Just keeping this site fresh, even if I have to only use words instead of sexy sexy drawings.  Finals week begins a week from Wednesday, and I am super not ready for that.  Fortunately, my animation final is due on the last possible day (the 24th), so I have two weekends between now and then to get it done.  My comic, however, is due a week from today, before finals even begin!  I am much further along on that than the animation though, so that’s good news.  I guess we’re spending the day of the final reading everyone’s comic.  These aren’t just eight sheets of paper; they’re going to be fully assembled comics, with a cover and everything.  It’s pretty neat, I’ll have some pictures of the finished product up here in addition to scans of the story.

The other big thing I need to get done is for my intro to Archaeology class (it fulfills a liberal studies credit or something, I dunno).  We’ve got a group presentation (for tomorrow), a group paper (next Tuesday), and a final exam (that following Thursday, I think).  It’s a lot of work, but whatevs.  That’s what I get for totally not being super productive the last eight weeks.

Maybe I’ll post the cover to my comic here soon, just to give y’all something to look at.

So, hey, what’s up?  I’ve got less than 3 weeks left until finals time, so I’ve been buckling down and plowing through all of the various projects and papers I’ve got going on.  This includes an 8 page comic and a 2 minute animation, which you’ll see in due time.  Of course, that means I don’t have a whole lot of time and energy left to devote to any sweet drawings for this site, which is pretty lame.  And it’ll be like this for the next month.  So I guess y’all can just hang back and eagerly wait to see the awesome stuff I’m working on now.

Hey everyone, I apologize for the slower update schedule in recent weeks.  My animation class is winding down (only a week and a half left), so everyone’s been working hard to get everything done.  And honestly, we’ve got a lot more done than I thought we would.  We really only have a couple more scenes to finish shooting, which will definitely be done by Friday, and starting tomorrow I’m going to help get a lot of our sound work started.  A few of us (me included) are going to come into class on Saturday and record the majority of sound effects that we need, so next week will basically be all post-production work.  It’s exciting, I can’t wait to see if the finished animation turns out like we’re all hoping.  The last day of class is the 21st, so theoretically I should have a copy of the finished product to show y’all soon after that.  So yeah, that’s something to look forward to in addition to the slower updates here.

Alright, so I finally got my Wacom Bamboo Fun in the mail today.  Super exciting.  I spent a solid part of the day messing around in Corel Painter with it, just learning the ropes and what I can do.  I decided to ink and color the Farm Girl picture I made awhile ago for my test piece, which I will post in a little bit.  So for the rest of the week I’ll be finishing up a few pictures so I can get my store/commission page all set up.  Aiming to have that all finished by Friday, but we’ll see.  Glad to get some color to this website, all those pencil sketches and drawings were a bit dull.

I understand updates have been a tad sparse here over the past couple weeks as we all (or maybe just me) eagerly await the arrival of my drawing tablet.  Once that happens I’ll try and make sure that updates are a bit more regular.  I’m also working on setting up an account over on Comic Art Commissions so I can sell some finished artwork, as well as accept offers for commissioned stuff.  It’ll be cheap, since I have absolutely no internet cred yet.  Hopefully that’ll start changing sometime.  I’ll let you know when it is all ready, which will probably be later this week.

Oh, I can’t wait to get my drawing tablet.  Don’t know if you know that.

Second night of zero sleep this week.  I’m losing two days of productivity this weekend because of my bro’s high school graduation (not knocking it, just wish it could have been any other weekend), so I need all the time I can find.  The animation’s at well over 200 drawings now, with more to come (I reuse a few frames, though, which is a good time saver).  Really wish I had something to show for all this.  Oh well, it’ll be finished by Monday at 5:45 (or it better be, anyway), so there ya go.

5:11 AM, time to go back to scanning this batch of 163 drawings.  Wooo~

Ugh, I’m running out of juice here, and there’s still another week left of finals.  Curses.  I’d say about 90% of my time and energy is directed towards my hand-drawn animation project.  We’re really only required to have roughly 10-15 seconds of finished animation (as in inked, colored, consistent geometry, etc) just to give us a basic understanding of Toon Boom.  The rest of it can be as rough as we need it to be.  Me?  I’m polishing the entire thing.  AND I’m including music and sounds (not at all required), as well as lip-sync. Which we haven’t learned at all, so I’m sort of learning as I go.  Because I’m insane.  Hey, this is what I want to do after college, so I figure I might as well start getting used to it.

My everything hurts.

It is currently about 1:20 in the morning here, and I’m taking a small break from my animation project.  It’s due in a little over a week, and it’s my first real experience working in Toon Boom, and lemme say that I’m enjoying it thoroughly.  Makes it so easy to put together something professional.  Plus I get to play with the Cintiq tablets in the lab, so yay.

Anyway, a few little hints on what the animation is: it features a tree and a squirrel, and there’s singing involved.  So look forward to that.  Now, time to get back to drawing.  Nothing like pulling an all-nighter running on nothing but Red Bull while all your friends are out doing stuff.  Such is the life of an animation student.