New Years Eve Recap

Fact: I wore a really hot dress.
Fact: I called my dad at 6am to come pick me up from underneath a bridge in the industrial district
Fact: I tore up my knee when i gracefully ate shit on pavement , two inches below a scar i received by the exact same method on new years morning 2010.

Would have done this sooner, but my trial of CS5 expired about a week ago. Thanks to the magic of craigslist, however, I am back in the game with a full version of CS5 Master collection (liscensed!) for under $200.

Thanks 2012~!  

i think i'm part magpie

I love Christmas shopping. Shopping in general is a major pastime of mine, and i have to say it's more fun to pick out things for other people...I just have a bad habit of forgetting that everything i've bought also has to be wrapped until it's the day before Christmas eve. I always get roped into doing wrapping for some other member of the family as well...Needless to say, i spent a good portion of today neck deep in colored paper and ribbon and tape.

I don't have any Christmas art to put up, but all the exposure to gold ribbon and the really delicious Lebanese food i ate tonight probably had something to do with this.

But hey, i'm not really trying to justify drawing a pointlessly gaudy naked woman. Nope. Not at all.

Smoking Girls

I will never stop drawing girls with cigarettes. EVER.

Get the flo back.

I have to admit I have been really enjoying Florence and the Machine. Lately, I've found i really enjoy singers with a unique sort of stage presence.

Wow...it's been kind of a crazy month. In case anyone was actually wondering (i doubt it) the whole 30 days/ 30 characters thing didn't really pan out. Sorry. But the good news is several other exciting things happened this month, all of which should have an actually positive influence on my productivity.

I was really fortunate to attend the 3rd annual CTN Expo in Burbank a little over a week ago. I almost couldn't handle how many awesome people i got to meet and how much talent there is in the industry right now. Tons of amazing blogs to follow make me really want to put more time and energy in to this blog. I got a lot of great advice and feedback from people who looked at my work, and got to know more about ways to stay afloat in the industry. Overall, i was really really impressed with the level of passion and drive and devotion that so many people there possessed in regards to making art. It really goes beyond telling yourself just to draw more to finding the love and the pleasure and enjoyment that makes drawing something you WANT to do more. I think the fact that I have spent most of my time as an artist in school really made it hard to cope with the first few months after graduation. My art really suffered, i had to re-evaluate my reasons for making art and figure out what to do with myself once the structure that academics imposed on my life and routine disappeared. Even more so when i finally moved back to my family's home in Portland, OR, and found myself feeling truly up-rooted from the stand point of no longer having what i could recognize as my own individual space.

The thing I've missed most about school is the ability to just go into a lab, sit down at a desk and get to work without the obstacle of a clumsy laptop on coffee table/wacom in lap arrangement in someone else's living room. Turns out, it wasn't as hard as one might think to find a perfectly good cintiq for sale cheap on Ebay, and a after a few hours on craigslist, i bought a desk too. Once i got those two pieces, it was really quite surprising how quickly i was able to throw together a reasonably function able workspace. But who really cares, i think i would have been just as happy with the cintiq on my floor. it's been set up for a whole two days now and i really couldn't be happier forsaking daytime, sleep and regular social interaction for the experience of reliving my high school experience cooped up in a basement for hours with tea and a tablet and Photoshop and thick socks. Fuck it. You do what it takes.

Having a cat helps too. I don't know why, but at least i have the comfort of another living soul willing to spend as much time underground with me. Or it's just because we keep her food and a bunch of spare bedding down here.

Most of the time lately I feel like this. Let's hurry up and graduate, I can't handle all this thinking hard about stuff.

Talent is a myth.

It's just about time for finals, which means I just want to draw/read anything that isn't school related. Been bangin' my head against a cintiq for weeks trying to learn zbrush *baw* and doing a lot of landscape painting. Loving the latter! Apparently though, oil paint never dries when it's so cold outside...so look forward to seeing the fruits of my labor in....a few monthes?  Unfortunately, with a lot of 10+ hour days at school, i don't find myself having much energy or inspiration for much else...all the same, I try to force myself to draw some people now and then because that's what you do when you actually want to stay good at something, i hear.

Well, i'm clocking in at decent at best. Derp. here are something things from the sketchbook: girls with buns, Japanese girls (one looks like Noodle from Gorillaz) and some preliminary sketches of Dionysus (who looks like Jesus with a hangover in my favorite one) for my lovely Kristen.

 

Oh hay, and this was from a while ago, but I was wearing this shirt today....it's covered in a lot of paint now, but still awesome, and still makes me look like my mom:

Fall Semester

Hello again. Here are some images from projects I am working on at school.

First...If anyone remember the Russian woman and panther characters that I posted sometime last spring, I decided to use them for my senior thesis. These are just some illustrations I did to warm up to the graphic style I hope to use for the film, as well as a teaser of one of the layouts enjoy!

The rest are from my Animation Collective class, were i was assigned to concept artwork and character designs for a Hybrid 2D/3D music video the class is putting together. I'm in charge of the male and female characters that are trapped in a labyrinth. My Friend Maxine Is overseeing the Minotaur Character, but I coupldn't help doing a drawing anyway. I will probably end up doing more concept work than will appear in the final film, this is just a start:

Orthogrpahics to be modeled in 3d: Final designs will include body tattoos and color which i haven't finished yet.

 

Summer Sketches

This week i've been cooped up at my house with some mystery illness and no TV, so i finally decided i would get around to posting things that have sat on my hard-drive all summer long!

Yay.

Between dating a Cowboy and reading about the history of Mustangs in the American west, i wound up with a horse fixation (like i haven't had one since i was 4). My mother, also an artist, has always been able to draw horses phenomenally well, which, i think is the reason that any horses in animation or art that are poorly drawn just annoy the shit out of me. But, it turns out they're really hard to draw, so i tried some life sketches and non-life sketches to practice:

Then i broke up with the cowboy and had to find other things to draw...i think it's strange that poorly drawn giraffes and parrots don't bother me half as much? We watched the film Black Orpheus in my Latin American Art History class...i sort of wanted to draw all the characters in the film, but i never got further than a poor likeness of Eurydice, although the sketch itself makes me pretty happy. I also got a job at an exotic imports store...leading the the urge to draw some random chick riding what must be a pygmy giraffe.

I really need no explanation for cats. The tabby on the left is my Fiona, who just had a hurricane named after her...we always used to call her the little grey storm cloud.

Another true story

UGH UGH UGH UGH UGH UGH UGH.

SUMMER IS SUMMERY KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

I am so done with winter. I don't even mind the weather..just the cabin fever and drama that comes along with it.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhkay. Let's pretend none of that just happened. What happened you ask? Alright, good.

We're getting towards the end of (old) old stuff--here we have some doodles and a few finished pieces i did for/during animation last semester.

I like girls.

Well, hello there.

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but it seems that the ol' PB and Sketchblog sort of fell by the way side during the last couple of years. As was sort of implied at one point or another, I wound up moving to Denver to study animation...two years later, the results are somewhat predictable!

However, a good number of things have happened, and I've reached a point where i am once again feeling motivated (SSRI'sFTW) and would like to get this here corner of the internets back in full swing. I sort of have to, since I wound up getting some art published in my friends pulp fiction anthology wherein i get to promote myself and this blog....so basically I have until the 24th to make good on my word and fill it with exciting things.

While i take some time to get organized, and i tell you, it will take some time, i thought i'd start off by filling the gap by posting some of my favorite odds and ends from the past couple of years, little by little, day by day, heart beat by heart beat....soulful whisper...by...um. well, until things are all caught up!

Some will have explanations, others will be totally random...but all the more precious for it. LET'S START.