Doodles

Sketching while watching tv late at night. Not much on after midnight.


Surfing through ESPN I guess. I wasn't really paying attention.




"Have you seen my dog? It was about this big."

Kid's stuff

This is again from my son's sketch pad. He's 10. I imagine he'll be working at Cartoon Network next year or the year after. He's got a whole series of characters set and ready to go. These are the Kobooz. He drew them and I colored them in PS, with his direction of course.

Vintage Disney

I'm just posting this drawing from my collection because I think it's cool. It's Willie the Giant from Mickey And The Beanstalk, circa 1947. I bought this drawing off John Pomeroy when I working at Bluth back around '90 or so. John told me it was a John Lounsbery drawing.

A 9 year old's concept

Today I thought I'd share one of my son's concept drawings that we made into one of the extra characters in our short. As we were coming up with designs, our director just had everyone go home and design stuff. I told my son he should draw up some robots, as that is what he likes to do anyway. I brought them back and one of his was picked to be one of the extra characters. I did a more detailed version for the modeler and the finished model was done by one of our classmates who worked on the project for a short time.

The original design of toybot


My cleanup model


The final cg model

Personally, I think the cg model lost something in the translation, and my son complained that it didn't have the scooper thing on the end of his tail over his head. My mistake. Plus he lost the vents on the side, and the modeler put pants on him. I thought the vents were cool. I liked the boxy design of the original too like it was a old metal computer cabinet from the 50's or something. I'm not fond of pants on robots or even cartoon animals. Well, it was a democratic project and people were learning and adding their own touches. I say, not bad for a nine year old.

Blog look change

Yeah yeah, I know, I changed the blog look. I'm still not totally satisfied with their templates but since I don't really know html, I guess this is it for a while. Maybe I'll be able to change a few things later as I figure this out.

One Day At A Time

This blog isn't going to be my rant for or against the animation industry. It's just what I've been doing and am going to do in and around the biz. I'll leave it to others to pontificate on the business of animation. I will post pics and drawings every now and again as I get to them. Hopefully more often than not.

I'll continue to fight the good fight of remodeling my house, playing with my kids, making sure my wife gets enought sleep, and trying to keep the squirrels out of our giant pecan tree. We lost that fight again this year. It was a bumper crop for them I must say. I really don't know where they hide them all, and I haven't seen one sticky note yet to remind them where they do.

Other things I have been doing over the past year have been this 3D short film I'm working on with other animation friends from various studios. It's a great little film, or as I call it, 'the world's longest short' as it's taken some time just to get it to this point. It started out at Studio Arts during the day classes where we all went for Maya. These were the cheap $75/semester classes mostly paid for the LAUSD (the Los Angeles school system). One of the few things that I think the LA school system was ever good for, because their public schools sure aren't great shakes. One of the tricks of going to these cheaper classes was that you had to be available during the weekdays from 8 am to 3 pm. So it worked for all us unemployed animation folk if you could swing it. Into our second semester we decided to start a project during class instead of just class work, so we wrote, designed, modeled and and are animating a nice short film.

The character above is one of the main characters I modeled and am animating. It was textured by a very talented 3D artist named Iohann Sanmartin from Bogota, Colombia. The character's name is Bubba. He's a blue collar, none too bright working class robot. It's a fun little film and I think it looks great so far in the renders and lighting department as well as the design and animation. It takes place on Mars and has robots but really has nothing to do with anything like the movie Robots.

This Other Life

Hi! I'm an artist. I used to work in the animation industry in LA. I still do as a matter of fact, when I get the chance. I'm an effects animator, the 2D kind. The kind they don't use much of anymore. The kind that were made redundant when the big 3D craze hit. I didn't learn effects in any 3D program such as Maya as it didn't appeal to me. I recently went back to my roots in animation which was in character animation, and that I have adapted to 3D, so now it's a matter of jumping back on the horse and getting back out there. It all takes time to get scenes and stuff together again for a new demo reel. I spent most of the last 2 years in school training on Maya full time.

Which brings me to my other world. My life outside the animation industry. Because of lost work and paychecks and house payments and cars and kids and bills, my wife went back to work as an RN (registered nurse). It's a great job and it pays well and it gets a lot of respect from me.

So we basically switched roles a few years ago, and my life is one of house husbandry. She had been out of the nursing realm for over 6 years as my job seemed secure at the time, so she had to ramp up too as it were on new techniques and medical procedures that changed over the course of 6 years. She went through a period of maybe a year and through 3 different hospitals to get to where she is now. She's an ICU nurse and deals with heart patients. She's amazing. If we make a mistake and kill a drawing, nobody dies. If she or a doctor make a mistake someone could die. I think she'd like a lot less pressure, like one of an artist.

We also have two kids. A girl who is 17 and graduated high school this year. Undecided in what to do. Might be animation, might not. She draws, creates jewelry, & is a quite the photographer. We also have a son who is 10. He does nothing but draw, usually 1-3 hours a day. He already knows he wants to design video games or something of that nature. Both kids are homeschooled so they are basically home all the time.

Maybe, just maybe, when I have time, I can eke out a drawing or sketch on a napkin or hamburger wrapper during my lunch at In 'n Out. That is if I don't use the napkin to wipe the ketchup off my son's chin or something disgustingly worse like the table we're eating at. Actually, a ketchup drawing might be just the thing. . .with mustard for the hair color.

All that and we're going on about 8 years of restoring our old house that was originally built in 1922 as time and money permit. It's almost done.

So this is my story . . . . . . . . . . .stay tuned. . . .