A few new things

I just uploaded a few new pieces and a few old pieces! Check em out by clicking Concept Art and Archives to see whats there. As I'm doing more art and trying to categorize things into their appropriate places like concept or illustration or 3d...I realize that it's getting hard managing what goes where! For now I'm devoting "archives" to store my illustrations as well as some 3D that I've done in the past. Now if I get into more 3d, ill most likely add a whole new link. "Concept Art" is mostly pencil scanned drawings and digital sketches that I've done. They're not meant to be final pieces really..Anyway, the most important thing I realize is keeping everything simple and easy to find. No one likes to dig around and waste their time when they're looking at sites. It's usually a quick 'flyby glance' if anything.

So, In my free time I've been helping out my friend Hasan building a site for his Photography and Videos, using Dreamweaver. The site should be running shortly at www.hasansenol.com so you can take a look there if you want. As we're both building it and adding quicktime videos, and flash components...sound files, etc, I'm thinking of ideas that I can incorporate into my own site. For example, I have yet to update my comix page and make it all nice and pretty. It looks terrible right now. But the more I focus on the presentation aspect of things, the less time I have on the raw creative part. Of course both are essential as I have to impress people in order for them to take me serious and/or hire me for that matter when I direct them to dimgraphic.com.

The piece way up top is a space marine I sketched up, scanned in and painted in photoshop. A couple hours of work. I should start timing myself to see how long it takes to do a piece like that for my own future reference. It's inspired by the upcoming StarCraft II game from Blizzard. I sent them the piece so maybe they'll put it into their fan art section!

I also added some old Paintings into the Archives. The photos are pretty poor quality I must admit but I figured I'd post what I had for reference. I do want get back into oils again. Oh! Almost forgot, I gotta brand new shiny "People Counter" at the bottom of my page to track how many visits I get.

Working on 3D, Concept Art and Storyboarding

Just Uploaded my 3D artwork
I dug up my 3d work that I made back when taking a Maya at UB and posted some of my characters and texture work here in the "archives." This way I can maybe show people some of my 3d knowledge and have them hire me and pay me and give me benefits and etc to create elaborate masterpieces of all sorts...I'm trying to revisit the program and get more 3d stuff going...maybe some landscape and cityscape pieces would be nice!


Concept Art
About two weeks ago I attended a 'concept art' workshop at the Concept Design Academy out in Pasadena, LA. The whole thing was really interesting and inspiring as Christian Alzmann, an awesome artist described his works and techniques in creating creatures and characters. The thing was about five hours long and well worth the time and money. Since then I've been inspired to draw and paint my own concept stuff...and even to consult Christian on a few tips and pointers. The guy emailed me right away with a plethor of advice-so I have him linked to my "blogs list" so that that YOU and I can both check out his work periodically!

My Latest StoryBoard
I've been working briefly on a side gig too, helping a friend with a short film that she's doing called "Who is Chasing Whom." I drew up something of a 20 page storyboard for her and helped her and my friend Hasan film downtown one day. The storyboard in any film or animation project is vital since it's basically a blueprint of every single shot that the director plans to shoot. Without a concrete layout, you can imagine how much time and film could be wasted both on shooting and editing. Also, attention to detail can be lost without good note taking and make the film inconsistant with the story especially when shooting your shots out of sequence. With the SB, everything went quick and smooth!

The more storyboards I do the easier it becomes for me to come up with sequences and shots. With this project I worked directly with the director and there's a big difference when you have em right next to you as opposed to a director that can only be reached through email or phone. It makes for less revisions and the whole thing takes less time. Much easier to work that way in my opinion. Having photograph references is of course the other huge advantage when storyboarding as well as a map or top-view of the location, if there is a lot of action to be had. This way you can plan out character movements in relation to camera movements and the such.

I'll post the storyboard for this film soon!

Wall Mural and 17 Days Exhibit Animation

GGR Wall Mural

I've been meaning to put up pictures of the wall mural my friend Vali and I painted in two days...about a week ago. This is a 20 ft. wall mural of a face, I think it's the face of a guy in the 6o's that was used in commercials telling kids not to use drugs. So I call up this ad asking for an artist to paint a mural for them and I responded, checked out the location with Amber and estimated how long it would take to do...I took the job and with Vali, $130 worth of paint+stuff and 14' ladder rental from home depot we got the job done in two days. We transformed this wall into that wall!

The place is Called GGR or Gourmet Green Room, it's a medical marijuana distributor...how medical really...im not sure as I've seen people of all ages come in and out through those doors...I just painted thinking, well, Perhaps we just have a very ill society these days if everyone is in dire need of weed. The owner offered to write me a letter of recommendation in the case that I ever wanted a marijuana card for myself. Man was he surprised to know I wasn't really interested. "You guys must be from the East coast or something?" how did he guess? Anyway the guy paid us a nice sum and said if I ever wanted to hang some artwork up in his joint I could do so. He'd take 10% of everything sold. Now I gotta make some art to hang there. You can see more the mural in progress pics on my Myspace album at this link!

17 Days Exhibit

So I've finally finished my Animation for the 17 Days Exhibit and just at the last minute too, as I am supposed to show it on the 13th of October. My piece is called "Panoranimation" and it will be running the whole day at Western Michigan University on a loop and maybe even in the Cepa Gallery in Buffalo sometime next Spring. The piece is a mixed media animation piece featuring a stream of imagery and subtle animation with video. The name of this piece portrays a panoramic moving landscape that expresses a slow trickle of time passing, as one gazes at the panorama. This is a sedated moving piece running at a little over 6 minutes and thus requiring the viewer to stop and gaze for a while in order to absorb it in its fullness. Panaranimation studies an ongoing transitional flow of video with as little ‘cutting’ as possible of scenes. As a matter of being, it is for the most part just one scene. If "Panaranimation" was a still painting, it would surely take up a good 30 or 40 feet of horizontal space, thus in animated form, the art compacts itself to save physical space. You can see the animation in its 3:2 format at this link, or the widescreen format here.

Quickly on Politics

Politics...what lunacy lately..then again it's always been lunacy for as long as I remember. What have we turned this country into? A reality show! Gambling our own futures with self righteous, finger-pointing, corrupt assholes. I did have hope at one point during this past year and that was when Ron Paul was running...I agreed with him 200% and would have been more than proud to have him be my president. A man like that could have really turned this country around...instead we have lunatics running the show. 3rd party candidates of course have no chance but to be deemed as nuisances trying to "steal votes" ...what a load of shit. But anyway what can I expect, what can anyone expect these days when the media is all bought and owned by a certain few, when the political system has all rotted down to its very core!

I created these two political cartoon style sheets and a few political cartoons about McCain and Obama earlier this summer as I thought I'd be doing a whole series relating to the campaign trail, laughing at these two fools and their very important viewpoints and positions. I had a few concepts going and some rough cartoons, but it never really got beyond that. Now that the whole thing is bound to end soon in November, God save us all, there's really no point in trying anything...why contribute to this fun-packed thriller-suspense extravaganza!? In my closing thoughts I'd like to mention Bob Barr, the Libertarian party candidate who I've picked to be my choice as he's stated again and again about the corrupt nature of our bipartisan system and the fact that our two choices (obambi and MickyCain) are the one and same really. Your thoughts??

Updated Resume

Here's just something I made in Graffiti on Facebook a while ago, it's a simple and fun tool that lets you draw on your friends' walls. The best part though is when you're done, you can see a time-lapse video of how you drew your piece turning it into a process-art like animation.

Actually the real reason for a post is to say I've updated my resume page! Check it out.

Moved and Settled for a while

On the left are some Blog Logos I came up with in my spare time back when working at Clearmedia. Maybe I'll throw them in once in a while here and there when I write stuff on here.

Amber and I just moved a little farther west in LA, to an apartment complex called "The Madrid." It's definitely a lot nicer and in a better location than our other slum. This place in nice, has a gym, pool, hot tub and spa..all enclosed like a giant graham cracker box fortress from the outside barbarians.

Jinx dog is with us for an additional $35/month...she's gonna owe us a lotta money after our lease ends in March; the million dollar dog! I'm gonna switch to a closer Job location out here in Westchester soon, still working for Borders bookstores part-time. Well besides all the moving nonesense this month, I finished doing the storyboard for "After the Headlines." The total number of frames reached over 200, all on 14 pages. I'll post them on my storyboards page when I have them approved and revised.

I'm really behind schedule on my animation that I have to submit for Michigan, but that is gonna be my next focus. I'm going to send it out by next week for sure. In the meantime, ill be looking for more freelance gigs and other art jobs too.

17 Days Video Series

I have been invited to have one of my animations play at the 17 Days of Video Series happening in Western Michigan University and also at the University of Buffalo, my old university in New York.

17 Days is a video series, curated by Adriane Little, for the Atrium Gallery at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Western Michigan University. The concept is that there are 17 Days paired with 17 video artists. One artist’s video work per selected day will play continuously and simultaneously on both of the 50” plasma screens, one on the first floor and one on the second floor, located at the front entrance of the Richmond Center for Visual Art in the Atrium Gallery. 17 Days began with the spring 2008 semester and then continues in the fall semesters going forward.
For this Installation I have created a piece called "Moving Landscape" but the title is subject to change as I put my last finishing touches to it. I'm currently finalizing the editing and sound work. Once I finish I will post the video and explain the concept behind it, as it is abstract in many ways.

In Search of Inspiration

In one of my very ordinary days working at Borders bookstores I came across a fellow artist. We began to chat and exchange all sorts of information and excitement regarding authors, comic book artists, storyboarders...etc. This guy started scribbling a whole list of precious names, links and sites...I checked them out briefly and compiled a list here for others to see and visit:
Alex Maleev........fine artist/photograpy
Alex Ross ...........comic book/superhero artist
Craig Mullins.....fantasy art
Travis Charest....comic book/fantasy art (gallery 2)
J.G. Jones...........comic book/concept art
Jae Lee................comic book/covers
John Van Fleet...fantasy art
Ashley Wood......fantasy art/concept art
Kent Williams....fine artist
Tim Bradstreet...comic book art
Bill Sienkiewiczart...comic book art/ art

Splashpageart.com
albertmoy.com
comicartcommunity.com
illustration.org

The Past Three Months

I've been working at a company called Clearwire for the past three months as a web graphic/interface designer. Clearmedia 365 is the web division where I joined forces and worked alongside Pat Prekel, another intern graphic guy. The Clearmedia site is currently in their final stages before launch and when they do, they will provide the public with media, news, photos, entertainment, sports info, downloads...etc. Throughout my time here I worked
mostly with Photoshop, puting together background images and graphics for navigation tabs, a little logo work and a little clean up, readying images for online posting. This type of work doesn't let you be too creative unfortunately, as I primarily worked with pre-made images that just needed a few tweaks, overlays or touchups, resizings, a color correction to keep everything consistant...whatever. It was great practice regardless. At one point I was asked to work on caricatures for the two running cadidate goons Obama and McCain, so I picked up my sketchbook came up with some ideas for cartoons, face expressions and whatever else related to the daily campaign trail.
I'll post some political cartoons a bit later on a different post or somwhere else on this site.
So now that I'm going to have all sorts of free time until I find my next job, I'll finish working on my site, do some freelance gigs and also make some art I've been waiting to do for a long time. As a matter of fact, I have some canvas ready for stretching and painting upon back at home. Lots of inspirational material to look at and plenty of ideas circulating in my head at the moment. My site still needs bigtime revision I think. I like the way the homepage is looking, with a simple navigation up top, a spot for a daily comic/drawing in the middle and this blog feature towards the bottom. Please offer some ideas if you have any on how to make dimgraphic.com even better. I'm looking for a better way to present my comics with a simple navigation option to go from one to the next. It's gotta be a simple enough system where I can just keep all images in one folder and upload new images as I make them. I'm also thinking of dumping a lot my art into one place: the Archives and just store them there rather categorizing paintings into paintings and animation into the animation section. There just seems no point, art is art and I like to try a little of everything. "Specialization is for insects" -Robert Heinlein.

Welcome

Slowly but surely I am adding and fixing dimgraphic.com to make it look better as not only my portfolio website for a lot of my artwork and animation but also as a portal of communication to the outside world. Here I will post ideas, issues that interest me, some nonsense and always a fresh piece of artwork, or a sketch dug up from long ago. I used to have a similar blog that I called "Mindwaves" powered by Bloglines. You can visit the old posts by clicking on the link.

If you notice under Links, there are sites like Youtube and Artbistro that I have accounts with where I upload stuff. Recently this Summer I was hosted as an artist on Phauxshow.com so I've got some stuff there. As I come across other blogs or tutorials, art sites or whatever I'm sure to post them under links just as well. Finally you can subscribe by using RSS (up in the right corner of blog) that way you know when something new is posted.
Feel free to leave comments and suggestions of any sort.