Games Taking Over My Life Pt 02

Well hey! It's been awhile since I've made a post, my new years resolution obviously getting side tracked...

partially because I've been busy playing games!

After I did the Bastion piece i wanted to try doing a simple gif illustration again. "Simple" being the key word... but ended up taking me through a long complicated Benny Hill chase scene between Photoshop and After Effects. Complicated, but great excuse to finally experiment in AE.

So about the game! I had heard about Broken Age from the famous kickstarter by Tim Schaefer, but admittedly I had neither cared nor had played any of his previous games. After watching some play throughs and watching the Double Fine Adventure Documentary I finally threw my money into the ring and bought the game.

My favorite thing about it is definitely the story and the art style, so for someone who hasn't played a huge amount of games the art definitely carries itself for me. It's definitely going to be one of those games i'm going to be recommending for awhile.

Without blabing on any longer, here's the piece both animated and not!

now back to finishing the comic.. hopefully out very soon!

News Post Extravaganza!

Hello again!! It's been a busy 2014, and while I felt like it went by too fast to look back on, a lot happened!

1. A year ago this month I was working on the near end of season 1 of Astroblast

2. My Coroflot postcard piece went public

3. Displayed and sold my sailor moon piece at Hub Comics

4. Met my comic and artist idol Emily Carroll

and lastly, just in time for the new year, 5. Got hired as a full time Concept Designer at CloudKid! WOO!!

(see.. see... that's why i drew myself on a cloud ala monkey king/dragonball style. What a card right? s.. sorry)

I'm very excited about the new year and the new position, and I wanted to celebrate by making a few art resolutions! Hope you guys are busy making your plans, too!

Christina's Art Resolutions for 2015

1. Finish short story comic

2. Send out new promo cards

3. At least one colored sketch a week

4. Draw every day (work doesn't count!)

And there we go! See you all next time!

We... are the Crystal Gems!

I love Steven Universe. It brought something to television that I really desperately discovered I needed: exciting lead female characters. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of cartoons on tv (it comes with the career choice don't it?) but there's something really special about this show. Maybe something about its anime influences really speaks to 10+ year old me, and the gorgeous backgrounds and stories don't hurt it either ;)

To kill two birds with one stone, I made this piece as both a tribute and an application for a Cover Artist for the running comics. A dream job of mine would be to make fanart as a honorable DUTY!

Maybe someday! Until then...

the final!

                                                    the thumbs... and maybe a future one?

See ya next time!

Dig that Hole, Build a Wall

This piece i hold responsible to my pals Alyssa and Barnes, for gifting me the game "Bastion" in the first place!

SO, a little back story without spoiling the game for you, Bastion is a game where you bop little monsters on your floating homeland in the sky, where some "calamity" has just occurred and wiped out most of the population. Don't worry though, you've got some delightful western-electronic jams to get your adventure on. Later in the game you figure out what makes the game mechanics so unique, and it gets pretty emotional. I highly recommend this game for anyone!

I also wanted to try involving some animation in the piece just as an experiment, and came up with this: 

(im pretty happy with how it came out, thank you Sarah Johnson for helping me out! Gif queen!)

And here's some messy bonus process work, yippee! See you in October!

                

In the Name of the Moon! (A Sailor Moon Gallery Show)

My illustration bones are getting a little rusty... so it was extremely fortunate I got to work on a piece that got into a Sailor Moon themed show for Hub Comics in Somerville, MA! (up through September 2014!)

(Someone also was nice enough to put up a quick tour of the gallery too, take a peek: http://youtu.be/8Xc3QqEQaWk )


I had a few different ideas for the show, but after showing the concepts to friends they agreed a star chart would be the most interesting one.

(messy messy messy)

The process ended up getting really involved/experimental too. I ended up redrawing it on tracing paper and transferring it on bristol, which i think ill only do from now on if it will be a traditional piece.

               (spent a lot of time in photoshop measuring out everything. Circles must be perfect!!)


Way more graphic than i usually go, but once i inverted the pencil lines the white pencil look started to really connect with me. Now that i know how to make transparent pencil lines in photoshop, it might be something i practice on future pieces too!


So anywho, After a year of doing very vectored work for animation, it was really nice to get back into something that i could spend more time on and go crazy with detail on. Relaxing from art with art, that's how we do it!!

See ya next month!

PREMIERE!!!!

I'm

SO

EXCITED!!

The show I've had the privilege to do design on (for almost a year!) just premiered this weekend on Sprout and Syfy! It's....

                                 Astroblast!

For the very first time... I saw my name on tv!

(wow)

And one of the very first episodes that premiered (Titled Building the Perfect Present) was one of the first episodes I got to do a bunch of props and a background for! Mostly sparkles, rainbows, balloons and ducks... aka the most fun thing to draw ever! (and you can watch it too, link below!)

Watch the episode!

It was also exciting to see the Sprout network itself treat the week leading up (and the day of!) the premiere with red carpet treatment, live show and all! It was so fun to watch and I'm floored i got to work with such a talented bunch of artists, writers, storyboarders, sound designers, voice actors, and every other creative person on the team!

The studio I work for, Soup2Nuts, also got 1000% into the spirit by throwing our own launch party, where we had a snack contest!

(i won a Soup2Nuts hat for the smoothie cups I made, best day EVER)

The best part was, without a doubt, hearing the kids' reactions to the show. Makes me emotional thinking about when i used to eagerly wait for my old favorite show Blue's Clues to come on. Seeing kids be excited and happy is the best pay off ever.

But now that the anticipation is through, its back to work and back to procrastinated projects for me, like this Sailor Moon piece I need to finish by the end of this month, eek!

(just a sneak preview for now!)


So that's it for July for now, see you next time!

Where have you been for 3 months??

I have no romantic whirlwind stories or tales of adventure. Unless you count my committed relationship to my daytime design job and trips to Boston 5 days a week. Instead I am guilty of being a poor blogger, so get your finger waggling out on me while you can because now I'm going back into this with more motivation than ever!!

So what have I been doing for those past three months??

Well...

I worked on this Hanna Barbera inspired piece:

And I've been exercising the 'ol doodler part of the brain...



 





And, as has been the case since october, working on the fun adventures of space animals on a M-F basis!

The thing that I want to push myself more to do is get some of my flabby editorial illustration muscles moving so I can have something to show you guys real soon! Until then, happy April everyone!!

D is for darling december space adventures

I have clearly had space themes in my head for the past few months, so it was extremely fun that Coroflot gave me the freedom to do anything i wanted for a postcard project! They simply wanted each of us to do something based off the word "Next" as a promotional series to give to their clients.

 

Since december has been a busy both over here I have nothing much else to share for now. But here's some of the other concept thumbs i did for this project!

My thumbs are messy, but trust me.. you go through like 50 of these before you get to maybe 3 that are somewhat usable. I have to learn to get even tidier with sketches though!

Until next time... IN 2014

 

Spacey

I have 3 projects I can't share yet! One of them I'll be able to share in December, but for my lonely November post all i can offer are these little fingerprint-sized doodles of the Astroblast characters! I can't wait for you guys to see the premiere of the show. It's SO CUTE

So until next time (where maybe i'll have a picture of my desk and stuff?) Here's some space animals:

Big News for October!

Hi again! It's (without a doubt) the best month of the year! So I'm even more excited to announce some big news that just happened recently!

Right now I am currently working with Soup2Nuts on a show premiering next year called "AstroBlast!" under the design team! This means that ideally i'll be busy for the next year doing stuff with an incredible group of artists! SOUPER FUN STUFF AMIRIGHT?

I also recently got to do some spooktacular halloween designs for Hero4Hire! I can't believe what a fun project this one was!

Lastly, here's a sneak peek of what was supposed to be for last month's update (woops) and will hopefully be finished soon:

I wonder what this sparkly mess is all about?!


That's all for September thru October! See you next time!

Pastel Birthday Illustration!

This month it looks like I'll be a bit busy with projects that are in the rough progress stages, so hopefully by the next couple of months I'll be able to share news on that!

For now, here's a little something I made for a VERY belated birthday gift. I like to try to incorporate all of a friends' interests in one chaotic image:

Have a wonderful August! More to come in September

Even though it's July doesn't mean its not cold somewhere!

This month I made a piece about gundams with a slight Aztec spin to it. I like that in Aztec glyphs there's a technicality and cleanness to the construction of it. Adding to the appeal of the story of the Popol Vuh (a Maya story but bear with me here) with the 13 gods of the underworld, whose designs also have a pieced together look, I thought the marriage of relic and robot would be a fun illustration to try myself.

This month I also thought it might be fun to post some scans of my sketchbook... since my current one is almost full, too! The ones below are done from staring at pinterest photos, so pardon my addiction to pinning!!

That's all I can show you for this month, see y'all in August!

Tufts Medical

This month I had another great opportunity that was finally put up online, this time I illustrated for Tufts for an article on language!

Both the Tufts Now page and the Tufts.edu homepage has the artwork featured! Take a look at all the great spotlights below.

The image itself

The view from www.Tufts.edu


Another great month to read up on all things art and language; read up on the article below! See you all next month!

http://now.tufts.edu/articles/meaningful-assumptions

Brandeis Magazine!

Recently I got the opportunity to do a really fun full page for Brandeis Magazine! Check it:

Had to put a snarling beast in there somewhere! This time around I had a lot of process work, too. Here's how it goes:

 The two things that didn't change from the beginning from here on was the dragon and the figure. Streamers were removed, although a great party element. Maybe TOO much party.

 Things are moving along neater now. Pose changes, more elements have been brought in. Now its really starting to look like the final!

Then some quick color studies are done, and the dragon's neck and the circular window is changed. All the elements are starting to make much more sense now, and I then redraw the piece for the final.

Finally, ta da! The illustration is finished and the piece's colors were reproduced wonderfully.


See y'all next time!

The Grand Adventures at Hero4Hire Creative!

So this post is a tad overdue, since I've been done with my internship for a few weeks now, but here is an overview of the things I got to work on/help with!

First and dearest to my heart was getting to work on a "5 second friday" which was something I got to design for while my friend and fellow intern Mari did the animation for it!

Go see it here ---> The Fat Cat Trampoline

For reviews,  I did up a few sheets to summarize the work done for it

 

After that, I got to work on a map of how to get to their studio from the building! There were a few mistakes along the road.. but I got there! And I found out some of the quirky aspects of their building, hm!

Another little thing I got to do was do sketches for designs for a tv show concept with the other artists at the studio! So so cool! I hope the pitch works out and I see the show on tv some day (whether I was useful or not! some of these are kind of derp)

To be completely honest, my favorite part of this experience was the people I met! It's changed my perspective a lot, and i appreciate every single one of them for it!