2 out of 3 ain't bad

I have now come to a near completion of two of the three maquettes I have been working on. I fiddled with them during last semester to escape from regular work, but didn't really make any headway. During the break I would work on them during the few minutes I had to myself each evening while everyone else was in bed.  After I baked the figures I did some minor adjustments. I sanded down some patches and carved away a few things that I missed while sculpting. I also painted and sanded the base to help them look more elegant. Very lastly I sprayed the figures with a light gray auto paint primer to give them an all around even gray tone. I say I have completed them to near completion because I know there are littles things I may change up or do to them down the round.

Recent Work

Since the Spring 2014 semester is about a week away I thought I would post some of the things I did last semester before this new one begins. If I don't do it now, chances are it will be put off for the foreseeable future.

I took my first 3D modeling class last semester and flourished in it. However the first few weeks of the class I was hoping I would be able to escape the class with a B-. The key that unlocked understanding Maya was two-fold. First was looking at Maya like it was Adobe Illustrator but in a 3D space. The second was my teacher, Tom Austin, giving us free range in our designs. Once I had those two things I just took off in the class, and had a lot of fun.

This was the second object that I modeled. The foreshortening is due to it being in 3/4 view. I named it Ulfbert after a documentary I watched about viking swords.

With the shield I started to add some actual wear and tear to my objects. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, I just wanted it to look cool.

The next series of images is of a viking sea chest. I spent a lot of time developing the shaders for this object. I also did a lot of research of how they were made and used. Since they are used as the seats on a viking ship I added the wear of a lot of repetitive sitting. 

I couldn't resist adding some kind of a joke.

This set of images is part one of my final. We were tasked with making a house for a viking village. For this assignment I researched houses/huts vikings lived in. Luckily there are a few modern replicas of viking villages. The house I modeled this one from is one of the more well known houses in the Swedish open air museum Foteviken. 

I made "my" viking the ship builder of the town. I added some logs under the side of his house to help show who he is. I also couldn't resist the urge to put in a Dalarna horse as well.

I threw this table together in the 11th hour to help fill up the area and make it look more lived in.

I also added my sword, shield, and chest from my previous assignments which helped to personalize it.

Part two of my final was building a shed for the viking ship. As a class team building exercise our teacher had us build a viking ship in two weeks. I was tasked with creating the hull of the ship. 

I couldn't just build a shed without having some kind of tools to go with it.

This was pretty fun to come up with the design of the shed and put it all together.

In my animation class we did weekly animation tests. In my animations I was able to keep pushing my animations and get more believability out of them and some actual life put in to them.

Of the several warm up animations, I like the leaf drop the most. It is nice to have some personality within the object.

For this walk we had to come up with a character and all of their background. After we came up with their background, we started to draw some sketches of them in action. After all of that, the character background and sketches were collected and then redistributed to someone else. This is the character that I got.

For the final we needed to have a flour sack interact with an object and go through a change of emotion. After 100 ideas, the first idea was picked to go forward. Several changes later I ended up with a more refined story.

Halloween Love

Here's a quick doodle I did during one of my classes. I figure Halloween is the monsters version of Valentines day.

Go Ahead Maquette My Day

For the most part of this summer I have been dedicating what little time I have to my self to working on a project that I have been wanting to do for a couple of years. Being an artist I love toys, and from a young age I have tried to make my own toys. This passion or zeal to make my own toys has never really passed me up. As I got older I realized there is a fancier more elite version of "toys" Called maquettes. So this summer in the hour or two I had each night after my wife and daughter went to bed I began to work on maquettes of the characters from my comic strip. They are still a work in progress, I was hoping to finish them before the start of school. Now they will become projects I can pull out and do little bits here and there and hopefully finish sometime in the near future.

Cinco de Moustache

Every year I participate in something called Cinco de Mustache (in celebration of Cinco de Mayo). On April 1st you start clean shaven and then you don't shave until May 5th. On May 5th you then shave out the best mustache you can. Every year I have high hopes for what kind of mustache I will do. However, every year when I shave out my mustache I realize it looks nothing like what I pictured in my head. I have come to the conclusion that I just don't have what it takes to grow a good looking mustache, which is sad because as Rod Kimble once said "all great men have mustaches."

Octopus riding a goat.

In a discussion with a friend the phrase octopus riding a goat came up. It left an image in my head that I had to get out.

Pop-up Adventure

For my wife's birthdays (for any holiday really) I try to come up with funny ways I can do cards for her. This year I thought it would be fun to make up a pop-up card. Well several hours later, after scouring the inter-webs, I had ideas for at least five or so birthday cards. I thought once the cat was out of the bag on the pop-up card it would be old-hat so I figured I should just do them all at once. With a little story telling I came up with a cute little way to package a pop-up book to give her (which meant I had to come up with something else to give her as a card). I found some templates for pop-ups here, I then threw them into photoshop and created my own design on top of them.

The title comes from whenever I ask her what she wants for her birthday, or any holiday, she says "I don't know?"
The cover image for this piece I did on my iPhone using Sketchbook Pro.

This pop-up was a witch in a cauldron so I had a bit of changing to do for this one. 

I changed this one from Santa Clause to me.