Hallo-Win!

It was about a year ago my daughter decided that she wanted all of us to dress up as her favorite Christmas song "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells" for Halloween. She decided she was going to be "Robin laid and egg" That I was going to be "Batman Smells" (I don't know how I feel about that decision...) and that her Mom was to be "the Joker got away". All that was left was "the Batmobile lost its wheel", that got  the wheels in my head turning as to what I could jerry-rig up. After a little planning and a trip to a the dumpster behind a local appliance center for some large pieces of cardboard I was ready. I based the design of the Batmobile from the 1989 "Batman" movie (personal favorite of mine). After a couple of days of hard work on my wife's part watching our newborn and daughter while I toiled away at piecing the car together until it was finished. I am really pleased with how well it turned out and my daughter loves it so I consider it a Hallo-Win.

"Robin laid an egg, the Batmobile lost its wheel"

The Finished Batmobile.

WIP Shots

Anniversary Card

Recently my wife and I celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary. To commemorate this occasion I painted a little something in lieu of a card. I am getting more and more into the mid-century modern style art and wanted to try my hand at it in this piece. I limited my pallet to 6 flat colors, next I want to try dropping it down to 3 or 4.

Here's a graphite transfer of the image.

A white wash (with a hint of blue) was painted over the whole background and then the flat colors added.

Penny Hockey

I took an old project from my junior high shop class, a penny hockey board, and wanted to see how I could update and outdo 12 year old me. The Basics for penny hockey is to take turns flicking a penny trying to score a goal with pegs in place as obstacles.

Here is the original board I made back many years ago. I didn't do any research of what a hockey rink actually looked like I just wanted to draw on it and play.

This is about the same size as the original but with more research and work put into it. I redesigned the peg layout and raised the sides so the penny doesn't flip off the board as much. (The dimensions of this board is 7 1/2" x 13")

The next few I made I changed the size to 10" x 20" along the scale of the olympic/international rink size for more surface area. I scaled down all of the dimensions from the international rink to make these as accurate as possible. I was also able to give enough space behind the goal pegs for the penny to pass behind them. Each of the logos are hand painted on. 

Since making these I have had many requests to make more. I am developing a more streamline process for making these. However if I were ever to sell them I would need to put a generic logo on center ice so as not to infringe upon trademarks.

A Birthday Card for my Wife

I've stated in previous posts how I enjoy doing zany things for my wife for birthday or holiday cards. In doing this I have discovered that each holiday or birthday I have the need to outdo what I did the previous year. This process is starting to become a little crazy. Since I did a pop-up book last year, this year I had to top that. Not necessarily an easy task. So I thought what beats a book with moving pages? The answer, a moving image. So the day before her birthday, coincidently also the first day of spring break, I sat down drew some thumbnail sketches and then started to work on her card. A little over 6 hours later I had a rough 10 second animation. Now when I say a little over six hours I mean that collectively. I spent two hours in the morning on it then two hours while my daughter napped, and then two more after my wife went to bed.

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.