"300 heads" sketchbook update

Five pages from my "300 heads" sketchbook:

Steve Jobs, Stephen Colbert, Mark Kelly

John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman

Robert Iger, George Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy

Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr.

Nothing all that pretty, but at least I'm keeping myself busy.

300 sketchbook update

Five new pages for the "300 heads" sketchbook:

The three richest people in the world: Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison

The three tenors: Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Jose Carreras

Soldiers: Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, Specialist Pat Tillman, Sgt. 1st class Leroy Petry

Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Pattie Boyd

Malala Yousafari, Neda Agha-Soltan, and Marie Colvin

More will come soon.

300 sketchbook update

So this blog has been static lately, but for those who have been asking for updates, here's the latest 15 minute head sketches from my 300 heads sketchbook. I colored them up a bit in Photoshop. See how many you can recognize from the headlines over the last few months:

Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut, Imed Trabelsi

Muammar Gaddafi, Vice Admiral Alex Gortney, Michael Keaton

Melissa Leo, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale

My spare time has been spent on a ten page mini-comic that I'm doing 100% digitally. It should be finished soon (before ComiCon) and I'll make it available as soon as I can.

Sketchbook Dump

ComiCon started this week, so I've been drawing a bit each hour while I'm in panels. Here are a bunch of recent sketchbook pages:

Queens of the Stone Age.

Softball team and the Scheme Team.

Fist, hats, and people at ComiCon.

Paul Pope, ComiCon attendees, and the Marvel panel.

Panel members hosted by Chip Mosher of Boom! Studios. http://blog.boom-studios.net/

Sketchbook: 7/13/10

This morning I remembered to bring my sketchbook with me when I gave blood. Unfortunately the magazines in the waiting room were nearly all Good Housekeeping and didn't have much in terms of celebrity faces. The left three women on this page were in the room with me, and the rest were in the magazine:

Cont'd, with some IRL people on the right side of the bottom page:

Later on I did a pass on all the remaining Last Comic Standing contestants in the simple caricature style I've been developing. Still not stylized enough for my taste. (Ref):

Jury Duty sketching

Thankfully they didn't need me in court. Color done in Photoshop because I need to practice that too.

Summertime Sketching

About to get back into drawing again. Did a 2D piece recently that in no way used a computer, and it was a bit freaky. There's so much out there that inspires, but I don't want to get too wrapped up in appreciating when there's lots more creating to be done. Here are some recent entries from the sketchbook that I colored a bit in Photoshop:

Big Cat Diaries! Because my TV is closer to me than the Zoo or the Wild Animal Park at the ends of town.

Michael Mann and Will Smith's Ali. "The Champ is Here!"

Abandoned idea for a recent Red Dead Redemption piece. For those who know the game, the idea for this was to make a drawing of the night Jack was conceived. Dutch would be glaring at John and Abigail, who share a moment as she fills his glass. Bill Williamson and Javier Escuela are joking around to the side, in their own little stupor. I think the best layout is the one penned out in the bottom left. I liked the concept for this a lot, so maybe I'll come back to it.

Hearts and Minds, from the Bodies exhibit in San Diego last year:

Pedestrians during a Chinese New Year celebration, 1997. Camcorder in the man's hands.:

Self-Portrait from last week, looking busted. 

Normally I look a little more like this (pic via The 8-Bit Cubist):

Looks like the cover of a DJ duo's album...

Thumbnails: Breakdancers from "B-Boy"

Back in film school, I wanted to do a demo reel that showcased motion that not only was difficult to animate with a computer, but was visually interesting and exciting to watch. Breakdancing was the perfect choice. To do this, I had to pick up every video I could find (this was before YouTube, and most breakdancing videos were shot on tape at that point), and go through them frame-by-frame to find out what the key poses and breakdowns looked like. It was a lot of work, but as any animator will tell you, there's no other way to pull off complex animations. In my student film B-Boy, the moves I had my character do included a 6 step, Swipes, Turtle, Headspin, and Windmill (the 6 step and Turtle were the only two I was ever able to do in real life). Here are some of the thumbnail drawings I did to get the poses and timing down (30 frames per second):

The 6 step:

This 6 step is similar to the style of the one I did in my reel. He does it all at once in the last 3rd of the video.

And here are the thumbnails. The order of the pages goes from left to right on the top, then left to right on the bottom. The three number columns represent the frame # on the video, the # of my scene in Softimage 3.7, and the overall # it would be if it were on its own:

 

Turtle:

These thumbnails go in order from top to bottom, left page to right page:

 

And finally, the famous Windmills:

 
 

Sketchbook: Clothed Pictures of Famous People

Here are some more selections from old sketchbooks that I scanned recently. The first is the author Zadie Smith from her great novel White Teeth:

 

After looking through some old sketchbooks, it turns out I've drawn Edward Norton twice:

 

Key facial features of 4 famous women (2 singers, 2 actresses). Can you recognize them all?

 

Clockwise from the top left: Angelina Jolie, Fiona Apple, Natalie Portman, Bjork.

Stylized portrait of Terrence Stamp from one of my favorite movies, The Limey:

Quick sketch of the godfather of noise, Rahzel:

 

Sketchbook: Preparing for Film School

I've been meaning to get the better drawings scanned from my old sketchbooks, and I think I'm all caught up. For my first post in this series, these are some pages from 2000, when I was still a student at the Evergreen State College. I knew I wanted to become an animator, but I first had to flesh out my sketchbook to apply to film schools. The Vancouver Film School ended up being my next destination.

This first page has drawings of a dancer from a magazine ad, along with some Matrix poses:

The dancers on this page were "x-rayed" from a cigarette ad, followed by a more healthy yoga couple:

 

 And this page contains my arm without its skin, and some life-drawings from a Pinoy Eskrima (Philipino Stick Fighting) session held at the college. The man with the short ponytail is the sensei. I took his Ninpo Taijutsu class the term before.

  

The first page in this pair is from a book by the famous photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The second is from an animation book, if I remember correctly. Nothing is traced, just drawn to start becoming familiar with the subtleties of how animals move:

 

More animal drawings. Trying to guess what muscles are under the fur: