Teaser?

Just gonna put this right here. More to come?

Styles

PAX was this weekend, and I was inspired. While waiting in lines, I read the sixth volume of Marvel's Runaways. And I got to play some really fun games that made me really want to delve in and produce more work for my portfolio. SO I thought I'd start with some pre production pieces inspired by some of my favorite Runaways Characters.

First there's Karolina Dean, aka Lucy in the Sky.


I've been staring at these images all weekend, so I thought I'd put them in at the top to show the reference I used. I broke down her color palette. Very soft pastel colors, with yellow being centric to the whole pattern. Then, I looked at her actual attacks and broke them into silhouettes. It's a bit like fire, water, and hair all mixed together. It knocks people down, grabs hold of them, acts as a shield. I'm not really sure what it would feel like if I touched it... but I have a feeling it depends on her mood/motivations. So, the silouettes described are: swirly, stretchy, and sparkly, haha. The attack breakdowns describe how it would look compared to her character... how it stretches across and next to that would be a "sample" frame of the animation I'll be doing.

Next up is Nico Minoru, aka Sister Grimm.


Oddly enough, I felt like the centric color in her palette (at least in her ~energy~ because I mainly focused on her big spreads and the panels where she was actually attacking something) was also yellow - but a more dark and dull yellow. I added variations, simply because her palette is fairly limited. Not many cool colors to speak of. A lot of the blue I found was actually the opposite of the rest of her general tone. So, I included a light, more saturated blue. The silhouettes describe the type of attack she deals. Karolina is an alien, but Nico is actually a witch - and her character has a gothic style. So, there's lots of fire - which is what the outer silhouettes describe. The middle silhouette actually describes lighting... which is often randomly interacting with her, her staff, and the environment as she attacks things.

The sample frame is her staff being enveloped by fire, lighting... and the attack itself is a frog. Simply because she has a wide variety of spells that she uses, so I thought I'd take a classic and fun approach to her attack.


2D Animations soon!! Time to bust out some CS5 and get to work!

More Platforming Concepts

Frogs and Others!

Agatha

Agatha is a little project I dreamed up years ags. I thought why not scribble up a concept piece for it while I wait on my C4D questions to be answered. Happy Tuesday to you all!

Platforming Frogs

Here are some concepts and silhouettes for a platformer character concept:





And here's some keyframes of a frog swinging on his tongue and jumping I did in photoshop:

Rough Draft Cont'd

Hey, so here's that model sheet I was talking about making:



And here's some keyframes; You can see the model sheet and some Richard Williams reference in the upper left hand corner.

Rough Draft

I made this a few posts back, and one of the designers at Digital Kitchen (Sean Dekkers) said it would be a cool animation. So, I whipped this up in about an hour. A proof of concept of sorts with maybe half of the animation principles applied (seriously, the hands are all kinds of messed up). But! I'll post it anyway as a part of my ~process~ for this upcoming piece.



I think I'll actually go back and "design" the character a little more - give him some personality. He's got a bit of a flare at the moment, I think I'll try and capitalize on that.

Boredom Inspiration

So, I was bored and realized I hadn't posted here in a while, so I thought I'd whip something up really quick and talk about how busy I've been as an excuse as to why it's terrible. But I actually kind of like these.



Just some quick silhouettes/life drawing. What for? Just because, I suppose.

Birds of a Feather

I've been working on a game team for CG 350 called Flight. I'm the lead artist, and I think I'm finally comfortable with that position. I've recently come up with a color palette that I've been enforcing on the modelers (Wonjin and John Mark). It's really fun and bright... it's really a nice break from all the stuff I do for projects and portfolio.



I hope you don't mind the silly little scribbles that are the characters. (The creature on the end by the way is a raptor. The programmers were vehement about the raptor, so it's going into the game). The scribbles were just a study of the characters next to each other... and they were pretty loose. For instance, I changed the Ostrich quite a bit because of some complaints that is was "too purple." It seems John Mark and I are the only ones who truly appreciate violet and all its shades. Alas.

CG 350 is the class that I work on the game team in, but we also have extra assignments. We had to create normal and specular maps for the character, in addition to the diffuse. It was quite fun. Most people make self portraits of themselves... so I'm thinking of sculpting a self portrait in Mudbox. But we'll see if I have time.

Here's the Ostrich.





The extra maps aren't going to make it in the game, but I thought I'd show them anyway. It's the first normal map I've ever made, and it's very very simple. Definitely a work in progress.

Fight of the Flightless

I'm on a game team now, for CG 350 called Flight. It's a 3D balloon fighter game with flightless birds as the players. My teammates include my friend and Chance of Rain technical artist John Mark, a couple of juniors Wonjin Kim and Victor Anderson, and my boyfriend Nate Ross.

I've somehow been designated the Art Lead, and I'm alright with that. I decided we should all model a bird for the first assignment in CG 350 which has a 1000 tri cap.

Here's my result:



This was the initial concept for the Ostrich:

Chance of Rain Color Comps

The dawn colors were all based upon pollution in Mexico city and dawn in Guatemala.
The afternoon colors were all based upon the colors of the clouds in various hurricanes around the world (ida, rita, francis).
The dusk colors were based upon sunset in Mexico city and the rainbow pattern that appeared just before the Sichuan earthquake last year.

Now, to figure out good transitions from one to the other through the course of the short. I think it's time to fiddle around in After Effects and Photoshop.

Updates for the sake of it

Fall is here, which means school. Chance of Rain is coming a long smoothly. John Mark is working hard on boob-rigging and the whole team spent two hours yesterday at the mocap studio.

I have to say that Romina is an amazing asset to my team, both as animator and as the choreographer and main dance reference.

I'm currently setting up cameras and scenes and things. Trying to get everything organized so that I can finally start doing what I want to do - FX.

I bought smgrissom.com and I found a hosting service, but for now, it'll just be routed here.

I suppose I could upload the working animatic, but it's going through some changes this week, so I'll just upload a few thumbnails I'm doing for a completely unrelated class (concept art), and a walk cycle I did over the weekend.



That, there, is a bunch of compositions for a concept art assignment. It's supposed to be a Musical or Opera poster for a Depressed Transient Devil. Fun assignment.



And this is Fatima walking. It's partly for a sound design assignment, partly because I haven't animated a character traditionally in three years. There are some kinks, but for the most part, I really like it.



and why not, here's the end Animatic for the short. We've changed the jump, but the timing and all is about the same.

Storyboards - Chance of Rain 1, 2, and 3

This is the Chance of Rain Intro.

Fatima Model Sheet

This is the final model sheet for Fatima - meaning 'to abstain' by the way.

I've also attempted a couple of low poly models (just to practice, as I have never really modeled a person before)

City Concept for Chance of Rain

I took a class called Art 300 Environments with Peter Moehrle in the Fall of 2008, and he assigned gave us this:

and I turned it into this:


So, I've decided to incorporate the same idea to create the concept of the city for Chance of Rain. Plus, I thought I'd get in the practice while I have time between now and when school picks up again.

This is all I've done so far:

Fatima Color Comps

This is the final color decision, out of the ones done below. The decision of the facial and hair shape was based on the fact that we wanted her to seem calm, soft, and tranquil, as opposed to the severity of the other two. The tattoo decision was based on the fact that it kind of looks like veins, as well as a large tree (a motif we decided upon after the silhouettes were done). We also went with muted colors rather than bright ones, because we wanted her to fit in with the dull and dead quality of the world she lives in. Her warm skin color makes her racially ambiguous which was also a plus.

Fatima Preliminary Thumbnails

Initial concept sketches for my summer project/senior project character Fatima.

I'm going for a mixture of three elements: ethereal, industrial, and tribal.
I spoke to John Mark (my awesome teammate) about the direction we should go in, and we're gonna go more in the direction of shackles and bandages with a tree tattoo, rather than something long and flowy. Will have a model sheet up next month.