Announcing dims comicles!

As I'm playing around with the newly discovered weebly.com, I've come up with a dim development! Announcing the experimental Daily..or weekly...or whatever I can, Series:

DIMS COMICLES

So check em out, ill try to post new ones. I think Weebly will offer a nice platform for them, a new and easy way to upload them daily without having to use FTP..and all that. See you there!

Also...

Step-by-step process for the above image, from concept to final!

Dear friends!

Dimgraphic.com will soon be evolving from an old furry catepillar in its cocoon to a butterfly of awesomeness! This site has overgrown weeds and decomposed skeletons in its closets...Time for Spring Cleaning!

What a load of poetic metaphors that was...hehe, but really now, I've discovered the wonderous www.weebly.com along with many other beautiful online discoveries...if only I had the time to list them all here.

But anyway, with the help of weebly, I'll be restructuring things and pushing for a better, more readible site...I have received lots of feedback from several people and really appreciate it. All of it will be taken into consideration as dimgraphic evolves into a more superior species!

stay tuned..

My Concept Design Academy classes have been pretty great lately. They've definitely forced me to rethink my usual approach to drawing, from a stylistic method to a more analytical. Especially the figure drawing class where we break down the form into simple shapes and polygons...morph them into 3d objects and evolve a human out of it all. It's like modeling in 3d
but on paper.
My creature design class has taught me a lot too so far. Most importantly the approach to drawing and developing the concept. We start from a silhouette thumbnail and redraw a bigger version of the figure, gray scale it and add lighting+color. It's a great process and it works. We're currently in the "sci-fi" stage and are drawing monsters/aliens/zombies...etc.

What I'm realizing to be the key important thing when creating concept creatures and characters, is to relate them as closely as possible to that which already exists! Everything must be based off of something that already exists. References are vital, and any lack of references just throws the whole concept off...makes it unrealistic.

Anyway as the classes are taking up my spare time, I'm still working on a few freelance projects. Deadlines deadlines deadlines!

First Week Homework

So here are my Environment sketches I made over the course of this past week. I drew them into my sketchbook at different places and then scanned them into Photoshop. I then reworked them a bit by adding different shades to backgrounds and foregrounds.



As I understand these were supposed to be quick sketches, real simple shapes and layouts...I might have gone with too much detail and tinkering. I have to learn to simplify and focus on shades and shadows...

This was at a motorcycle shop in San Pedro. I was waiting for the doc to come out with the news..



I like using the blue col-erase Prismacolors as they give this nice soft feel to the image, not as harsh as using dark lead. Very good for initial concept layout.



















During my break at work...











I went riding my bike through Santa Monica on the way to get my plates at the DMV. I found these two buildings, worth sitting down next to and drawing. The shading was mostly added at home.

















This bridge looks awful...I rushed this one badly... I think it was getting dark and I was cold.














walking the dog near the apartment I ran across these electric meters...not too exciting.

February is here

Big plans for this month as I'm starting my art classes Saturday, tomorrow I'm going to the art store to buy some supplies. I've also bought a motorcycle finally...and I'm ready for the road, this is how I'm going to get from place to place from now on. Since classes are starting I'm sure to be drawing a lot and thus posting a lot of new concept art and stuff on dimgraphic.com.

Freelance wise, I'm working on a logo for Aaliyah's production company to come, so far the concept is there and I just have to rework and make it look more corporate, or logo-like. The idea behind this one is taken from the name of the company being Dirty Water Productions which relates to her community and its history. I took the symbol of cupped hands holding water, after considering a few other visual options like a sewer drain or a gutter with a deposit of stagnant water...The hands represent an offering, even if it may be dirty water...the gesture overpowers the purpose.

I've been commissioned to create a music video as well, so I'm generating ideas involving a song titled "Little Girl" by Chris Alleyne, you can hear it on myspace at that link.

I've updated my DemoReel page by adding a title credits animation I did a few months back for a film project called "Sophie" as well as some other old motion art samples using After Effects.

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.

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.