Assorted Animal Characters

(handily labeled individually, for ease of perusal)




Recently, it was brought to my attention that while there are many different kinds of human characters in my portfolio, there is a blatant paucity of characters of the animal variety. By means of remedy, I post here the findings of last weekend. I spent most of Saturday doing sketch-research on various animals, and a number of hours today hashing out some rough designs from what I learned.
I sure had fun learning all sorts of new things about animals, too. (Did you know that over 86% of dogs have four legs, and use all of them to walk, or even run? Funny, when you think that most humans get by pretty okay on only half as many legs.) Suffice it to say, this has been an eye-opening weekend; and I plan on doing some more of this informal study of animals...at a safe distance, across from a computer monitor.

Thanks, Will.

The other day, I was looking over the shoulder of my friend, Will Strong, as he drew in his sketchbook. All I could see of his drawing was goggles and a mustache; I still don't know what it was that he was doing, but because of him I couldn't stop drawing these guys for a week. Week-long sketch addictions are becoming a thing for me lately.

Dirty Birds: Sal

He sells hotdogs. Also, he's behind the stand throughout the short, so no need to design a bottom half. (Maybe he doesn't even have a bottom half?)

Dirty Birds: Herbie

Here are some explorations of the Herbie character in my latest short project. By way of excuse, I've been spending the last few weeks doing lots of storyboards, so when they get to a presentable stage, I'll post them here.

An Answer

So, I know many of you have been losing a lot of sleep over Tuesday's riddle...
"What has two horns, a wooden leg, and a super-cooled nuclear core?"

And while you probably figured out the answer on your own, I'm going to give it to you again here:

ROBOT GOAT PIRATES!

Now, for further clarification, some images for your perusal.

[Fig. 1] Regular Goat Pirates (notice the conspicuous lack of cool android limbs)

[Fig. 2] This is an example of a pretty standard Robot Goat Pirate:

[Fig. 3] Dada as a Robot Goat Pirate. (Left image, according to Sawyer's imagination; right image, according to my own estimations)

[Fig. 4] Assorted other Robot Goat Pirates. (Seriously, I couldn't stop drawing these for an entire week.)

For Further Study: I'm pretty sure that THIS and THIS are both results of the same idea-generation process that produced Robot Goat Pirates.

One of these things is not like the other...

Some brief character explorations. vive la différence.

Why You Make Me Hitchoo, Girl?

I keep coming back to Izzy, the senior film for our class in the animation program at BYU. It's like an abusive boyfriend--I know it will just keep hurting me if I go back to it, but I can't help but come back because I'm still in love. Foolishly in love.
These are some potential extras for the intro sequence of the film. The ideas continue to grow more ridiculous and less usable (baby on a flamingo, anyone?). But the fun-factor is through the roof (for me at least).
Thanks for letting me get away with some of this stuff, Sean.

Because We Can

Just finished one cartoon movie--gearing up to start another one. Bet you can't guess what it's about...

:)

Trying to figure out a look for our winged friends.

What Might have been...

Here are a handful of sketches and designs that I haven't posted, in all the flurry over the last several months that we've so lovingly called "Izzy." They are design explorations, that ended up not being chosen for finals...but they were valuable, because they helped us get where we needed to go.
Anyway, have a look. Hope you enjoy!













And above, some quick screen grabs of the models that our tech team is putting together.
For now, time for bed...
Soon, some new sketches--hopefully.

More Explorations

Some more explorations into character development and design for our senior animation project at BYU. The film's in an interesting place right now, since our story crew hasn't nailed down character personalities--which ends up being fun for me, because that means I'm free to do designs all over the place, but it's not exactly great for meeting deadlines. Luckily we're only in the beginning stages.
Right now, we know there's a girl and a rhino...and that's about it.
Anyway, let me know what you think about what you see!

A reworking

You may remember this from a little while ago... Now in technicolor!

Gals and Rhinos

Well, it appears as though the month is drawing to a close already...where does the time go? I haven't posted much lately, but I don't want you to think that that is because I'm being lazy or anything. I've just been busy working on a crazy deadline for work, which is good because work=food=my wife and baby are happy=I can keep drawing for fun.
At any rate, our group at BYU has begun work on our animated short! It's about a little girl and a rhino, so I bet you can guess what I've been drawing non-stop for the last little while. I don't really have anything clever to say right now, so I'll just get to it:
All of what you see here is marker and photoshop (except for the two watercolors and the one collage, which is entirely photoshop). Hope you like seeing the exploration--leave a comment and let me know what you think!

A freaky green dude

So, Halloween is nearly upon us, and here are some recent sketches.
I love the trumpet--it's just an awesome instrument with so much soul. I had lotsa fun with this sketch, so I'm hoping to make some time to do a little more with it later on. We'll see. With any luck I can make some time this weekend.

Today, we watched Charlie Chaplin's City Lights in our character animation class. After watching the boxing scene, I couldn't quit thinking about how tough-looking those dudes in the ring were, so I spent my next class period doodling this:


And (in case you thought I'd forgotten), I've upped the ante once more in our pre-halloween freak out fest. Feast your peepers on this beauty:
Yep. "Shrek the Halls limited edition shampoo." Okay, we all know that straight to video/dvd releases are lower in quality, so I'm not here to tell you about how horrifying I think that cinematic trainwreck will be. After all, straight to video releases are about making money for studios so they can produce more cinematic releases later on--and we've all probably done paid work that wasn't up to our artistic standards to help make ends meet.
What's really scary (and nonsensical) to me is the idea of Shrek selling shampoo. Shrek is a bald ogre, and the most hair we ever see on him (thankfully) is his eyebrows...which are admittedly kind of bushy, but hardly warrant the use of a buble gum scented shampoo/conditioner combo. Anyway, here's to Suave for cooking up this pre-halloween's weirdest surprise.
I hope you're all excited for Halloween, and that you get a ton of candy! May strange, inexplicable and sugary things happen to you and your loved ones this year!

Up playing way too late

For a guy that has class in 6 hours, this may not have been the wisest decision.

Dairy Scary: and other offerings

In honor of the upcoming Halloween holiday (hooray!), I am making a scary post...of sorts. The other day, while flipping through the paper for coupons, my dear wife, Allison found the image noted below:

Yep. You read right. "Imitation Pasteurized Process Cheese Food." You know, there's a reason that imitation food-like items such as this are only 89 cents a go. I hope none of us have to be brave enough to find out exactly why that is.

I'm just trying to get you warmed up for Halloween. This is only a little bit scary, I'll admit--but hey, it's still early in the month.

Anyhow, here are some recent sketches from my school notebooks.

There is this totally radical (replica of a) traditional Chinese horse sculpture in the Asian and Near Eastern Languages department office at BYU. I took a moment to sketch it before a meeting with the professor that I work with (I'm a TA for Japanese 201 in my spare time).
More fun faces from classes.
My favorite part about this is that the fellow pictured on the left-hand side of the page below had such floofy hair and a great jersey on (which I didn't get, since I was taking notes beneath the drawring). He looked like a baseball star from the 1970s...I don't know what to tell you about the lady to his left.
This is a sketch I did a little while ago--a design for an upcoming personal project. I have so many things brewing on back burners that my creative stove top sometimes feels 17 feet deep...I can't even reach some of the ideas that I put on the back burners ages ago. On the other hand, though, maybe it's best to let some ideas stew for awhile--like a delicious curry--then hopefully it'll get tastier with time.

And here are a couple of concept character sketches from an illustration project for work that I've got due at the end of this month. It's about a family, but so far I've only really gotten a feel for the boy and the father. More to come as it becomes presentable!