Eureka – Eureka Seven: AO
Just had to do another Eureka Seven: AO illustration. After all, it was the original series that gave me the confidence to go into animation in the first place. Here is Eureka, the heroine of the original series, instead in a flight suit from the current production. Had a lot of fun with this. It took around 3 hours to complete and came from nothing. Think I’m back into my groove. Had very little trouble getting down any of the forms tonight aside from her feet. I hate feet. I’ll be posting my new demo reel next!
Maggie Kwan – Eureka Seven: AO
A little out of practice, but still managed to pull off a new illustration tonight in just under 3 hours. Here is Maggie Kwan, a cool character from Eureka Seven: Astral Ocean. I found her character design to be top notch. I personally really dig big fat arms / gauntlet type of glove things on skinny characters. Maybe that’s why I chose to draw her. Who knows? Hope you enjoy. In other unrelated news, I have a new demo reel out, going to post it soon. Stay tuned!
Proof of Concept – Shaded Chasm
Professional BG and SFX didn’t make it in on time for my deadline this week, but the vid will be updated with them shortly. Here’s a quick concept video of how we want Shaded Chasm to look and feel. If you view this vid fullscreen on a Windows Phone or other smartphone, you’ll get the gist of what it will look like as if you were playing it. Hopefully we can nail down a programmer sometime soon and set this thing into motion.
Q-Bee – Darkstalkers
After finishing that Cerebella piece, I had the growing nerve to draw another fanart. I tried to come up with reason to do another Skullgirls piece, but just couldn’t find any inspiration to do any of the other characters while keeping it appropriate for all viewers. So, I turned to my favorite fighting character of all time – Q-Bee. Quite possible the coolest Darkstalkers character of all time, I am rather disappointed that she does not show up in the newer next-gen games. I don’t know what it is about bee characters, but Wasp is also my favorite female superhero in the Marvel universe… interesting. Maybe I’ll do her next? Either way, it’s back to school for me now that break is over. I have to give a speech next Monday and I’m not looking forward to it!
Accidentally flattened my PSD for this image, but was able to save out some in-process images beforehand. You can see the process on my facebook!
Skullgirls – Cerebella
Decided to finally do a personal piece for a change. Man, it’s been what? Almost 4 whole months since my last one? Time sure flies!! Here is Cerebella, one of the characters in the upcoming fighter game, Skullgirls. I did this piece in Photoshop with my new Intuos 5 tablet. I wanted to put it to work on something special all week! So here we are. Skullgirls is a groundbreaking game – it’s all hand drawn, HD sprites, unpixelated, shaded with 3D lighting inside of the engine, and it just goes on and on from there. I had the opportunity to try out for Skullgirls as a clean-up artist, but sadly didn’t make the cut 2 years ago. I wonder if things would have been different had I been at this level back then instead of where I was. Oh well! Skullgirls drops on Tuesday this week on the PSN and Wednesday for XBLA. I’m going to definitely pick up a copy for my PS3 – will you?
PS – if you’re curious about my progress for this image, check it out on my facebook!
49-Hour Animation Competition 2012
Our second year entering into the 49-hour film competition hosted by the MG Collective. This year we got it in on time, had a lot of fun, and did it all with just 4 people instead of 5. Not only that, but other than myself, the group was entirely made of sophomores. Really proud of them. I think we all got a total of 9-11 hours of sleep each over the span of the weekend, but man, it was exhilarating for us creatively! Put our skills to the test in a small timeframe! This year’s theme was more open to interpretation, which I think is why it was so fun for all the Huntington University groups. This my group’s take on “panic”. Enjoy!
Prototype Shaded Chasm!
So, today I discovered StencylWorks, a visual game creation software and decided to attempt putting my sprites into a game. It took a lot longer than I expected since some of the code was being evil. Here’s a prototype of this puppy in action! The movement keys are A and D for left and right. If you hold down Shift, you will sprint, and if you try to go the opposite direction while sprinting you will have a slide/halt animation play. Pretty cool! The generic backgrounds were part of the kit, and I don’t own them.
Click to play the prototype!
I’ll probably be adding on to this to get jumps and attack animations in there just to shop it around to people and REAL programmers since I don’t think we can port this straight to a Windows Phone game. Exciting stuff! Can’t wait to get Chris/Jay’s official backgrounds in for the test and make it look cohesive of what we’re going for. Cool thing is we can add dialogue and all sorts of stuff in the prototype so it looks like my free time will be eaten by this in the coming days. Awesome!
A Virus Named Tom
Hey everyone! So, as most of you probably already know, I’ve been working for Misfits Attic since August, working on this sci-fi puzzle game. Well, it turns out I’ve been pretty much the only animator for the game since November while still being a student at Huntington University! Pretty crazy. It’s been a crazy ton of responsibility and a lot of work. You can imagine me being excited to you the big news! A Virus Named Tom is now available for pre-order, which get’s you into the open beta!
Those that go this route will get their high scores permanently baked into the full game. So, say you get like gold on one of the levels and beat the developers’ scores, well your name will be on the scores list for the final product. And there are more incentives for pre-ordering – order before Valentine’s day basically gets you a second copy for a friend/Valentine. Pretty sweet! It’s only 5 bucks so if you’d like to support me, Huntington University, and the Misfits Attic team, order away! The final game will be 10 bucks, I believe, so ordering now is basically getting you a 50% off discount!
Currently it’s just available on PC, but will hopefully be coming to Steam, Mac, and Linux in a future release.
If you’d like to find out more or sign up for the beta, head on over to http://www.avirusnamedtom.com/ Thanks everyone!
Cloak of the Deep
I have been going through Folkflore on the PS3. It’s such a classic! The art is phenomenal and I just had to draw Ellen in my personal favorite costume – the Cloak of the Deep. The design for the costume is flawless in my opinion so I had to attempt to do it justice. This piece took about 4.5 hours from start to finish. Time sure flies when you’re having fun! If anyone wants to see the process, I’ll be posting it on facebook. Laters!
Katherine
Just a speedpaint I was really happy with. Love doing spurt-of-the-moment un-refined drawings of video game characters. Hope you enjoy!
Katherine is (c) Atlus from their 2011 title “Catherine”
Florrie
My friend Jay and I decided to do an art trade for Christmas. He requested an illustration of Florrie in my pixelated style. Hope you enjoy it!
Really exciting stuff coming up from Misfits Attic! I’m working on an animation that will be at the forefront of my demo reel and I’m super stoked for it. Hopefully I’ll be able to link it or post it in the coming month!
Sprite Progress
Hello hand-drawn animation. It’s been awhile.
I felt inspired this morning.
Going to do a run sprite for Aikaterine. Right now it’s just sketchy without the arms, but in the end it will be full color, with proper proportions and better timing. Just calling it quits for today. Hopefully I can complete it in my freetime. Going to bring it into Photoshop and make her a high quality pixel sprite like the illustration at the top of my website. If anyone is wondering, the sketchy run in the upper right hand corner was my stick-figure version of the run that I made as a blueprint for her. You will see the intended arm pose there.
Aikaterine – Misfits Attic Update
Continuing with my drawings of Kolevis this past week. It feels good to draw my character again, and for some reason this happens every fall around Halloween and before Christmas. Perhaps this is because she reminds me so much of Halloween with her costume and color scheme. One of these days I’ll have to bring it to life. In my previous post I did an ultra-painterly realistic version of Kat using a new technique. While it was fun and produced a cool result, it was too much work and not the style I enjoy. In this illustration I went back to my roots – video games and tested her out in some old-fashioned pixel art. I definitely like the look of this better and makes me think that one day she’ll have her own video game!
While on the topic of such, Misfits Attic released a monthly update yesterday detailing the progress made in the game and how far we’ve come over the past few months. One of my animations got highlighted! On top of that, there is some cool music brewing for it as well, so check it out: http://misfitsattic.blogspot.com/2011/11/monthly-update-november-11.html If you’d rather not go to their website and read the article, you can just watch the animation above. I did not create the art, simply animated it and brought it to life. My only creations were the explosions, particle effects, and blood splatter. Everything else was hand-animated in After Effects. Enjoy!
Not Dead
Hey guys. I’m not dead, just extremely busy working full-time remotely between multiple companies! I’m blessed to have these jobs and I’m doing my best to rock them and not slack. However, I’ve been getting really burnt out lately. Need some personal work to keep my creative mind alive. So here, had some fun with this little explosion animation I did today in After effects. Had a lot of fun with the colors, blurs, particles, just everything! I was inspired by the effects used by characters in DC Universe that use Ice Beams. It is a vis-dev assignment for Misfits, but I have no idea if it’s going to be used or not. Figured it wouldn’t hurt to post an itty-bitty something after months of silence. Here it is:
New York Chapter
Comes to a close. A little over a month ago I came onto Motion Capture NYC’s team as an intern. I worked on their Whiteboard Animation side of things, doing heavy work in motion graphics using After Effects and Photoshop. Because of this opportunity, it lead me to more contacts and expanded my network. I gained a lot of experience and cool stuff to put on my reel! It was a lot of fun, but now it will be good to go back home and turn the next page on my life’s book. I’ve picked up a remote-work contract position at Misfits Attic and am very excited to finish my projects going on over there. Right now, things are very hush-hush, but you can check out the company and get an idea of what I’m working on here: Misfits Attic
Now that I’ve finished my work at MoCapNYC, I want to show you the projects I completed there. The promotions have gone public so feel free to check out Doodle and after you watch what they’re about. Pretty cool company if I say so myself! I did about 90% of the animation on the first spot, and on the second I did it entirely by myself. Let me know what you think!
Kolevis
Weekend marker pinup. Had fun with this. I don’t have a scanner here in NYC so I have to use my cell camera to capture my drawings. Sucks. Click image above to see full marker drawing. Let me know what you think! Feels really good to be drawing my muse again!
Aikaterine Kolevis Illustrations
Decided to draw a bunch of Kolevis this week. Didn’t use any references, basically just sketching here after feeling inspired by all of the graphic novels I’ve been reading. I need to publish a real graphic novel of her story. It would be perfect. But, until I’m able to I will have to just keep on drawing her until I get her look down just right. I think my favorite was drawn back in November of last year. I need to keep trying to mimic that look. But hey, this is what you get with markers and a half hour of free time.
Unicorn Boys Jump
Well, having a good experience with that animation last night led me to continue onto it a bit. I gave Pincho a leap as well. This was a little more time-consuming than the run cycle since I couldn’t copy frames or anything. Lots of fun animating the smears in the star and shoes, the overlaps in the ears and keychain. Let me know what you think!
Unicorn Boys Run
Hey all. Been doing some visual development work for Shaded Chasm, a series hopefully coming soon from Mourou! I had Keff up here for my birthday this past week and we started writing episodes, getting the plot and character development down. Now it’s up to me to direct the visual look for our series. So, I was doodling around in Toon-Boom last night and decided to do an old exercise from school – the walk cycle. Since Pincho is a little more action-based, I decided to give him a run. This was a lot of fun and helpful in deciding what to do next. Comments on the style would be appreciated! Is this something you’d like to see more of? Would you rather it be puppet animation instead of hand-drawn? Let me know! Thanks guys.
June 11SC Progress
So, what have I been up to these last few weeks? I’ll tell you – the 11-Second Club for June. I started working on it on Thursday, and this is what I managed to come up with in that time. Right now I am working on getting the rough skeletal animation down before I go over it with the clean-lined characters. I find it much easier to animate these simple shapes rather than just going straight into the characters. Let me know what you think! If you have an account on the 11-Second Club forums, you can keep track of my progress here: Ru / 2D Animation / June It’s fun to watch all the steps as I go along!
It’s really exciting to be doing this animation. I like the community there and I’ve met a lot of cool animators just like me. I’d still love a job, but I have no problem refining my animation skills while I wait to hear back from potential employers.
Kuiper’s Sail Remix
New addition to Mourou, Stephen Yonkin, as sound designer and composer, came up with a new soundtrack for Kuiper’s Sail so that it may be submitted to festivals and shown publicly with full rights. I think he did a fantastic job. The song is completely different than the Junior Boys’ piece, and still manages to give the film a very complimentary feel. I personally liked his work with an atmospheric ending, high tension for the climax of the film, and other cool transitions. Check it out for yourself! I recommend some bassy headphones for full enjoyment. Currently, this film has been entered into the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Let’s hope it does well.
Stephen and I are excited to work on more collaborations in the future. Stay tuned!
Visit his soundcloud for more of his electronic beats: http://soundcloud.com/stephenyonkin
Real Drawings
My marker died, and so now I need a new one.
Click the inverted images for the real drawings! Trying something new with my theme, sorta like a blackboard and chalk!
Baseball Poses
Some clock work to keep in practice. Possible client wanted me to work on baseball poses, primarily a pitcher’s extreme poses. I didn’t make a Clock-Sketch video for these, but rather just did them on my own. Enjoy.
Click inverted image for real sketches! Trying out new theme sort of deal akin to a blackboard and chalk!
もうろう 