Illustration Friday: Cats

Did this one early on in the school year. I was gonna make a series of 6 paintings in this style...but then I had to make a thesis. So it's been postponed. Cats! (That's totally gonna be my mom in a few years...)

Bill Peet's CARS

So I'm surfing around Bill Peet's website and I find these old designs for the Disney short, "Susie the Little Blue Coupe." I've yet to see the short, but these designs look uncannily like Pixar's character designs for CARS. See for yourself:

Bill Peet's car designs

Pixar's car designs

I duno. I guess there's only so many ways to design cars, but I feel like Bill Peet must have had a pretty strong influence...wouldn't be surprised if they had pulled some of his drawings from that handy Disney archive. Visit Bill Peet's site for more pictures from "Susie."

Illustration Friday: E is for...

Enlisted officers coming to your college campus and tryign to get you to sign up for the army! Heh. So yeah, this was for my college mag, Reporter. But that topic's so wide open that I guess it works.

Ezra's Epitaph Graveyard Set

Yesterday Ian and I created a miniature set for his senior thesis, Ezra's Epitaph. It's a really cool graveyard with a coffin and a tree on the top of the hill. We made it surprisingly fast...in about 6 hours. I'm working on some CG stuff for his film as well, so I will post that at some point.

The Set! There are live action people composited over certain sections of this...as well as stop- motion animation.

Here is the back of the set...you can see that we started with balled up newspaper which we covered in masking tape to hold it down. Then we used plaster cloth and green floral foam to create the terrain. We crumbled up the foam to make the grass, as well as added some tufts of fake fur painted green for long grass.


I was going for "scared" and I don't know what Ian was doing.

P.S. This movie's going to be awesome. Coming Spring 2006 to a Bard College campus near you!

Thesis Color Script

I just returned from NYC and the Pixar exhibit at MOMA. If you have a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. There was SO much art to see including maquettes, texture designs, animation studies, color scripts, etc...so inspiring to see! They were also showing Pixar's new short, One Man Band, the day I went...but unfortunately we missed seeing it by an hour or so. It was so packed in the MOMA...the line for tickets stretched out the door and down almost a whole block! (Thankfully it moved pretty fast.) Anyway, I came back in the mood to create some visual development type art, so here is a full color script for my thesis, Love at First Roach. The colors you see here are general ideas for lighting and texturing, but will likely look a bit different when fully realized in 3D...feedback welcome as always.



By the way, if you can't get to the exhibit, I highly recommend the book they've released which can be purchased for just $30 at MOMA's website. While there you can also listen to the audio tour with some of the work from the show.

Illustration Friday: Surprise

Thought you were gonna play in the big game, HUH? Well, surprise. You're not. HA!

Thesis Update

Here's a new render of my characters after I tweaked the textures a bit.