oil. The trick about painting in oils is having patience, so I let this stage dry over night so the next day I am able to apply paint without the worry of taking off paint that is already there.


ULTRA MAN!! He's great, spending his time fighting monsters the size of buildings and saving the life of thousands while he's at it! I'm really exited about this piece and I'm glad to say this will be my first oil painting in a long time. This image is actually a photo of the sketch already down on the masonite ready for paint! I've never really painted anything this stylized in oils before but I'm confident I can make this work and I feel up for the challenge. Maybe I will post process pics as I go along but I haven't decided. It feels great to step away from the computer and get you hands dirty. There is so much going on as far as work and freelance so forgive me if the final takes a while but I'm hoping I can buckle down and grind this one out. Everyone stay fresh and if ya DIG IT drop a comment and say hello!

Gestures 2008

So i've been taking about 20 minutes each morning recently to warm up doing gestures. Some of them are from my head, others are from reference but my objective is to try and understand the human form in a dynamic and stylized way. I'm liking the unique structure I am achieving with some of the shapes, not concentrating on traditional accuracy but a more modern and stylistic way to interpret the figure. I want to continue this practice and turn it to a daily ritual. I feel it will be extremely beneficial considering I am planning a graphic novel soon. The better I understand the figure from memory the better I will be at telling a visual story. I also included an ink drawing constructed from one of the gestures, drawing with an ink brush is fun and I don't do it enough. Hope you guys enjoy and any feedback is welcome.

SHUT UP YOU STUPID KID!!! Love Fest

VOTE FOR MY SHORT AND SHOW YOUR BOY SOME LOVE!!!
(To vote just leave a comment on the video)
VOTE!!




Hey everyone, like i've blogged about before i'm slowly learning how to animate. This is a little five second animation for this contest over at Channel Frederator. It stars an original character of mine called simply, stupid kid. If you ever knew a super obnoxious and annoying kid growing up this is him. It's an amature animation but I'm learning and I hope to keep on getting better. Let me know what you think even if you just think is completely stupid. Thanks guys.

SUSHI PACK cont.

Here is some more stuff I did for the Sushi Pack cartoon on CBS Saturday mornings. Full episodes will be going up on the AGKidZone website soon so if you guys happen not to catch it on CBS you can watch them anytime on the website. This year we hope to push awareness on the property so hopefully you will be seeing cool stuff coming out. I can't wait until we make toys from this show, I think they might start off as a specialty product so expect them to be awesome! This is definitely a great show thats not getting the eyeballs it deserves so i encourage you to watch some episodes and let me know what you think. I've been working on my own personal projects lately and I'm very excited about them but they need a lot of work still.
I will be starting a new full size oil painting soon and I will post the drawing for it in the coming week hopefully. Until then everyone have a great weekend !

GO JOE!!!!!

SNAKEYES!! One of all my all time favorites. You can't do stormshadow and not Snakeyes now can you?? Hope ya digs!


So my friend and co-worker Saxton Moore is having a G.I. JOE contest over at channel frederator raw. I decided to do my all time faves Stormshadow and Snakeyes (Snakeyes is still in the works). Love these two, I always though they where the most badass, other than Destro that is. I have really fond memories of this show and the toys were a dream come true for a young boy like me. I had tons of fun with this one and even though the holidays got in the way I finally finished one of them and the other should be done tomorrow. Hope you guys digs and hope everyone had a good holidays. Everybody's resolution should be to post more often, I know that's what mine is=)

POWERPUFF GIRLS 10th ANNIVERSARY

I got contacted by Jay Rogers, art director for Cartoon Network in ATL. for a special piece of the powerpuff girls. Apparently they do a cool in-house calendar with all their properties re-invented. They wanted a dark edgy illustrations depicting the girls in battle with a monster. I gotta say this was a lot of fun and the dudes at cartoon where a real pleasure to work with. I had fun exploring these characters and adding a little bit of me into their world. I was so excited because they wanted me to do my style(or one of them) for this piece. I think once i got the drawing down the rest just flowed and it was more or less painless. Thanks to the Cartoon Network guys. Hope you guys out there enjoy it.

SUSHI PACK PREMIERE ON CBS SATURDAY MORNIGS!!!!!

FINALLY!!! After long months and crazy hours and turnaround deadlines Sushi Pack will make it's debut on CBS Saturday mornings in The Kewlopolis Block. Sushi Pack is a super group of five pieces of sushi brought to life by a freak lighting storm and now they live in an organic doughnut shop looking to fight crime and enforce peace and justice!! Don't let their size full you because these five sushis pack a BIG punch!! I mainly worked on the show as a background supervisor and character designer. DIC entertainment did the bulk of the production work but we here at AGP did the visual development and quality control. Check out fellow co-workers Saxton Moore and Jim Groman for their post on Sushi Pack artwork. It was a joy to work on this show because the style is fresh and cool and it's a fun show. I've been waiting a while to be able to share this with you guys so here you go. I'll post even more stuff later. Hope you digs!

HADOKEN!!!!!!

Just a little quickie I had to get out of my system. Damn i used to be into this game!! Still am. Dont mess with Ryu!!!

Hulking Sacks10

Random, very very random...my kind of animation excersice.
DISCLAIMER...I didn't come up with this dialogue!!!! I was messing around with mouth movements and showed it to a co-worker and that person came up with the quote. I just thought it was hilarious!!!

These are the small post-it drawings that started it all.

Hello all. So I've been playing with animation lately. Just messing around with Flash casually trying to learn and have fun in a very silly way. I AM NOT AN ANIMATOR. I do like trying different things though. This little short is of my good friend and colleague Saxton Moore. I really had fun doing this and I know its silly and nothing great but I learned a lot and I hope to do more and get lots better. I will be posting more soon. I hope to get better at this. Hope you guys enjoy!

Experimentations with Memories in 3-D

I used this sad little boy for some ink drawings done for the Transplant show (see posts below). I am working on another group show in NYC for sometime in 2008. This was all experimentation, and doing that I started playing around with a 3-D look for some pieces. I didn't know whether it worked or not until last night. I found some old 3-D glasses and tried them on with my new pieces, to my surprice one of them was right on. I figured out what I did that made them work and duplicated that on the other piece. I'm excited about this discovery and I might do further experimentation for future pieces. The pink and blue piece is not 3-D but I thought it looked cool for maybe a t-shirt design. Maybe even without the boy. I will try and post the ink drawings done for the Transplant show at a later time. Please let me know what you guys think. I'm not entirely sure about this direction and so far its all an effort to try and discover what it is I want to say with this upcoming show. Further details will be anounced later when things get more solidified. If anyone has any 3-D glasses laying around and want to see the pieces in 3-D that would be amazing, and if you do please let me know what you think about it. Peace world!

IRONMAN

I have been reading tons of great comics lately!! Marvel has its claws on me right now and I'm digging a lot of work out there. Over all i think one character is in the middle of it all right now, Ironman. He's kind of a cold blodded bastard that has a serious case of powertripping. He basically got captain america killed and recently got completely demolished by the hulk in World War Hulk, which is amazing and I recomend it to anyone! So i've been meaning to do an ironman piece and I finally got around to it. Struggled with this one for a bit at the end of the process, but overall it was really fun to do something purely for myself for a change. I feel inspired right now and I'll try to continue this momentum with other pieces. Till next time I hope you enjoy the piece and feel free to drop a line.

Freelance and ©oncepts

Hello all, sorry for ignoring this blog like a bastard child, I do apologize. I have been soo crazy with freelance and work and also enjoying the summer by staying active. These are concepts and illustrations I had to do for a property called Pretty Freekin Scary developed right here in American Greetings. I am one of two illustrators working on 4-5 books for Penguin publishing and they are due out Sept. in bookstores and wallmart among other places. Fun behind the scenes stuff. Will resume with the personal work very shortly, maybe even tomorrow, but for now enjoy this filler and no, I am not dead...just blog-lazy.

ASSHOLE MOUTH

Everyone knows one of these guys....now wipe your mouth.

Sorry for the lack of post lately, been crazy busy with freelance and other stuff. I've been wanting to do another framed piece and I thought this would be a good oportunity for one. Kind of discusting i know but they all kinda are. I'll try and make sure to post more often. I got a sketch-o-rama coming soon so be on the look out. Peace out!

THE RHINO: Spiderman Villain Contest

Quint over at Ain't it Cool News had a contest to design to design an excisting Spiderman Villain for the next movie. The winner will get a couple of cool busts of spidey and venom. I decided to do the Rhino and really give his costume a cool new look. We also had to cast them for the movie, so I decided to go with Dwayne Johnson A.K.A the Rock. I think he would bring charisma and a level of fun that these villains need for the Spideman franshise. I love redesigning these characters and give my take on them. I had tons of fun with this image and it was a completely different way of working for me. I created paths in photoshop for each and every section of the suit to give me the cleanest possilble result. I love it. I hope to work like this more often in the future. Big things to come soon!! Till then stay fresh☻

ROBOCOP!

FINAL

Initial sketches

Photoshop sketch

Tight pencil drawing
My latest post for Sketch-o-rama. This one took a while to develop but I'm pretty pleased with the result. I've started to sketch out the initial concept in photoshop because of its flexibility to make a cool pose without being restricted by the edge of the paper or anything like that. I also like to skew things and experiment in photoshop until I get something I really like. I then took this piece and did a tight pencil then a quicky digital color job. I'm posting an initial sketch as well to show were my initial look for my version came from. I'll try and post even more frequently, but till next time...peace out!!

By the way who's watching the big fight on saturday?? i got my money on Maywheater!!!

ME AM NO BIZARRO

Hello again. I feel inspired as of late. I need to post more often and keep myself on a good pace with creating new artwork. I decided to do a Bizarro piece, because what is cooler than a retarded version of superman? I love the concept of bizarro and the endless ways you could interpret him. I did this piece entierly in photoshop and i like certain aspects of it but I'm not at all ready to give up the traditional goodness. Next up is a redesign of Robocop for the sketch-o-rama blog!! I cant wait to sink my teeth into this one, and check out the good work being produced for that blog. Till then enjoy and give a holler if ya feel like it!!


These are some hilarious stagings of my Bizarro having some terrible luck trying to relieve himself done by friend and animator extraordinare Saxton Moore. Yes, even Bizarros need to take leaks✪