Sketchbook: Classical Art Studies

This assortment is from a range of books from different years, but are pretty good examples of when I would try to focus on classical art through line drawing. The first page was done in 2002 at the Art Institute of Chicago. The top figures are from Cezanne's The Bathers, Hopper's Nighthawks is cropped on the left side (I believe it was temporarily at the Art Institute at the time), and the bottom right quarter is a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh:

Speaking of Van Gogh, I drew a sliced mango in the way I imagined he would in the top right of this page (circa1998). The left side is a line-by-line recration of a drawing by Picasso (whose title and internet link escape me) that I did in 1999. The woman's profile in the bottom right was taken from an art school flyer I had handy at the time (2000).

Rounding out this post are two more artist's portraits. On the is a portrait of the young artist prodigy Amedeo Modigliani (2000). On the right is a quickly-drafted Wasily Kandinsky below a recreation of his signature, both done by brush pen in 2000. I take Kandinsky's philosophies on painting to heart each time I try to work on something abstract.

Tao Feng: Lip Synchs

"I've been waiting for you, now let's dance."

"Forged by revenge and tempered by fire-the Phoenix will always burn bright!"

Lip Synch animations for Tao Feng were done using Lightwave visemes. These two videos show the Jade Dragon and Fiery Phoenix characters during a warmup and a victory cutscene scenario.

Tao Feng: Throw Cleanup

Raw mocap.

Cleaned-up mocap.

In Game capture.

My first job after film school was working as a 3D Animator for Chicago developer Studio Gigante. Their first project was Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus, a fighting game exclusively for the Xbox. It was a great learning experience that gave me experience in areas like mocap refinement, cutscene animation, and lip synch/facial animation. This sequence of videos shows the raw motion capture progressing to cleanup, then to how it looks in game.

TV Turnoff Week Promo

TV Turnoff Promo #2. 2002. Digital.

This image was originally done for the Adbusters.org submission contest for their "TV Turnoff Week." As someone who liked the idea I submitted several styles, one of which was a person turning off the television and raising the blinds to let the bright sun fill his room. This was the one they chose to put in their magazine that year. My goal is to keep submitting each year, noticeably raising the bar on the images I put forward.

Weezer vs. Radiohead

Weezer versus Radiohead. 2002. Pencil with digital color pass. 11"x17"

This piece came from the random observation I had one day that the two bands had a high number of parallels between the appearances of their members. Both had slight-looking frontmen, lanky and shaggy haired guitar players, and drummers of similar shape. The rest I pushed where I could to make the similarities pop. Colin Greenwood was made a referee in the "fight" to balance out the number of people on each side, and song lists were made for both bands to fit in the background. The slogan "as commercial as alternative gets...as alternative as commercial gets" doesn't have much meaning to it, other than to summarize the parallel universe theme.