Ice Cream

I made this one day when I was craving ice cream but didn't have any in my freezer.

Looks ALMOST good enough to eat, right?

I am getting some weird shading on my bowl, which shouldn't be happening because it's completely smoothed. The bumpmap might be the reason. Or something completely different. I'm still working on it. (Same with the spoon. Spoons have such weird material!)

Life update + Here there be dragons...

Apologies for not posting in a while. I've been doing random art for people as well as personal stuff for myself, and trying to get the hang of LOTRO while polishing up a ton of animations and branding stuff for my portfolio. Less than six months until graduation!

Here's a commission I finished about a month or so ago. 

And ironically 2012 is the Year of the Dragon. I did this for my school's branch of SIGGRAPH.

Hopefully my next update won't be in two months...

Influence Map

A long time coming, this one.

[original] Nicolai Macamoile

Here is the primary antagonist of my pet story Enigma. Nico is completely charming and affable to a fault. And he truly believes that everything he does, he does with everyone's best interests. Even if he simultaneously knows that he's wrong. 

I'd drawn him up as part of the 30 Days, 30 Character Challenge I participated in this November--as I had a name for him but not a face or a design.

second cousins

My mom usually calls on me around this time of year to draw portraits as gifts for our relatives. This year, the gifts are for two of her nieces/my cousins. The first is Reyne, my first cousin's daughter, and the other is of Gage and Riley, my cousin's sister's kids.
I hope they don't see this before they're supposed to! ;) (They need to be colored, but still.)

In other news, babies are really hard to draw. Forget trying to convey "boy" or "girl", try "human" and not "alien" or "blob-thing".

animation background concepts

We're doing a lip sync animation in my Digital Ink/Paint class as our final project, and this time around we were required to have a background accompanying our character. I'm using the same character I did for the walk cycles (Calypso, her model sheet is on a previous post), and since she's from a foresty area (at the bottom of a mountain), that's what I did.

The character's going to be drawn at about mid-size so you don't see her feet--unless I get told otherwise by my instructor. :B
And of course, the actual background I'm using (the first image) is a little duller than I'd like it to be normally so it doesn't overpower Calypso, but I made a couple variations just for the heck of it.

self-expression

For the Adobe Imagination Challenge.

A very vague theme, self expression. Everyone's gonna interpret it differently.

I think for the accompanying statement to this picture I wrote that while I like to surround myself with beauty (even though I don't take pains to make myself pretty), I'm more about trying to capture the best thing about an object or person--not beautifying it. I like to admire the beauty in the world around me, but I also like the simple things. I like honesty.

I was due for another self portrait anyway. The last time I did one was fall 2009. Yikes. I really should do another one, realism this time, but still in Photoshop.