Back in business

Hello! wow... I can't believe it's been so long since I last posted... Thanks for all of you who keep checking this page :)
I started my sophomore year at Ringling this August, been super busy... So far everything is going great and I'm really enjoying my animation classes (both traditional and computer animation). Other than that, I've been working on some other projects that hopefully I'll be able to show some results soon.

meanwhile here are two animation shorts from this year

Primitive theater: we had to tell a short story with a character or two, that are basically no more than a mprimitive shape the emotes.




CLICK HERE for a Hi Res version.


The ball bounce was our first assignment in Computer animation:



CLICK HERE for a high res version

So that's it for now... a lot more to come soon.

work...

Hey everybody... I just got back home from a week in Sinai, Egypt... It's an amazing place and has been a great vacation from a busy summer, and I now feel very ready to go back to school... in 19 days I'll be heading back to Sarasota, and I have so much to do before that... I have a lot of work in progress that I hope to get done before school starts... meanwhile, this is a piece I did last week as birthday gift for friends of my parents ... I'm quite happy with it, although I now think I could accent the shadows some more, and in general work on defining the light some more... but, this is just another step in the ladder I guess... I'll be posting some more work really soon.. I hope... thanks!

Lola

My dog is getting old and is enjoying the luxury of sleeping 18 hours a day :)

I've bee busy working on some different projects lately, so meanwhile I guess I'll be posting some sketchbook stuff...

Mantis

This is an illustration I started a while ago and never had a chance to finish... So I took some time last night to tighten it up, and this is what I ended up with. It started as part of a random prompt challenge on a local website, under the title: "Mom! look what I found in the back yard..."

Chris

some color

These are two color sketches following a Japanese drummers show I've seen a few months ago... I'm trying to explore different ways to approach digital painting, so this is an attempt of a more rough expressive look, that I kinda like...

Summer time

Hello! Well, unbelievably my first year at Ringling has passed. Looking back it went so fast, but it was a great year. The last couple of month were really intense, so it's great to be back home and recharge. I haven't updated for quite a while, but now that I have some extra time I'll try to post new stuff quite often. I have a lot of plans for this summer so stay tuned... as for now, here are a few caricatures of my fellow Ringlingers. I love doing these, so this was a nice way warm up and start my summer. hopefully these are recognizable (for the Ringling students among you)... if not, well, I guess it means more practice ;)
Have a great summer everybody!

Kazoo

I can't beleive I havn't posted anything for such a long time... It's the last month of school and schedule is tight, but it's all good. I am just about to start my final project for Animation class for this semester - Bi Pad motion. I'm really excited about this one and hopefully it will come out the way I see it in my mind. Stay tuned for the actual animation in a month from today. I'll try to keep u posted on other stuff in the meanwhile.

Anyway, for now here is my character - Kazoo the Skunk!

Figure Drawing

Hi! so, a lot is going on lately... I am super busy with school mostly... Traditional Animation is awesome so far and hopefully soon enough I'll have something cool to show. Meanwhile I'm working on other projects, but it will take a while till I can post anything, so I guess in the next few weeks I'll keep posting some older stuff to keep this blog alive :)
These are some life drawings from last semester. They vary between 1-2 minute gestures, 20 minute poses to an hour long one. Enjoy!

Style exploration part 2

Hi everybody! long time no update... well, my second semester in school has started a month ago and it's been busy. I Finally started my Traditional Animation studies and so far it is really amazing. I can't even describe how much my appreciation to the creators of all those memorable 2D films has grew after animating a few bouncing balls. They are true artists and I really want to believe that we will see those incredible drawings back on the big screen soon. I really hope that Disney's upcoming "Princess and the frog" will be a success.

On a different note, I am still doing some character concepts inspired by African masks (what can I say? it's really fun). During my exploration I bumped into an image that amazed me:


mask picture from: "Masks of Black Africa" by Ladislas Segy

Is it only me or the resemblance is amazing? The shape of the head, the hair the brows the nose the mouth... I found this to be really interesting. Once again it has shown me how those simple shapes can have so much appeal.I am really curious if the designers at Pixar have seen this image. Anyway, this really gave me a great incentive to keep going with these so here is another round of sketches.. some I like better some less, and hopefully I'll find a time to color a couple of them soon.

Style exploration

Well, it's been a while since my last update... As I was trying to continue to develop the Paleolithic Characters I designed a while ago, I came across a couple of books about African masks. My mom used to have a lot of these books and I remember that as a child I always thought: "Hmmm...why can't she have 'real' Art books..."
It's funny how things change. Browsing through these books today, I find the different designs and textures those artists used fascinating. The simple geometric structure of those masks is so different from anything else and I find it a great source of inspiration.
Anyway, here are a couple of designs I did, inspired by these masks. I tried a more graphic approach on this one, with a heavy use of textures, which I find interesting...

sketchbook

a couple of recent sketchbook pages....

messing around with Mother Nature

Hi everybody! Here are some more hybrid designs, this time a turtle and a hippo. I am trying to work on my digital painting skills, and find a technique and style that I like, I'm trying to work on using values rather than "filling the lines"... still a long way to go. Anyway, while coloring, these two hippo-turtles moved somehow from my cartoony kingdom to the darker side of concept design, looking a bit to monstrous to me, but... oh well, it's all part of the process.

friends...

just a couple of caricatures I did recently.... I really appreciate people who can capture the character of someone in a good caricature, and it is something I am trying to get better at... so these are a couple of attempts, messing around with different styles...

Girabbits

Hi everybody! I can probably continue doing this for hours... Designing weird and stylized animals is definitely one of my favorite things. So here they are, the kids of papa Rabbit and mama Giraffe... hope you don't find this too disturbing ;)