Finals

Difficult to report anything but work. Caught up in the midst of finals I have a thousand and one things going on but no brain cells to talk about them.

A friend of mine at MCAD has just recently set herself up with a website and I would highly recommend checking her stuff out. She has great illustrations and amazing tone work.

Nicole Vanche

Little news and Storyboards

I wish that I had more news to add. I'm afraid everything is going a bit slow right now.

I've been working on two larger projects that have been taking a lot of my time but that don't give me a lot to show. I do have some storyboards that I made last week that I like a lot though.

I was also playing around on Flickr today and found a really interesting imagery tool that finds photographs based on an image you draw.

Icon Design and a new blog

Currently I am working on improving my graphic design skills and understanding. I found this link on my Dig News feed and it has some really interesting points on icon design.

http://turbomilk.com/truestories/cookbook/criticism/10-mistakes-in-icon-design/

Also, I have begun a new blog using WordPress which I am hosting on my personal web server. Its focused on discussing the art of storytelling. I hope to be posting interviews, news, video, and links to other interesting articles and artists. Please come join the discussion.
Ailea Studio Storytelling Blog

Final Chase Storyboards

I added some more parts with the bears and tried to make the ending a little more tense.

Storyboarding

This semester is one of the greatest I've ever had. I really enjoy my classes and feel incredibly stimulated by my teachers and my peers. One of my classes this term is Storyboarding for Animation and Film. Its very fun and I love how encouraging my teacher is. I've really gotten a chance to experiment with Photoshop and my wacom tablet, learning how quickly I can draw to get my ideas across.
Here are my storyboard roughs for class this week.
The story is just a chase scene between a wolf and a fox.

page 1

page 2

I'm looking forward to finalizing them over the next week. If anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it.

Talks Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

A talk by Sir Ken Robinson on schools and the new direction public education needs to go is amazing. Robinson is a great speaker with just the right amount of wit. This talk was given in 2006 but I just found it and I think its amazing. One thing he said that really struck me as an artist was, "if your not prepared to be wrong you will never do anything original." This is very true, yet is something that public schooling trains out of us. Probably one of my most challenging daily trials is to push through my own fear of mistakes to create something new. What would the possibilities be if our schooling fostered creativity instead of squashing it. What sort of art would that new generation create? What kinds of new inventions?

Check out the video

My last blog post was about the new 3D gaming tools that are being created. That fascinated me, I would like to see more of these kind of innovations created in the future. I've especially been interested in the possibilities these kinds of technologies offer to comics. Would it be possible to create a 3D comic? Something that looked like an image on paper but as you moved around new objects or characters would be revealed. Could this be a new way to involve readers in a story?

I'm really truly excited for what is soon to come out in the world of video games. As a comic artist and illustrator I have dreams of someday doing some of the concept work for games like these. Imagine the possibilities.

Zefriel v. 1

So the fox comic is finished but I've decided to retouch it before I put it in my portfolio. I would also really like to continue Twin Cities Babylon sometime in the near future. I hope that I have time for it. In the mean time I'm playing with a new coloring style and working more in Corel Painter. Here is a partially finished painting based on a role playing character named Zefriel. He's a half dragon.