I saw Kubo and the Two Strings in theaters the night after I got back from the Philippines. I was super worried that I'd fall asleep because of the jetlag, BUT I did NOT! And I loved the movie. In fact I loved it so much that I wanted to buy a T-shirt. Unfortunately, there are not really any T-shirts available for it yet. Pshaw.
Luckily! I found this Kubo T-shirt Design Contest!!!! I thought, "Sure! I like T-shirts! I like drawing things!" So I went ahead and entered the contest. If any one reads this blog in the next 10 days (unlikely) and feels like voting for me, here's the link: http://thrdl.es/~/5fVt.
Finally posted the second episode. It was quite a journey to make this episode. We can really only film on weekends because it takes so long to make bread. So - we finally had a weekend where we were both free. We start making the rice cooker bread first, which takes the longest. We realize that we forgot some ingredients, so we headed to the store. We get to the store and notice that the power was out. "Oh that's too bad", we think. "At least we still have power at home", we think. We get back home and...you won't believe it...our power was out to. That weekend most of Western Washington's power was out. So we ended up cooking our dough on the fire. It was a bit smokey, but good with cinnamon sugar.
A few weeks later we had another free weekend to bake. Luckily the power stayed on, but we had a few other mishaps along the way. We ended up making the rice cooker bread AND the microwave bread twice. TWICE!!! This was mostly because our story changed and we had new ideas we wanted to film, but also partially because I messed up measuring Stephanie's ingredients the first day. I gave her about half as much flour as she needed. The shot where she's folding in the butter is from the first day (we forgot to add the butter until a little later the second time) - the dough was a lot runnier than it should have been. The resulting bread was pretty dense and not as "bread" as the second attempt.
We had to redo the microwave bread because I forgot switch the microwave to low power for the first fermentation, so the dough was kid of half-baked at that point. Luckily that bread does not take a whole day to redo.
Oh and I almost forgot about my wonderfully awful idea to do an accent for the narrator/host. It was really...something? I apologize to anyone who is offended. I don't know if you will ever be able to forgive me.
I'm not sure how far we'll make it in this series, but at least I can say that my grandma thinks they're great!
My brother just bought himself a Surface tablet and has decided to use it to practice drawing. His first attempt was to follow a tutorial on how to draw Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
He sent me and my sister this beautiful drawing using OneNote:
So naturally my sister (who also has a Surface) had to show him how it's done using FreshPaint:
So of course I, naturally, had to display the results using my Wacom tablet and Photoshop:
Of course there are many different tools out there that we didn't try, so give it a go! Here's a link to the tutorial we used: How to Draw Aang. Have fun!
My sister and I decided to to try out a new project! We are trying to make all of the bread from the anime Yakitate!! Japan - which is basically a bread making competition anime (where do they come up with this stuff?). We are recording our adventures/tutorials on our YouTube channel: Cartoon Kitchen. I learned a lot in the process of making the video - from lighting to editing to After Effects. It's pretty corny, but we had fun making it. We just uploaded our first video today, so check it out!
Welp. I lied about being more consistent at updating. Here is a little drawing I did of Mabel and Dipper from Gravity Falls. It's drawn from a reference picture. I can't wait to see what this show has in store!
So I've been pretty busy the last few months, which is why my posts have been so infrequent. And part of the reason I've been busy is because of the holidays, and the other part is that I just got a new job working as an Associate Engineer for Pixar's RenderMan software in downtown Seattle!
I got to visit the studio for a few days before starting work, and lemme just say, IT IS AWESOME! It's clear that Pixar's great movies are cultivated from the relaxed, creative, and friendly environment at the studio.
That was the announcement, so here are the new drawings. I got some Copic Markers and pens for Christmas and I love them. They just blend into the paper so smoothly - they look like the paper was always that color. I messed with line width in a few of these (which clearly I need more work on), but I'm mostly working on creating interesting characters.
Angry old women are surprisingly fun to draw.
Gravity Falls!
A side note: I'll try to higher quality photos. Some of these are just blurry enough to be irritating. And who knows, maybe I'll start updating more regularly too. I have to get those Roadtrip photos going again!
I've been drawing in pen and markers a lot lately (with varying amounts of success), so I thought I'd share some of my attempts with you. Here are some one panel stories that I drew to capture some moments. I was inspired by some of the artists at CTNx to try to draw stories rather than just singular, out of context objects. Specifically, Pascal Campion, who wrote a beautiful book called 3000 Moments, and Valerie LaPointe, a Pixar story artist. Definitely check them out!
Bryce Canyon is a truly unique natural wonder. The canyon is more of an amphitheater than a canyon, formed out of odd rock formations called "hoodoos". The rock formations were formed by years of erosion, floods, and frozen winters. We hiked down into the canyon through a bunch of switchbacks into an area called Wall Street. There had been a thunderstorm the night before, so the canyon floor was a bit muddy. It's hard to capture how large the hoodoos actually are, but hopefully you can get a sense of the scale of the individual parts as well as the canyon as a whole.
This last photo is a bonus from our drive through the Dixie National Forest. Bryce Canyon can be seen in the background. I was thoroughly impressed by the large number of cows in the forest (sorry I don't have a photo for you).
This is a short animation that I did in my Computer Graphics course last Spring. I made the crab/lobster and oyster rig and animation curve program, and my partner worked on the lighting and texture capabilities. I came up with the story idea and then we both worked on the animation (with a little help from a friend). The production quality is a little low, but hey, we only had a few weeks to write the program and make the animation! It's a bit ridiculous, but it makes me laugh. Without further ado, I present the most crab-like lobster you will ever see...Rock Lobster!
Here's a link to a web address incase you have trouble viewing it on mobile: Rock Lobster.
I'm trying to learn how to paint. This is a shark! He's a little rough around the edges and I kept trying to fix them, but that just made it worse. I like him though. I'm using gouache paints because you can get really nice bright colors, and I've seen some awesome art using the medium. They're sort of in between watercolor and acrylic, so they're pretty fun to mess around with. Stay tuned for more!
This is a tattoo design that I did for a friend earlier this week. The words are a quote from Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night, which was the first play she acted in at Everett community college. I've never done something like this before, so it was fun to learn about tattoo art practices. The cross hatching is a little wonky and some of the lettering could be better, but I'm happy with the design overall (and more importantly, so is she).
I'm going to start this blog off with some photos from my road trip with my sister this summer. We went from Montana through the Southwest, and then up the coast back to Washington. We stopped in some really beautiful National Parks along the way and got to see some places that I've always wanted to visit.
The first stop on the trip was Yellowstone National Park. My sister and I had never been, so it was amazing to see in person. Here are some photos from the park.
Lower geyser basin (I think)
This pool has a face!
Steamboat Geyser. It really sounded like a steamboat.
