Ebay Bikini Girl

So I found myself on the east coast recently. Whilst I was there I hung out with my former classmate/roommate Robert Smith aka "Sir Iguana" and we collaborated on this little piece to sell on Ebay for no particular reason. I drew, he painted. You can find the listing here.

Alex Woo's Gesture Drawing 101

I would like to take a moment to plug Alex Woo's new gesture drawing class. Alex is a good friend of mine, a fellow Pixarian and a heck of an artist. You may remember him as the director of the Rex Steele animated short.
Anyway, Alex has been teaching the gesture drawing class at Pixar for a while now and has decided to adapt his class into an 8 week curriculum that will be offered to the public for the first time.

Here are the details:

The course will consist of 8 classes over the course of 8 weeks. The curriculum will be as follows:

Week 1: Line - Distilling the pose to its essence
Week 2: Shape - Abstracting the pose
Week 3: Silhouette - A clear read
Week 4; Space - Creating depth and dynamics
Week 5: Exaggeration - Pushing and pulling a drawing
Week 6: Extrapolation - Seeing beyond the surface
Week 7: Story - Giving your drawings context
Week 8: Final Review

The class will meet on Thursdays from 7pm-9pm at 160 Folsom Street in San Francisco starting June 16th and ending August 4th, 2011.

Tuition will be $800 for the entire course (all materials will be provided).

Class size will be limited to 12 students.

If you're interested and/or would like more information, you can email Alex at alex@woohoopictures.com.

Valentine Sculpture Process

I thought I'd show you guys part of the process I went through with Michael Defeo when creating the valentine girl sculpture. Mike works in Z-Brush which is a digital sculpting tool, first he made an initial rough pass based on this art of mine. However, he made her in a neutral standing pose because we want to make a few different pose variations down the line, and it'll be easier for him just to pose one model a few times than sculpt from scratch each time.
So I drew over images of Mike's first pass and made notes on how I'd like him to change it. This first one was done in a pretty strict "turn around" method as this made clear most of the important information.







There was certainly a good amount of back and forth of notes and revisions but always to the progressing improvement of the piece. There were plenty of surprises for me, sometimes something looks great in a 2D drawing but when you bring it into 3D it doesn't work or it breaks something else. Definitely a great learning experience.





This video shows the final standing version, the fruit of the notes and revisions.

valentineFinalDefault from michael defeo on Vimeo.

Then Mike posed her and we continued the revision process a little longer.




And very soon we called her done.

valentineFinal from michael defeo on Vimeo.

You can see a bunch more of Mike's process videos here.

Valentine's Day at Wonder-Con

I'll be attending Wondercon at the Moscone Center in San Francisco April 1st to 3rd. You can find me at the Imaginism Studios table (AA86-87) with my good friends Kei Acedera and Bobby Chiu.
I'll be displaying this beautiful prototype of the Valentine Candy Girl statuette sculpted by Michael Defeo. Michael also hand painted this 3D print out of his Z-brush file. Check out this nifty video he made on his painting process for the piece on his blog.







Photos are by my good pal Juan Hernandez.
Thanks Juan!

Art Blocks for Ghana Part II

Just wanted to let you guys know the "Art Blocks for Ghana" charity auction is currently live on Ebay at the moment, including my own piece. The auction ends Sunday March 20th 4pm PST. 7pm EST.
There's lots of great art, so get while the gettin's good!

Happy Valentine's Day!

As an extra special Valentine treat, I thought I'd give a sneak peak at a statuette I'm planning to produce. I worked very closely with digital sculptor extraordinaire Michael Defeo, and I think he did a pretty bang up job. She's based on this Valentine piece I did last year . Right now she only exists as a ZBrush file. Whether she'll be cast in vinyl or resin, at this point I don't know. There is no release date in sight as well. So hold on tight, time will tell.

Mermaid Progression

I had some requests to see the progression on this one. Luckily I made a few scans as I went.

As usual, I start with a rough. As you can see I changed the hair in the final.



After transferring to the colored paper, the first step I took this time was to "ink" the line work with a brush. The black areas are actual ink, the rest of the lines are acrylic.



Then I built up the shading with acrylic washes.



And lastly I hit it with a transparent later of concentrated watercolor. That stuff can be really bright, I toned it down a lot on this one. I used a little gouache as well for the highlights and white areas.



Simultaneous to all that I like to make a color study, It's basically a guinea pig for the real thing.