Comic-con Saturday Recap

This was my tenth consecutive year attending the San Diego Comic-con. The convention seemed to noticeable escalate in size between 2005 and 2010, but the last five years have all felt basically the same, with the convention taking over the center as well as increasing portions of downtown. I only go on Saturdays at this point, and it's a pleasure to reunite with my old San Diego buddies, as well as anyone who is able to make it down from Los Angeles or other cities. I try to sample a little bit of the floor and upstairs panels each year and this year I attended three panels: 3D Printing with Adobe Photoshop, William Shatner's motion comic "Man O War," and Google Spotlight Stories, which are akin to a CG theatrical performance you watch on your phone.

The Google Spotlight Stories panel had animators Patrick Obsorne (director of "Feast") and Glen Keane ("Duet"), who were very nice to speak with and kindly posed for photographs. I'll have to draw some caricatures of these gentlemen soon.

With "Feast" director Patrick Osborne, before the Google Spotlight Stories panel.

With master animator and "Duet" director Glen Keane after the end of the panel.

Walking around the floor was fun as usual, with the chance to view the finely-textured costumes from Batman vs. Superman up close, and exploring the illustrators tables, where I was positively blown away by Heather Theurer's incredible fantasy work, especially her realistic renditions of Disney characters:

Heather Theurer's take on the Frozen sisters.

Lilo and Stitch, with Mulan underneath.

Another artist, Scott Smith, made a series of typographic prints that fit every line of dialogue from popular movies on them:

I also saw Star Wars concept artist Iain McCaig doing some live portrait drawing, which was enlightening (the drawing advice he gave to his subject was to "get completely lost in your reference.") Terry Dodson's "Vespa Girl" was irresistible, so I snagged a postcard of it as I walked by his table. Little surprises like these are the reason why it is still worth it for me to continue going to Comic-con each year.

Sketchbook: Caricatures

Eminem and Dr. Dre sketches, scanned and colored in Photoshop. A bit "meh" and needing of some more love, but I've been busy these days with other things and unfortunately I can't spend as much time on each face as I'd like:

And finally, animators Shawn Kelly and Carlos Baena, from a picture taken at Siggraph. After scanning in the drawings, I pushed the proportions with the smudge tool to the point where the hatchmarks are nearly invisible. I went for a loose, distorted look, which was a lot of fun. I think I might be onto something with this style, specifically with how nicely the colors get formed by drawing color out from the variety of values found on a drawing that has a color layer on multiply above it in Photoshop:

The photo:

Siggraph 2010

I went up to Los Angeles this week to attend this year's Siggraph expo. In addition to a show floor, demonstrations, panels, and lectures, Siggraph has an area called the Emerging Technologies show, where you get a sneak peek at a variety of engineering marvels from around the world. I took a few pictures as I walked through:

Clockwise from top left: adjusting the direction of a pair of synthetic eyes via joystick, my friend Sabine dancing with a small French robot, a set of sensors that could be positioned in any number of arrangements, tickling a holographic pixie.

Left: Two people testing a "scent sensor" that, when activated by a perfume-scented piece of paper, would bloom and attract bees and hummingbirds cast from a projector above. Right: putting my hand out in a scanning field, where it was then rendered on a computer in real time. It was like putting my hand underneath a falling stream of virtual water and seeing its shape appear on the monitor. Very cool.

On to the show floor. I stopped by the Vancouver Film School table, and saw that I'm now included in their alumni book. It brought a nice feeling of closure to see it.

Another real time 3D scanning booth, only this had a much larger field to step into. The render on the left was taken from my iPhone. 

This Tandent booth had some impressive technology. It was able to isolate the shadow layer of an image and remove it to show the subject as if it was evenly lit from all directions. There was one before/after shot that they had of a wrinkled receipt with the after version looking essentially like a printed-out text document, it was so clear. When applied to faces (in real time, no less) you got this result (original video feed on the left, then the isolated shadow layer in the middle, then the differential "diffuse image" on the right):

The man at the booth who was explaining the tech to me said that the main function they were developing it for was facial recognition software.

On the way out, I bumped into animators Shawn Kelly and Carlos Baena, co-creators of the world-famous Animation Mentor online school. Both were extremely nice and fun to talk with, and I was very pleased to hear from Shawn that Red Dead Redemption is currently very popular with his coworkers at ILM!

More Caricature Practice

I'm still trying to find my go-to style for caricatures. I've been picking themes for subjects, and today's ended up being animators & animated filmmakers. Most of the source images for these came from the podcasts from the Speaking of Animation Blog, which I was listening to today.

Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (ref), the guys behind the story to How To Train Your Dragon. I did this first thing in the morning, so it doesn't have much flow to it.

Ted Ty, Aaron Gilman, and Richard Baneham. Kind of a spectrum of angular minimalist to straightforward portraiture, which I keep slipping into accidentally.:

And finally Steven Gordon, David Weatherly, Ben Rush & Ken Fountain (ref). I tried something different and "chunky" with these, which ended up being pretty unexpected and fun:

There's a big world of animators out there, so I'll no doubt be including more of these as time goes by and I hunt for more subjects. I'll also be posting some co-worker caricatures on here soon too.