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Throwback time!

Back in the early 2000's I was obsessed with the idea of learning to animate. After 6 months of studying Autodesk Maya textbooks and learning how to create an animation from the ground up, I created an intro video for Solar Light Films that I would like to share with you today! I hope you enjoy the story of a butterfly that morphs into a bright light in the heavens. Watch the Butterfly Intro Video here.

#artobsession #anotherfirst #animation #throwback #solarlightfilms #creative #introvideo

A brief peek into the Production Design for Daisy Belle's Lavender Lady. I hope this will inspire ingenuity and determination in your creative process! Push the limits of your perceived abilities, have courage, and go make something great! 

I'd love to see what miniatures you have created! Feel free to post in the comments!

Practice makes perfect. A 1 hour study using objects found around the house.

Fear makes excuses...  

​As always, I'm going to be real with you. I have been talking about painting on location for a long time now. Why? Because cooking in the woods requires a different set of skills and mindset than cooking in a gourmet kitchen. I'm looking to broaden my creative skill set in a social environment, gain exposure, practice talking about my paintings to strangers, and I believe if you can create outside of your cave, you can create anywhere. 

What have I been waiting for? Well, I told myself... not enough time... my website is outdated... my Patreon page isn't launched yet... I don't have business cards... I don't think I have the best supplies I need to paint outside of my studio... yada dada. The truth is those were all just excuses driven by fear of doing something I'm not already good at yet. It takes courage to do something new in front of an audience.

It took talking about it with my brother, a natural performer and artist. He asked me to paint in public and tell him all about it later as his birthday present. :) So, I agreed! The day came and I had all of my excuses! So I worked on checking some of them off, I finished my website and Patreon page. I gathered all of the supplies I thought I needed and I drove 20 minutes to a park in Del Mar just before the sunset. The weather was overcast, cold, and windy. I sat in my car... thinking how cold it was. I nearly convinced myself it wasn't worth the effort and I'd do it tomorrow morning.

Then, as I was thinking about how I hated letting my brother down, I saw a couple moms walking up from the cold windy beach in shorts! I thought if they can walk around in shorts, I have zero excuse to get out and paint right now. So I did. I gathered all of my supplies, walked myself down to the beach, and began setting up shop.

The set up was great! My portable easel went up fast, I had all of my paints and brushes in the drawer, I had a small recycled jar and a bottle of water for rinsing brushes, and my homemade glass pallet with glass scraper for easy cleanup. The difficult part was definitely racing the sun, painting an evolving subject, and strange eyes watching. That alone made mixing colors and laying strokes more difficult. There were people migrating over to take a look at my painting. None of them stopped me to make conversation until I was putting everything away. A man and his daughter approached and inquired about the painting. They were very excited to see an artist at work. 

Even though the painting didn't turn out or even get close to looking like it could if I spent more time on it, I feel a need to do it again! Next time, no excuses! After all, the goal wasn't to create a beautiful painting, it was to broaden my creative skill set in a social environment! Which i did. It was also to gain exposure, which I didn't...haha oh well, next time I'll have cards with my website on it. This was also an exercise to become more comfortable talking about my paintings to strangers, and to practice painting outside of my cave. So, I'm going to call this a success. :)  Happy Bday Bro!

Your first anything is such an opportunity for growth. If you're lucky, people will believe in your ability to learn and accomplish great things along with them. I was so lucky on my first film. I got to create an animation, an animatic, cut a trailer, storyboard, design/shop for/and age wardrobe, and do fx makeup on zambies next to a couple very talented makeup artists!

​Thanks for walking down memory lane with me! Whatever creative goals you have, go for them! I believe in you!

Watch Zombie Man!

Replicating a Van Gogh is HARD. :) Any now I have an appreciation for him like never before.

I’m on an animal illustration kick and having sooo much fun with it. It’s like being 7 again. Playing house, choosing who gets to be who or what.

When my sisters and I were little, like most kids, we played house. We used to create our character’s out loud to one another…you know, get the background on our supposed friends or enemies in the game so we knew who we were talking to. This was always my favorite part.

It wasn’t always sugarplums and lollipops though. We would argue over who got to be the singer or the figure skater. Sometimes one of us would choose to be a famous person, then the rest of use would struggle to think of our own famous person to be… it wouldn’t be long before we each had 3 different professions or a really hot boyfriend, a kickass job, and of course lots of money.

We had the most awesome collection of costumes. It makes my wardrobe today look tiny in comparison. There were 80’s prom and wedding dresses, cat and clown costumes, little house on the prairie clothes, and outfits from my old dance recitals.

Well, now I’m all grown up and I still get to dress up and play pretend, just in a slightly different way. Meet Mear the meerkat. He’s an explorer and thinker with a burning desire to get down to the bottom of things.

Today he is on an archaeological hunt with a messenger bag, his own design, specifically for these missions of discovery! The bag contains very important tools including a bucket, sifter, brush, hand pick, containers and pouches for organizing fossils and dirt samples, as well as a pouch for his colorful one of a kind glasses, made specifically for dating his findings in the field.

More characters like Mear are on their way, so keep on the look out.

Update: A few more characters I've created since writing this post.

To lighten the mental overload a bit I try to focus less on the film as a whole, and more on each individual scene. Breaking the project up into small goals.
Once I have knocked out one or two scenes I feel better about the project.  Having that visual foundation can simultaneously inspire and block the flow of goodness. Sometimes all I want to do is visit the finished boards. This makes drawing new boards with any real potential near impossible because I’m focused on a different scene. Sometimes the best answer is to forbid myself from looking at the finished boards so I can focus on the scene at hand.

Questions I ask myself while creating my shots and storyboards.

​What do I want to say with this scene? Which characters are in the scene and how does their personality influence the mood of the scene? Who is most important in the shot and how can I position the less important characters so to draw more attention to the main character in the shot

This is the first project I have story-boarded without using pencil and paper. Instead I am using PS and my new Intuos4! I highly recommend using PS to storyboard with. The tools are a real time saver. Layers, ctr z, lasso, and scaling. Before I got the Wacom, I used a Genius tablet. It was a great starter tablet but very limited and I couldn’t get myself to storyboard using it. There wasn’t enough pressure variance. The Wacom is very close to drawing with pencil and paper. Getting over the initial weirdness of looking at the screen instead of at your hand when you draw is the hardest part, but taking the time to get over the weirdness is worth it.
I begin each board with a very rough sketch or organized scribble. When I like the sketched composition I either create a new layer and draw the finished version over the top or if I really like the sketch, I might clean it up a little and call it done. There are times when a perspective is difficult to achieve. In those cases I take and use reference photos of a willing model. The fine artist in me considers this cheating, but the digital artist in me says back off, it’s brilliant!