a break from drawing

Up until a week ago, I have not drawn a single thing for over 2 months.  Bad artist,  I know, but I do have my reasons.  One thing that you’ll learn from working in anything art related is that you will rarely have time to create art for yourself.  It’s an easy thing to do when you’re creating art for someone else 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week.  Do that for a long period of time, and you can easily feel burnt out.  Drawing for a living is fun, but it’s still work:  hard work to be exact.

When it was time for me to go on hiatus from the studio last March, I decided that it would be a perfect time to take some time away from drawing.   Fortunate enough, I have been learning how to DJ since January so I wouldn’t be sitting around being lazy.  So I would focus my new found free time on that as opposed to drawing.  I was so burnt out on drawing, that I wanted/needed time away from it so I enjoy and rediscover it again.  It’s a double edged sword because you can get rusty as an artist: if you don’t use it, you lose it.

I actually planned on taking more than 2 months away from drawing, but a friend contacted me about doing some artwork for her cousin’s wedding gift.  Her cousin and his bride to be are comic book fans and she wanted me to draw them with zombies.  Long story short, she got her cousin and soon to be wife drawn with a bunch of zombies.  For the first time in a long while, drawing didn’t feel like a chore.  Despite the mistakes I made in the drawing, it was a fun piece to do.

Now that I have the time, look for quite a bit of new work on this blog: I have a bunch of unfinished doodles that need attention.

Cheers.

random doodles

Random doodles with a dash of color.  The addition of shadows help my roughs look more polished than they really are.  Cheers.

The Crow

One of my favorite movies in middle school was The Crow.  I liked the dark subject matter and thought the character was such a badass.  Anyhoo,  the sketch was originally a value study for something more finished.  I ended up liking how it looked and with the suggestion of my coworker, Chase, I threw up some textures on it for the finish.

Nightclub City DJ Rivals

Here’s a trailer for an upcoming videogame where I did cleanup/color for the cutscenes. Directed by Parker Simmons, backgrounds by Brandon Cuellar, help from Nathan Rico and production overseen by Jen Ray.

Check out the intro to the game

Titmouse 5 Second Day 2011

Meet Hornsby!  It was my first 5 second day at Titmouse and I still can’t believe I was able to have one done in time.  The last time I really animated anything was the fall of 2008.  It was very nerve wracking as 5 second day approached as I had no idea of what to do.  I came into the studio with no idea in sight and opened up photoshop to get some inspiration.  Luckily I designed Hornsby and just found a music track to animate him to. I finished animation on Monday(5 second day) and spent Tuesday after hours cleaning up the animation and adding color. I spent a little bit of Wednesday doing a quick composite job for the shadows thanks to my buddies Parker and Mike.

I’ve meaning to get back into animating stuff, so thankfully, 5 Second Day helped get that ball rolling.  Let me know what you guys think.  Also, check out what the other Titmice did for 5 Second Day on the titblog. http://titbloginc.blogspot.com

Cheers!