Another Girl Sketch

How quickly time flies. March is almost over.
So much for New Year's resolutions eh?
I'm working on another digital painting, but it's taking forever.
Work has been keeping me pretty busy too.

So here's the obligatory, generic girl sketch.

Mr. Friendly

Another one of my New Year's resolutions was to post more artwork here. This a painting I did in photoshop of Mr. Friendly the cat, who's getting ready for work.

Sansho the Bailiff

One of my New Year's resolutions this year is to watch a lot more movies. Out of the twelve films I've watched since the holiday break, one of them just really blew me away.

"Sansho the Bailiff " directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.

What an amazing film.

I never really intended on making a lot of posts about movies on my blog , but this film was just too good not to mention.
I hope everyone gets a chance to see it.

Here's a great quote about the film from Wikipedia:

"The New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane wrote in his September, 2006 profile on Mizoguchi, "I have seen Sansho only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.""

Update:

My friend Shiyoon Kim had one of his drawings posted by John K. on his blog here:

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/12/appeal-2-big-eyes.html

I think that's pretty cool. I'm glad to see John using Shiyoon's work as an example of appeal. Shiyoon has amazed me since we started as freshman at CalArts together.

I hadn't looked at John K's site for a while, even though I enjoy reading what he has to say and seeing all the cool artwork he posts, so I started reading through the past entries that I had missed. I saw that John had posted a youtube clip called "Ratatouille - Character Profiles - Target Bonus Disc" in a past entry to basically criticize the characters in the movie, and he's definitely entilted to his opinion.

But watching the clip when it came to the Ego character profile I was surprised to see there were some of my drawings from the sequence I story boarded in the movie. My story boards are shown right at the beginning of the Ego character profile where he is talking with his assistant. The profile starts at 6:26 on the clip. You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAroxSedM3A&eur



I had no idea there was a target bonus disc, but if you would like to see some more behind the scenes art on the movie, it looks like it's a DVD that's really worth buying. I'm assuming they sell it only at Target.

I also really have to thank Mark Andrews for his help and guidance as the head of story on this film. First of all, for allowing me to do this sequence, and then helping me to see it through.

Still Alive...

Work has been taking up quite a bit of my time recently. I've been having to burn the proverbial midnight oil quite a few nights over the past couple months. So unfortunately I don't have much to post in the way of artwork this month.

I can't go to Japan this year, which is a bummer. I have really enjoyed spending the past couple of New Years there and picking up all those lucky amulets, called Omamori, for the coming years at the Shinto shrines. The luck from those amulets has served me pretty well.

Here is the Shrine I went to last year. When I was thinking about moving back to Southern California after my car accident in 2007, I picked up a "job" amulet from here. I was hoping to get some luck finding a new gig closer to home in L.A. and it worked out!


Speaking of the new job...
This year I have to stick around L.A. for the holidays, just in case some work needs to be done. We are on a pretty tight schedule. I don't think I'll mind it too much though. Working with Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois on this project I'm on has been a fun experience so far. Our head of story, Alessandro Carloni, has been cool to work with as well. Congratulations to him on his Annie Nomination.

My office mate and fellow story crew member, Dave Derrick, has also been great to be around, and he has really helped me learn the ropes at the new studio. We went to school together at CalArts. He was in my class, so it's been nice to be around an old classmate and friend every day. Dave just recently published his own art book called African Diaries. It's filled with Dave's beautiful drawings and has some really insightful writing about his experiences in Africa. I highly recommend picking up a copy.

I don't know if I'll get to post anything else before the New Year, so Happy Holidays to everyone and have a great New Year!

To close out, here are some photos of the things I will miss about going to Japan this year, besides those lucky amulets.

1. Riding bikes through Takatsu-ku.



2. The Christmas decorations in Odaiba.



3. Street/Festival Food. I think these are Okonomiyaki...



4. Sleeping on the train after a long day of shopping....



5. ...and finally Tina, she is a good dog.

Boxer Life Drawings

We had a model dressed as a boxer in the gesture drawing class at work the other day. Here's a few drawings I did of him, most of them are one to two minute poses.


The goal here was just trying to draw with a lot more simplicity. I used a ball point pen so that I couldn't erase any lines. I have a tendency to really over work stuff and fuss with the shapes and forms too much, so here I was just trying to draw with some simpler shapes and do it with as much economy of line as I could. Hopefully the character comes through and the pose reads clearly. I realize the drawings could be pushed a lot more, but I felt like I made some degree of progess with these.

As for those finished pieces I promised in earlier posts, I've been trying to work on some things, but they just weren't turning out well. It's been damn' frustrating, I seem to be incapable of finishing a single drawing these days, let alone doing a painting in the computer...

I'll try to post more when I can.

There's no place like home...

Thanks to everyone who's been leaving comments on the few drawings I've posted so far. No artwork today, but I just wanted to give a little update on what I've been doing.

I recently moved from Northern California back to Southern California in July. It was something I had been thinking about doing for quite a while, and even though it wasn't easy, I decided now was the time I needed to do it.

It's really nice to be back "home". I put home in quotes because technically I grew up in San Diego, but after having gone to school here for 4 years, Los Angeles is pretty much my second home. Thankfully San Diego is so much closer now that I can actually drive down there more often to visit my real home and family on the weekends. No more 9 hour drives! Woo hoo! I really missed so many people and places down here, so it's been really great to hang out at the cool spots with all my old friends again.

Meanwhile, I'll be patiently waiting for the entire Southern California region to eventually become San Angeles a la Demolition Man.

I also just recently got back from a trip to visit my girlfriend, who is studying abroad in the United Kingdom. My first stop was Glasgow in Scotland, where I saw a few NEDS. After a week there we headed to Palma de Mallorca off the coast of Spain and then hopped on a cruise to Casablanca in Morocco. We also stopped around to quite a few other places off the coast of North Africa and Spain along the way.

So that's it. It's been a pretty nice summer for me so far. I just started a cool new job on Monday, working with some pretty awesome people, and once I get more settled in I'll start working on this blog again.

I apologize for all the lame youtube links, but I left all the photos of my recent trip in Scotland. So to make up for that, here's a random travel photo of Darth Maul in a barber shop that I took in Japan last year.