Unchanging Robot

So what I don't get...

2011-03-01T17:55:00.000-08:00

...is why everyone seems to hate Kasumi in Mass Effect 2. She's a badass Japanese chick with an adorable voice! And funny lines, to boot. Okay, I mean, she's like 5 dollars. Whatever, man.

Back on Rex.

2010-10-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

Gunslingin'

2010-08-08T21:28:00.000-07:00

Show!

2010-04-24T00:12:00.001-07:00

So the show I've been working on, Generator Rex, premiered tonight. The first episode I worked on doesn't air for a few more weeks, but it's still pretty exciting. Drawing!
I miss working on the show, it was a sweet one to start out on. I'm currently working on Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, which is still a blast and the director I'm working under is amazing. I've been really fortunate so far. Now if I can just make full-time one of these days!

This is a thing that happened.

2010-04-05T23:13:00.001-07:00

Realizing you are close enough to shake hands with a bear: unsettling experience.

New year, new update. Only two months in!

2010-02-26T17:14:00.000-08:00

I'm still alive, and I'm still drawing a lot though most of it isn't my own stuff. Kind of prefer it that way to be honest, the pay is a lot better for one. I would like to get back to work on that comic project in my off time, though

I'm still freelancing storyboards for Cartoon Network, it's been a lot of fun and I've been enjoying the show that I'm working on. Hoping to make full-time some day, but honestly I'm just happy to still have work.

Anyways, here's a doodle I did to get back in the swing of things. I like drawing this character a lot (perhaps you might have noticed).

Blog? Blog!

2009-11-26T02:36:00.000-08:00

So it has been forever since I updated this poor blog. I have been drawing a lot in recent months, but none of it has been personal work. I've been doing some freelance storyboard work for Cartoon Network since August, which has been a lot of fun and I'm hoping they bring in full-time after the holidays. Who knows, though, it's been a long time since these kinds of things have worked out in my favor.

What little spare time I've had for drawing has been on commission work, which I fished for a while ago while unemployed and am only now really starting to get bites on (figures,when I'm too busy with my CN stuff to work on it). In the end it hasn't left much time to draw on my own.

Anyways, here's a doodle:

Meme

2009-06-08T22:55:00.000-07:00

So there's this meme floating around on DeviantArt, it's pretty self-explanatory. I totally left out two expressions, and I need to go back and fix a lot of the others, but I know this next week is going to be crazy busy for me and I'm not going to be able to get around to those fixes for a while.

Sorry there's not more text to accompany this, I started a contract position at DIS today and I'm pretty beat - I don't know how well the day went in terms of the work I produced, to be honest, so the stress of that plus the fact that I'm just bone tired means a short post.

I also start a four-week action storyboarding class at Cartoon Network tomorrow night, so between the workload for that, DIS, and sleep I'm not going to have much time for my own art. Not that I've been really posting much lately anyways, I guess. But still, better too busy than not busy enough!

P.S.: On the subject of DeviantArt, here's the last comment I got: "the only thing that I dislike about your artwork is the eyes and faces of your people." Awesome!

Test panel

2009-05-16T18:25:00.000-07:00

Inked with Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop. Still not satisfied. Will try another panel from the same page in another style.

There are a few leads from the CalArts job fair last week that I'm following up, plus some other opportunities as well. Hopefully something comes out of one of these things.

Tests

2009-04-25T00:12:00.000-07:00

So anyone who reads this blog knows I've been punting around a comic idea in my head, but there are a variety of obstacles in my path. One, I need to find a method of cleaning things up that's fast but still appealing to me. Two, I need to find a method of coloring that also fits those criteria. I've yet to come across a clean-up method that I like as much as my sketch linework; cleanup is notorious for murdering the life of a drawing. I wasn't satisfied with the linework and coloring of the two test pages I did before, so I'm going to be experimenting with a couple different approaches in the next few days. I also still need to get some color issues worked out so that what I update on my main monitor looks like what I drew on my Cintiq. I've just been kind of hoping that what everyone else sees is closer to the latter than to the former.

Then there are story issues, but that's a massive pickle in and of itself. I did want to age up the boy character a bit, he was too young for where I would want to take the story.

Basically, "working on it" for the past week has meant idly sketching some characters, plotting vague story points and structures, and playing a lot of Fallout 3.

Quick Manga Studio doodle

2009-04-19T01:14:00.000-07:00

To try it out. It's ruler functions sound amazingly useful for background work; I figured that kind of thing was something one would wish for but would never actually get. Honestly haven't tried it yet, though, so it might not be as amazing as I'm hoping for.

Fun fact: in Japan, Manga Studio is called "Comic Studio," because manga is a word in Japanese that means comic. Despite the name, it seems like a useful tool. John Allison uses it, after all, and he's never, ever wrong.

One last

2009-04-06T15:56:00.000-07:00

Here's one of the last things I did for my GDC portfolio, which I figured I should post up since I haven't posted anything for a while.

Pretty sure GDC was a bust, job-wise. Haven't heard anything from the handful of places that had openings I could apply to.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing next; probably a mix of working on a Flash portfolio, taking some CG animation classes over the summer, and applying to some TV places I haven't applied to in a long while. There's the CalArts job fair in a month, but I haven't had much luck with that in the past and the alumni table is notoriously overlooked.

Run-veeeeigh

2009-03-20T01:59:00.000-07:00

So Lissa had gotten me season 1 of Project Runway, which I plowed through earlier this week while working. I ended up picking up season 2 today while I was at Fry's (our old router went bust after some 9 years in service) and started watching it tonight. I sketched out my two favorite designers at the end of the first episode, and it's interesting that I did this because the very next episode revealed one of them (Andrae) to be totally effing crazy-pants. I also liked the nerdy Asian girl initially, but the tight time constraints of the show really don't allow her to incorporate any goofy wrist computers or hoodies with thermoptic camoflauge, so her gimmick is kind of lost. Also Austin Scarlett from S1, because he's super-fab.

That stupid Fidel Castro dude was appealing initially, but he's such a raging asshole that I can't stand him anymore. And yeah, I know that we're waiting on season 6 now and season 2 is old hat, but whatever. I'm slow that way with television shows. I also know who wins in the end, but don't know anything else, though the urge to check Wikipedia grows stronger by the episode. Right now my favorite for second place is Nick.

Also, I finished up a card the other day and took it to a place to print. I ended up going with the steam guy; I did like the girl but the drawing was irking me and I just felt like the trooper dude honed in a little better on the target demographic for next week (sorry, Nicole!). I kind of stopped working on her about 2/3 of the way through.

I can shut up about these cards now; I kind of just wanted some more finished drawings on the top of the page.

card designs

2009-03-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

So a couple of the drawings are kind of crappy because I'm coming down with a massive, massive headache today, but I'm trying to solicit opinions on designs for business cards to hand out.
I'm worried I caught something at Disneyland, that notoriously filthy vector for diseases, over the weekend.

Other things

2009-03-11T01:34:00.000-07:00

So I need to get a few other things ready for GDC and wanted to get some input. One is the spine for my portfolio, in the past I've just had my name info but that's kind of boring. I figured I'd get some artwork on the spine, with just a small bit of room for my name and info or maybe just putting that on the back. I was thinking of going with a group shot of the modern characters I designed a while back:

Alternatively, I could go with the some other guys. There's always something cool about dudes streaking through the air on rocket packs.

I've just got a cheap Itoya portfolio; I can't afford to spend $100 on a fancy portfolio case. There's always this niggling doubt at the back of my mind that recruiters look down on people with the same cheap Itoya portfolio as everyone else, but rationally I know they're more concerned with the contents than the delivery. I thought it'd be cool to do a wide aspect ratio portfolio, too, especially since I have a bunch of lineups.

I also need to get some business cards printed, I was thinking a design like this:

What do you guys think? Do you like them, do you like the idea but would rather other characters, or would you suggest something else? Obviously they'd be tricked out with color later.

I've still got like four major things left to do, and I'm running out of time. Gotta be working harder.

Man

2009-03-10T02:45:00.000-07:00

So I have hit artist's block so hard the last couple days. I can't do anything I'm happy with.

On the other hand, this has been great for my Killzone 2 score. I was in the top 6% of the world last week. How? By being a sneaky little bomb-laying bastard, of course.

Dude

2009-03-05T15:43:00.001-08:00

So I drew this thing, so I could feel less guilty while I'm playing the Killzone 2 multiplayer.
Same thing as the fantasy chick a couple posts ago. I want to get maybe one more steampunk design in, an environment or two, a monster for these fantasy characters, some storyboards, and maybe a couple vehicles in before the 25th of March. Pretty ambitious, I'll need to stop wasting time with KZ2. Y'know, later.

Guy

2009-03-02T00:11:00.001-08:00

New things

2009-02-26T02:00:00.001-08:00

More portfolio stuff. First character is a redesign of an old one that I never really liked, one of the protagonists from the universe with the previous soldier dudes. Second one is just a random fantasy thing.

Third verse, same as the first

2009-02-09T17:13:00.000-08:00

Third one in this particular line-up. This is the one I like the most so far. I'm hoping the colors on my Cintiq are way more accurate than the colors on my monitor, though.

More shtuff

2009-02-06T02:24:00.000-08:00

So that cleaned up drawing I did a few posts ago of the girl was a bit too clean for my liking. I liked the looser linework of the color test I did before, despite it being a weaker drawing. Hopefully I managed to capture that again with this other character from the same lineup; I'll probably re-do the linework on the girl at some point.

I also finished the third steam trooper and posted the lineup on my portfolio blog, since I didn't want to make a new post specifically for him as he's less interesting than the other two.

Follow up

2009-02-03T21:36:00.000-08:00

I didn't get as much done the past three days as I'd have liked to do, between the super bowl, seeing Slumdog Millionaire (just to confirm what everyone else has said, it's really good), and a freelance test I've been working on. I did just finish up this guy, though. Fits into the same lineup as the guy in the last post, though he's popped up on this blog before a few times. One more in that line-up, then I plan to finish up the line-up the girl fits into. Can I finish these by the end of the week? Highly unlikely!

What do these two drawings have in common?

2009-01-31T00:37:00.000-08:00

They were the first two finished characters to be drawn on my new Cintiq! I'm totally digging this thing. I wanted to take a picture of my workspace to show alongside them, but I'm having trouble getting a new video card working for my computer; this means I haven't gotten both the Cintiq and the monitor running simultaneously and that was the shot I really wanted to get.

Also, the contract work I mentioned a few posts ago officially went belly up after DIS underwent a major round of layoffs this Thursday, so I can't afford any of this. So that's awesome.

Sketching away

2009-01-28T02:01:00.000-08:00

So as I mentioned in my last art post, I've been tooling away on a bunch of projects even though I haven't been posting much. The images I've been spending the most time on are a couple of lineups that aren't ready to be shown, but I figured I'd post a few sketches I was doing tonight of one of the hero characters for the steampunk project in my portfolio.

Testing

2009-01-20T02:22:00.000-08:00

I'm re-working my portfolio, so I've got several projects I'd like to get character and environmental designs for. Ideally I can get a distinct visual style for each of them going on, and this is just a color test for the first of them (actually, the first of them is just me collecting the old steampunk stuff I did and re-doing it).

EDIT: Accidentally loaded a ginormous version. Fixed.

New Year's resolution

2009-01-02T14:24:00.001-08:00

Maintain a paycheck for longer than a month.

That's the main one. The contract work that I mentioned in my previous post has been pushed back, and I'm reaching that point where I'm starting to get worried. So far my plan if this gig doesn't work out is basically to cross my fingers really, really hard. You might be thinking, "Jason, that's not a very good plan." And you'd be right. It's a terrible plan.

Anyways, I doodled a colored version of an old design I posted a few months back. I've been trying to use various brushes to get a more textured feel.

Hope you're all having a good new year!

What I have been up to

2008-11-26T11:36:00.000-08:00

...since it's been quite some time from my last posting. October was a pretty crazy month for me - I spent a good chunk prepping for an interview at Lucasfilm Animation, didn't get the job, but then got hired for some temp work at DIS again. It wasn't an art job and it ended last Friday, but it's looking like I managed to successfully segue that into some contract work for the next six months. So that's a load off my back; I was just starting to get used to regular paychecks again and would prefer to continue the practice.

I'd like to say that it's because I've been working that I haven't been posting any art, and that would be partly true. However, I also know another good chunk of that time has just been dedicated to slogging through the huge number of games that get released in the last three months of the year. :P Memo to game publishers: I hate your stupid schedule.

Anyways, I didn't want to make a post with no art, so here's a sketch of a mermaid.

It's October...

2008-10-10T02:42:00.000-07:00

....and I've kind of been wanting to draw a scarecrow for a while now. I guess it's the season?

Anyways, the last image I was working on got so belabored that I hated it by the time I was done; so I kept myself to an hour for this one. Tried to vary up my colors, I tend to work from a very muted palette as of late.

2008-09-22T05:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the comments on the last page! This is page 7. After this I'm going to go back to page 1 and work my way up, then see where I'm going to take it.

Also, do any of you guys know of a good way to do half-way decent rain in Photoshop? I'm not happy with any of the results I've been getting.

This is a constant battle.

2008-09-22T05:23:00.001-07:00

You have no idea.

I have clearly underestimated...

2008-09-17T01:01:00.000-07:00

...the amount of time that goes into making a comic. This is page 6; I've done 7 or 8 in sequence but wanted to color this one first to see how it went. The whole thing's a vast epic that'll probably never get finished, but I figured it'd be a good learning experience.

The text has been written, though it's not in there yet obviously. Neither is the title or author of the book the girl is holding, which, you know, is relevant and all that.

Trying stuff out

2008-08-31T22:14:00.001-07:00

Joke post

2008-08-31T01:10:00.001-07:00

Feel free to ignore it. It's 1 o'clock in the morning, time to watch Pan's Labyrinth!

Heresy spawns from idleness

2008-08-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

And man have I been idle lately. This was mostly just a test to try out a different technique; working in black and white and then using an overlay layer for the coloring.
It's terrible as W40K art, it needs at least two more chainsaws, three eviscerations, and a mountain of corpses to rank anywhere.

(I officially hate Blogger for listing "eviscerations" as misspelled and causing me to google it to check. Don't ever google "evisceration.")

Girl page

2008-08-28T02:03:00.000-07:00

I found a old inked version of a standing pose for the girl character, and realized that I'd started a counterpart to the one-page I did for the boy like a month ago and then totally forgot about it. So I fixed a couple of things, colored it, and added some extra poses.

Man, I need to name these two.

I'm not really sure which direction I want to go on this project. I had combined a couple side projects into one, but right now I'm not sure that was the best idea.

Building a better ship

2008-08-10T00:22:00.000-07:00

Just refining the quick sketch I posted earlier. I ditched the balloon. Apparently this whole story takes place in a fantasy world where it's always 15 minutes till sunset. :P

Speed paint

2008-08-04T21:23:00.001-07:00

Got a bunch of new brushes through a link from Selene, tried a couple of them out. Really didn't yield any difference from my usual work, I don't think. Oh well.

Anyways, speed paint, about two hours.

EDIT: Added another speed paint. About 45 minutes for this one.

More designs

2008-07-28T00:13:00.000-07:00

I've just been plugging away at this project. I didn't get nearly as much done last week as I wanted to, partly on account of Comic-Con but mostly just because of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. I'm proud of myself, though; my party uses all the races this time and not just, well, Viera.

Anyways, I've been trying to design airships the past couple of days. I'm slower when it comes to mechanical designs; I've spent so much of the last four years drawing organic characters that I'm a bit out of practice.

I've also been doing some work on the girl. She's pretty much finished, so this image may change in a day or two to a full sheet like the one I did for the boy.

Crew cut

2008-07-20T23:54:00.001-07:00

Here are three of the crew members. The girl in the middle is the young junior mechanic, and was much more liked by the senior mechanic on her right before she finally grew taller than him. Once again the shortest member of the crew, he's been surlier than usual. The tall chap on the left is the medic, but is usually found filling in as the navigator when his medical skills aren't needed.

Oh captain, my captain

2008-07-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

Just plugging away at a couple projects I'm working on. This is the captain of an airship. I want to get the rest of her crew sketched out in a lineup by the end of tonight, though I won't have time to color them obviously. Let's see if I can hold myself to that!

Hey, this isn't an art post!

2008-07-15T13:07:00.000-07:00

If you guys haven't seen it yet, you should check out the Prince of Persia trailer they released at E3 this week. It's crazy awesome! Love the designs and the art style, they pulled it off beautifully.

Hot and steamy

2008-07-15T00:27:00.000-07:00

I'm working on some steampunk designs. This is a heavy rocket trooper; he's powerful, but he can't actually make it that far before running out of steam, so he's usually slow to the party. His gatling gun has to be cranked by hand, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

I'm also posting some early sketches of him. I like the final version a whole lot more, but figured I'd show my progress.

I'm also trying to improve my cleanup lines. Hopefully I'm getting better at it.

Getting closer.

2008-07-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

Trying to narrow in on the girl. It's tough to get her just the right age, for some reason. Other designs are up next besides these two.

EDIT: I replaced the image with a slightly recolored one. The old one was bothering me. Also fixed the finger on the middle drawing, which had been cropped off.

Boys!

2008-07-09T15:25:00.001-07:00

I made a preliminary model sheet for the boy. Preliminary, because there's still a lot of work left to be done and he might need to be changed, but I'm pretty satisfied with him at this point.

E-mail is now enabled! I'm not sure why I didn't enable it to begin with, but the situation's rectified.

Girls!

2008-07-09T12:53:00.000-07:00

Concept sketches of the female lead for the same project as the last art post. None of them nail it for me yet, but I'm getting closer.

Viruses are cooler when they spawn zombie hordes

2008-06-28T15:10:00.000-07:00

It's a good thing I uploaded that image last night; it was the last thing to be uploaded before my computer died.

It's right back up and running again, obviously. The death was largely of my own making, and through a brilliant stroke of luck I had picked up an external hard drive a couple of weeks ago on a whim and backed up 99.5% of the files on my computer, so very little was lost.

The utterly daft part comes in when the system recovery program tells me that none of my data will be lost, only drivers, settings, etc. OK, I can live with that. And all of the data on my hard drive was safe - except for the My Documents folder. Why on Earth would that be the only folder to get wiped? It seems like it would be the folder least in need of getting erased; it's just pictures and music and the like. Again, I'm pretty lucky in that I only lost a couple weeks of work to the wipe, but still.

Oof.

2008-06-27T17:53:00.000-07:00

Man, it's been a month since I updated this blog. Hopefully I'm getting out of this funk I've been in.

I had started working on a Flash portfolio, but I put that on hold because it was looking like I might have been able to start working a couple weeks ago. Still haven't heard back, and it's been long enough that I'm back to work on a couple projects I've had on the back burner.

Here's a character from one of them. It's an ambitious project, quite possibly too ambitious, and he's a long ways from finalized. The first portrait and the full-scale drawing are a bit too young for what I was thinking.

New portfolio blog

2008-05-28T17:24:00.000-07:00

It's getting to the point where it'll be a chore to keep all of my portfolio work on the front page, so I think I'm going to split off a second portfolio blog from this one. I'll keep updating this one with all of my new work as I develop it; the second one is purely to keep things organized for job apps.

Portfolio excerpts

2008-05-17T02:52:00.000-07:00

Here are a few pages from the portfolio I put up at the CalArts job fair last week. I tried to avoid putting up artwork I've posted to the blog before, though there's a repeat or two.

The top two images are from a game concept I was working on with my friend Clayton. The third was a rough for a sculpture I did (and need to put the finishing touches on and then bake and paint). Bottom was a sculpture of a hippogriff I did third year at CalArts.

More foxes

2008-05-01T01:27:00.000-07:00

Tried to design them a bit more.

Foxes

2008-04-30T02:02:00.000-07:00

I'm not the greatest at drawing animals, so I was practicing with some foxes tonight. The one on the far right is actually the first one I did, so it's a bit awkward, but I'm pleased with the other two.

Edit: That third one was really bugging me, so I cropped it out.

In other news...

2008-04-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

I've been drawing a lot of guys with guns in the past few days, so here's a girl eating M&Ms for a break. I need to get a sculpture done for the CalArts job fair in a couple weeks, get something to grab attention from a distance since the alumni table's kind of overlooked a lot of times. This is one of the drawings I came up with while thinking of characters to sculpt.

Alternate future

2008-04-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

I've been helping a friend of mine put together some video game pitches. Here are a couple of guys from one of them, kind of a nuclear winter, alternate history concept. I hope to get more from the two concepts we're working on done in the next couple weeks.

Goofy segue

2008-04-11T23:12:00.001-07:00

I found a couple of old sketchbook doodles in old books this morning (judging from the caricatures of Andy Schuhler, they're from second year). I just found them hilarious and wanted to share them. :P I forget what sequence of events led up to these.

More portfolio type stuff should be going up Monday, at the latest.

Inevitability

2008-04-07T23:54:00.000-07:00

I don't think it's possible to sit down and draw shady cops without coming up with at least one Clint Eastwood.

Bind pose turnarounds

2008-03-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

What I like to call the "boring views." Portfolio-oriented stuff.

Giant CG post

2008-03-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

These are the two characters I've worked on in Maya. The little girl character was my first character model I did in a class I took senior year. Hans' development has been fairly well-documented on this blog. I'm applying to a couple character modeling positions, so I wanted to get these up here.

Up late, listening to the Smiths

2008-02-23T03:01:00.001-08:00

Possible color layout

2008-02-15T02:51:00.000-08:00

I finally got a new monitor. Now I can actually see what I'm drawing, which I've found helpful in the past. Let's see if I'm a bit better about updating now.

Anyways, this is the color scheme I originally had in mind when drawing Hans, though I've been thinking about changing the orange to purple. Also worried that the stripe down his front makes him look too much like a wannabe superhero.

Hopefully my next post will be something besides Hans, I need a bit of a break from the guy. He's always a bit grumpy.

Expressions and hand studies

2008-02-06T17:52:00.001-08:00

Spacemen

2008-02-05T00:02:00.000-08:00

I've been working on a Maya model as a project for a portfolio I hope to submit at the beginning of next week. The character is from my third year film at CalArts back in 2006, one of a pair of unlucky chaps who are stuck cleaning up the refuse of the solar system for a living. I liked the film, probably the only film I made there that I can say that about, but among other problems I have with it I never really did have solid designs for the two guys until the end of it, and that always kind of bugged me. So my project for the end of the week is to have Hans here pretty much hammered down and have the modeling/texturing done for him in Maya. I figured I'd kick the week off with a sketch of him. Tomorrow I want to get some facial expressions to show, in addition to getting some more time in on his model.

I'd like to get some more designs in next week... the other character, not to mention their ship and maybe some other random spacemen/ships and some aliens. I've been on a bit of a sci-fi kick anyways recently.

More rock!

2007-12-24T17:49:00.000-08:00

So thankfully someone's been bugging me to keep this thing updated, though I somehow suspect ulterior motives on her part for this image. :P This is my avatar in Rock Band, and as you can see my goal in creating avatars isn't to create one that looks like me, but rather one that I'd like to see. The weird thing is, she started metal and ended up total indie hipster chick. Fortunately the metal personality doesn't reflect in any way except that she'll occasionally throw up the horns after finishing Orange Crush. I guess when you can see Alvin throwing up the horns, you can officially declare that gesture as having been co-opted by the corporate establishment and devoid of meaning anyways.

On a side note, my two monitors at home or both horrendously calibrated. My work computer is too bright, and my parents' computer too dark, so I hope this looks decent on a properly calibrated monitor. Should go about fixing that...

Scientists

2007-12-10T17:10:00.000-08:00

Was drawing some scientists earlier, thought I'd post a couple of 'em.

Art dump!

2007-12-10T09:27:00.000-08:00

So I've gone and joined the ranks of the bloggers! Well, not really. This blog is basically just around to be my art website until I finally get the time to make a proper website. Don't expect long personal posts about my feelings. Do expect occasional posts discussing pies.

So to start off with: a sight I saw on my lunch break a few months ago. This is the guy I want to be when I grow up.

More art to follow soon, with any luck!