Glorious, Life Like-ish Color...

And yes, that's the logo for The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Be Touched by his Noodley Appendage...

Got a chance with this drawing to play around with Flash as an illustration platform. It works well most of the time, but there's still an issue with lines that you hope are being drawen smooth and thin being interpreted as big fat blotches. Methinks that the software wasn't design to keep up with how fast a user is used to drawing using a sketchbook. Between that that the not too infrequent crashes, there's a few kinks left to iron out. That being said, I still feel way more loose and comfortable drawing-wise in Flash than if I tried it in Illustrator. Eww...

Got another Kate in the works. Might be a bit too ambitious because there's some effects I'm having to learn how to pull off, but I'm feeling more confident lately about challenging myself. If it turns out, it may end up as an alternative desktop. We shall see...

The Wrath of Kate

Two posts in one month?! Whoa! *dodges snowballs tossed by Satan, made possible due an abundance of snow in his unholy neck of the woods*

Been awhile since I posted actual art up here, so now I got my yearly quota out of the way. :P This sketch features the return of Kate, who was last seen in an earlier post and is a character in an RPG thread I occasionally post in. Not to put words in her mouth or to dictate to the audience what she's actually saying, but she's obviously a little peeved...

"Why yes, I'm well aware that some of the other girls are a bit jealous of me. It's NOT what I had in mind this year..."

Maybe I'll explain further at some future point. On the drawing side of it, I got to play with the Cintiq on this one. Flash and Cintiq seem to go real well together for me. There are a few annoyances, but nothing to make me turn to Illustrator *shudders*. Also, I've been practicing on drawing hands lately and I'm just starting to feel a teeny bit more comfortable with getting all the fingers into an expressive, natural position. Still need reference to pull them off, probably always will.

The Changing of the Reel

Though it pains me to do so, the time has at last come to retire my college era demo reel. Yay, though it hath served me well (eventually landing me my first professional animation gig), alas time has only made me see how much I didn't know back then. The guy in the orange Barney suit just moves all over the place instead of gesturing with anything resembling intelligible intent (though I guess it works for that particular character :P) The little puppet bit near the end of Dementia is still one of my favorite moments. The rest is either non-character work or stuff I could never get rendered, due to end-of-semester deadlines and (at the time) skill level restrictions.

But fear not! A new reel consisting of actual 'professionally made' material has been procured for your amusement.

This is but an early draft consisting of the best clips I currently have handy. As new stuff becomes available, I'll be tossing it in with the rest.

This will also serve as the vanguard for the newly redesigned piercedbrains.com site, which is also in desperate need of a make-over. Been training myself in Flash secretly, at night. (crap, shouldn't have posted that, ahh well...)

Won't be making anything too Flash-y (groan), but it'll hopefully be enough to allow me some control over the design of the key elements. I know I could go the easy route and just throw in some Google/Flickr plug-ins, but I guess I have a thing about sending the link to my supposedly professional site to a potential employer and having it just be a link to a Flickr page or be it's own page but have 'powered by Google' watermarks all over everything. Just call me Mr. Control Freak...