New Video and an Explanation...

So in case I haven't mentioned this before, I'm a college student and halfway through my second year. I am also taking a full semester of General Ed classes. This means that I am often very worn out at the end of the day. And what all of THIS means is that I have very little time for working on art, or blogging about it for that matter. However, since I am a busy student with no art classes at present, sometimes my creative juices start flowing and,since they have nowhere to go, get blocked up with ever increasing pressure. When this happens, my brain becomes a sort of volcano, and the art ends up exploding in a pyroclastic flow.
Lovely image right? So what does all of it even mean???
What it translates to is me working on major art works or devoting all of my time to a single project that ends up turning out pretty epic. My recent brain explosion produced an animatic that I've worked on for the past couple of weeks on my days off from school. It's drawn and colored entirely in Corel Paint Essentials by use of a drawing tablet, and it was edited in Windows Movie Maker. I posted the preview of it before, but here's the finished product, direct from YouTube:

The description for the video can be found on it's YouTube page; I don't feel like retyping it.
Oh, and here's the video from the actual show "The Slayers" that inspired this video:

But it's not necessary to see in order to understand the video... I hope.
Oh, and please ignore my total inability to draw a boat. Thank you.

So that's all for now! I'll be posting again soon (maybe later tonight) about some animation related topics: namely, I'll be sharing some of my animation and artistic inspirations, and explain some of how they've changed my life. Or done something slightly less dramatic than that.

Some Semi-Recent Side Projects

Well, the new semester has begun, and sadly I'm not taking any art or animation classes this time around. It is indeed very depressing. So, in order to make up for the lack of artistic assignments, I've been working on some "for fun" projects. A few weeks ago I finished a storyboard animatic that I'd been working on for a while, based on characters from the amazingly awesome tv series "The Slayers". It's been up on my YouTube page for a while, and it's about 6 minutes long... 0_0'. Yeah. Here's the video: Since that one's done though, I've started on another video using the song "Mr. Blue" by Catherine Feeny. It just happened to play on one of my Pandora stations about a week ago, and after I heard it, I couldn't get the idea for a video out of my head! This video features the same Slayers characters as my other one did (because I adore them and they're a lot of fun to draw), and it was mostly done in order to satisfy my curiosity about what really happened at the end of the last series of the show. The final ending was very... ambiguous. And when things are ambiguous, I for some reason have the urge to fill in the blanks. It's still not finished, mind you, (as it states in the video...) but I wanted to put up the section that I had done so far, since I'm not sure when I'll actually finish it. And I know it might be hard to understand, but hopefully it's clear enough that you can basically follow the plot. The song helps too. ;) Here's that video:

New Site Features

In case no one notices, I've just added two new "badges" to this blog from Facebook. The first is a link to my photos on Facebook, where I post most of my doodles, sketches and other artistic things. Most of these will NOT be posted here however, since the majority are fan works and not my own original characters. Also, there are quite a few drawings, so I figured it would be less confusing and save more space to just link to an already existing location.
The other badge is a link to my "PB&J's Custom Creations" page, which features arts&crafts projects by my best friend and me. We have pictures on the page of some of the things I've made, as well as an order form for requesting items for us to make. It's still a work in progress, and we haven't had much time to work on it, but we hope that people will take an interest in some cute handmade items.
Anyways, that's it for my "self advertising" for the moment - I'm trying to make a career out of my art, so I need all the exposure and practice I can get! So don't forget to spread the word!

Really, REALLY late update...

Okay, so I should've posted this in DECEMBER, but my two finals from last semester are available for viewing on YouTube. They have been up there for about a month, and will be added to the videos page on this blog. The showing we had in December for all of the RCC animations went really well, and I even won something! Best in the Summer ART-44 category for my short "Interplanetary ART". I'm really happy about this and proud of the work I did on that one! My two new ones that premeired were alright and I was pretty happy with them, but they were a bit rushed since I was working on them both at the same time, and I wish I could've had more time to concentrate on and refine them. However, I did what I could in the time that I had, and I'm happy with that.
Sadly, I won't be taking any animation classes this coming semester, but I will be working on animation and storyboarding on my own for a while, so I'll try and post some of my extra works here soon! I'm still hoping to take another animation class in the fall, so I'm going to be developing my next film, which will be related to my "Interplanetary ART" series. I'll try to post concept art and sketches here as time goes by, so keep an eye out!

New films on the way!

So, I finished my Animation Production Film Final today! It took a few (several thousand) hours to actually complete, but my instructor and I managed to get it all done! I'm not uploading either film to YouTube or even here until after the showing on Thursday, but once that's done and my films have been officially presented, I'll let everyone on the net see them as well! I can't wait to get some feedback (or at least I hope I'll get some feedback) but I'm also nervous... my films never quite turn out exactly as I had planned. Usually I can hardly stand to watch them for about a month after they're finished, cuz all I see are the gaping holes for things I wanted to do and the imperfections in the things I did. Looking back now at my two older films, I love and appreciate them a whole lot more than I did after they were first finished... but I guess that's just the way it goes with artists. We are our worst critics.
Anyways, keep an eye out for my upcoming posts! There's sure to be something exciting or enjoyable to someone out there.

Shamefully Overdue...

So it's been a while since I've posted... anything. And seeing as I've got two short films in the pipeline at the moment, I figured it would be good to get a few things up before I spring two more finished products on the world... and I had some free time and thought this should be done. At any rate, in a few more weeks I'll post my finals for both Animation Production and Storyboarding, along with animatics, concept art, and any other little tidbits that go along with them. I don't want to post anything prematurely, since I don't want to give my stories away to more people than necessary... I mean, they're only a couple of minutes. Easily spoiled.
Hopefully everything goes well with my finals and I'm able to get stuff posted in a timely fashion... yeah right. In the meantime, I've uploaded more videos to my YouTube account as well as the video page of this blog. They're just a few more pencil tests and animatics, but they show what I do with my life, so I hope they're at least a little interesting. I mean, I do plan on making these things for a long time. I just hope they entertain someone other than myself.

New stuff in the form of Classwork

So I'm not sure if anyone would notice, but I've been posting a few of my classroom exercises on my video and art pages. There still aren't too many things to see, but there will be over time. As such, I probably won't be posting on the front page every time I add something, so be sure to check the other pages for updates every week or so!