A new year and a moment to write about it!

It's been a while since my last post and I haven't uploaded much of anything new lately, so atlast behold...words, updates! The months just flew by...Christmas, Newyear's, birthday...and now it's almost February. Well, here's the latest...
School
I enrolled into a few 10-week classes at the Art Academy of Design in order to brush up on my craft and learn a massive lot of things hopefully. Analytical Figure Drawing, Environmental art, and Creature Design will be on my courseload for a few months and I'm really excited about that! Unlike my past experience in taking drawing courses, the Art Academy focuses specifically on the elements needed for what I want to do in the concept art field...for example, figure drawing isn't just drawing a nude model anymore, the workload seems promising in being detail orientated and specific as I'll be spending weeks drawing knuckles, and hands, bones, joints...piece by piece, working up to a full human form. The Environment Drawing class is definitely going to upgrade my ability in working with lighting, shadows and everything to do with composition. We'll be going to different locations and draw on the spot, gathering from the class description. The Creature Design class speaks for itself as I could always use more practice in making crazy concept characters. It's definitely been a while since school, or at least it feels that way...but this is good, this is refreshing and well needed. Having taken a drawing workshop at this school earlier last year I really enjoyed the class and expect to get a lot out of these courses as well.
Freelance
After working on the storyboard for "After the Headlines" Aaliyah had asked me to create a few more things, a DVD cover and disk design for the dvd. The work is in progress as we're going back and forth discussing ideas for the design. I'm also going to do a Logo for her future production company. At the same time for another client, I have some photo retouching work and animation to do. What I'm doing is taking older black and white photos during times of Slavery and reworking them in various ways. Coloring areas and highlighting faces, retouching the quality of the photos and adding color here and there. There will be some animation involved as well. I have also been recently asked to do a music video for a short piece of music, this should be a fun project; I'll write more about it later.

Up top is a photoshop character design of an Alio Bounty-hunter chick I made up one night and worked on for several nights more painting it.