SAIC Holiday Art Sale 2013

Thank you for those who came to the the Holiday Art Sale. It was a great experience talking to people. I am planning on creating a new series of paintings. I may participate again in the 2014 Spring Art Sale so if you are around Chicago in the Spring, keep your eyes open.

Bruce's Lecture

My Film Analysis professor Bruce has very animated hand gestures. I always think he looks a little bite like Bill Nighty.

Foggy Foggy Michigan Lake

Never An Easy Way

After spending months trying to figure out how to cheat on making less drawings for constantly-changing-perspective background by using After Effects' 2 an 1/2 D option. I realized I might as well just have used those time to make more drawings.

The title of this film is called Cyborg 

I admire you Joanna Quinn.

How many JellyBeans?

For the past month I have been thinking about a lot of things and looking at a lot of things.
To be honest, I didn't do much.
I didn't draw like I promised I would before summer break
I didn't finished reading the book I planned to finish
I didn't do a lot of things I promised myself to do.

I feel bad, but at the same time I am glad that I was able to stop and think for a while and learn more about myself and what I really want.

I found this video made by Ze Frank



How many jellybeans have I spend on worrying about my future? Oh man a big jar, or maybe more
But, I don't regret spending that much time worrying and thinking
Without all that I would not be writing this post, or finding this video, or trying out Corel Painter, or realizing how different the color of dusk in different cities, or be the person who I am now.

Thank you for everything that happened to me! good, bad, success, failure, mistakes, happiness, stress, whatever

William Turner: Reflections in a Single Polished Metal Globe and in a Pair of Polished Metal Globes

c.1810

I adore this painting

Scatter Hoarding

I just remember the password for my ancient Wordpress page. The Scatter Hoarding blog. I put anything that interested my on that blog: artists, games, films, musicians, Ads, and whatever that looks cool.

It is a site I want to publish publicly but never did. Maybe I will this summer. When I can go back and finish the contents.

In freshman, I promised my professor that I will have a blog that I routinely update. At last, I did it. This Blogger blog is  my first "active" blog. I never thought I would be able to keep it up. (Cheers to Tiffany and Kye, you guys have been very supportive in the beginning and until now.) This whole thing started  out as 365 Sketches project Tiff and I came up with last summer. We looked at other people's blogs and we envied their drawings. "How are we ever going to be able to draw like them?!"  We came up with the idea of posting sketches everyday and improve our drawing skills.
We were supposed to post for 365 days. We mange to carry on the project for a month. But then school started and we got distracted. Though I'm not posing everyday anymore, I'm still sketching everyday and keeping track of the number to complete the 365 project.
Specking of that,

I drew this last week. This is number 305 (counting backward)
I'm going back to traditional oil paint next semester. Getting paints all over my hands and mix paint with my fingers gives me the illusion that I'm an experience painter.  Mixing linseed oil and turpenoid makes me feel like a chemist, makes me feel....smart.

Animated .GIF

Yoohoo, it works! This is probably not new. Animated gif has being around for a long time. There's tons of .gif images online, but they are usually not very well animated.

Couple years ago I discovered a fashion photographer, Jamie Beck, who made the most amazing gif images I have ever seen.  They look like the newspaper from Harry Potter. Hum, how amazing are they? Take a look at one.

Maybe one more

Okay, last one

Aren't they amazing! The trick is to make the image into a complete cycle and loop it so it looks like a never ending scene.

Persistence of Vision

I went to watch a documentary about Richard Williams called Persistence of Vision at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The theater was not very pack, which is kind of sad. Most people in the theater were probably animators.

The documentary talks about Richard Williams' never finished animated feature film, The Thief and the Cobbler. He and all the animators in his studio spend 3 decays working on this feature. But in 1992, the project was shut down (or taken, I should say) and the 30 years of slavery like labors goes out the window. Just from looking at the bits of the tests of The Thief and the Cobbler,  I am already astound by the quality and the techniques of the animation.

The film was later finished and released by Majestic Films in 1993 as The princess and the Cobbler and Miramax in 1995 as Arabian Knight. 4 songs have been added to the released film, but in the Williams' original script, there was none. The script have been changed, scenes deleted and master piece gone.  I went on youtube to search for clips of the film and it is very obvious which scenes were done by Richard Williams and which scenes were not
I think this story of Richard Williams is a great lesson for me. I will mention one of the lesson I learn watching this film: finished the storyboard so I know the over all of the project. The documentary mention a lot about the struggles animators have to face. Time is always a big challenge for all types of animation. Deadlines deadlines deadlines.

This film actually gives me some inspiration. I will start experimenting as soon as I finished my 18 pages Human anatomy and Physiology exam. 囧

Quick Sketches :D

I'm listening to great music and all relax and happy. I opened my photoshop and sketched.

Chicago Latino Film Festival

I just came back from the theater. The Chicago Latino Film Festival is screening animation Buenos Aires Anima (Argentina), directed by María Verónica Ramírez and Tintico's Afternoon (Mexico) directed by Alejandro García Caballero.

Buenos Aires Anima has 4 short animations, each is created by different team. The whole project took 6 years to complete. The first animation, is the one I enjoy the most. (one with guggenheim supermarket)

I really like Tintico's Afternoon because it is using a simular technique I'm using for my current film. The POV view of the flying fly is fantastic. It makes me feel dizzy in the theater but what a wonderful effect! This film is a great reference for me to make my animation.  I also like the sound too, lovely, lovely.

It Has Been Raining and Raining and Raining, But I'm Happy

Finally! I finally organized a portfolio. Those are some pages. I never realized how difficult it is to archive and organize my own works. Even though I already have all the drawings digitalized and on my computer, this still took me couple days to make.

This video is totally irrelevant to my portfolio but it is very touching so I want to share it. I think someone was chopping onion when I watched it.

Happy April Fools

I smell success!

 
Happy April Fools' Day

Fly Balloon, Fly High

This is my website home page now. I made the drawing last summer and left the sketch in my folder for  8 months. I didn't know what to do with it...I didn't know how to color this before.

Color Studies

As I am stressing out with my school works and my deadlines. I managed to do some color studies using googled images as reference. Each takes about half hour. I'm trying to get myself familiarizing with different color palettes. I tend to use the same coloes,so this exercise is a good way to mix up my palettes and make new colors.

Why Is My Biscuit Missing A Corner, And Why Is My Soup Half Gone?

I'm repainting a lot of my old drawings from last summer. This is one of it. There's couple more coming soon. For this one I spend less time working on it compared to the green shirt lady (which I spend 6 hours) If I keep practicing, I will eventually finish one in an hour, hopefully.

Gesture drawings

My professor suggested me to do more gesture figure drawings. I haven't down gestures on newsprint size paper since last year. It's nice to use larger paper again instead of sketchbook pages. I can have real "gesture" drawings.

Week Goes By So Quickly

March 10th already! I have to organize my portfolio soon. I'm planning to apply summer internship at Disney and Pixar animation studio and the deadlines are fast approaching. 

I usually work on multiple drawings at the same time because I get bored drawing and painting the same image, fixing it without progress. The first two are the most recent ones. I think I lost the sense of color last week but this week I'm improving again. Those are my in progress works.  

I haven't done oil paint for a while, I think I should get my hands dirty again sometime this month.  

giraffe have BG color now

I never draw a fire scene. Let's do that in the next drawing. Industrial environment also sounds fun to explore.

More

I might have found a brush I like.

Digital Painting: Beware, Colors on Screens

I started doing digital painting last summer and I have improved a lot. I love doing it, but even till now I still do not feel comfortable drawing on tablet or Cintiq. I become extremely fussy about the texture, the look of the brushstrokes and so many more. Sometimes, I could not even put a single stroke down. This is very very frustrating. I feel freer when I'm using pastel or pencil on paper.
I try to find brushes that have simular texture to real world medium.

(Study of filme still from City of Ember ) This one looks better on Cintiq screen

Digital painting has another characteristic that is both a disadvantage and an advantage.
Right now I'm looking at the this painting on two different screens.  This is what I see: The image on the left screen looks greener compared to the image on the right. So with different computer screens, the colors are going to look different. I never thought about it until couple hours ago I moved my painting to another screen. (Wow)

This one looks good on a mac but looks over saturated on Cintiq 

However this can be fix in less than a minute by adjusting color balance, contrast or levels (This is the trick for digital painting. I often have to increase the contrast of my painting because I am too timid to put down bold colors)

Update:
Back to my own computer, now I feel like the second image is a little over saturated...

Hills Trees and Stars

I still like to draw simple and I love green. Green used to be my least favorite color, and now it has become my favorite color palette. I just never get tired of drawing trees and hills, so here's trees and hills.

There's a man standing on the hills

I'm also addicted to paint with 30° angle afternoon sunlight and 30° angle dawn light


And, I just couldn't resist making another sky painting, so I made another night sky painting. I'm not satisfy with the sky yet. There's too little stars. I want it to look like supernova explosion with lots of star clouds.

Piano Guy

He doesn't look as exciting as the lady I painted in pervious post, still looking a little flat, but I'm going to leave him like this for now.  I'm recycling my Project 365 sketches. I'm so happy I can paint colors now! (not just with a character sticking on a white background, but with character interacting with the environment) ACCOMPLISHMENT! PROGRESS!

I have been working on my short this week, keying out key drawings and finding reference for the backgrounds. Ah, back in the good old days of getting tanned from fluorescent light bulb.

Color Temperature

Yesterday I did a study of lights and color temperature using photograph and Photoshop's eye dropper tool to figure out the relation of the colors. 

 Today spend the whole day practicing. I can feel my eye balls twitching already.