The G

My pal Mario and I had a rather unusual caricature battle where the assailant, instead of humiliating the victim with caricatures, plagued them with self-caricatures pasted over the victim's desk area... good job if you were able to make sense of that, where the logic in that resides, I don't know. Anyway, the point is, here's a self-caricature of yours truly, enjoy!

Ballet

This is a layout/animation/compositing assignement. I'm currently working on the animation, but here's a shot of what the finished thing should look like. Dancers are fun to animate!

An update of sorts

Well I felt like updating my blog tonight, but didn't really have anything to scan (it's all at my desk at school, yeah...) , so I decided to just fool around for a couple minutes in photoshop and post whatever came out. Here it is, call it Simplistic Naive Charm if you will.

Mario

Here's a caricature of my good friend Mario, I was trying to get back at him for all the unflattering renditions of me that he's done over our years here at Sheridan. After some consideration, I think I still have a long way to go before I reach his level of grotesqueness in my own caricatures. Ahh Mario, you're an inspiration.

Francine

Yohoho! Group film projects are now well underway here at Sheridan, and I must say my team kicks ass! We're getting pretty close to reaching a final story script and direction, and a project blog should be set up shortly. In the mean time, here are some story sketches I did last week as part of uh, pre-pre-production? We decided yesterday to go with a pretty different direction (not everyone likes bright bubbly stuff the way I do, hahaha), so I'm posting them up here. Sorry Francine, that's as far as your existence is going. It was good while it lasted.




Stay tuned for more stuff!

Cafe drawings and doodles

Hey! It's been a while since my last update, I've mostly been doodling random "unworthy of my blog" stuff lately (that's all quite relative), so uh, that's an excuse right there! I finally ended up deciding that posting doodles was probably better than posting nothing at all, so there ya go, doodles!

Some sharpy caricatures done at the local mall, I slapped on some colors in photoshop while I was at it.

Random characters (and a pair of misconstructed legs?) doodled in my litterature class this morning. It's a good enough class, plus the teacher gives us a lot of time for in class exercises, so that's fun!

That girl is apparently faking surprise.

I don't know what my big problem is, come to think of it I've been posting "doodles" since the very start of this blog. Ahh the absurd complexities of my mind. Anyway, stay happy, until next time!

My website is revamped!

Hello all! I just revamped and majorly updated my website, go check it out! It's at http://rydia.net/clairvoyance . Enjoy!

Pierre Lapointe

It's been a while since I last made a more finished, polished drawing, it feels good! I heard some new music upon coming back to Montreal, some of which was terrific! There's this young signer-song writer-composer over here who's pretty popular these days called Pierre Lapointe, he's great! One of his newer songs, called "Deux par deux rassemblés" (Two by Two Brought Together) really gave me a kick, I loved it the first time I heard it. And then I saw the music video, it was INSANE. So crazy and fun and unexpected, and the style of it really resonated with me.

Anyway, this really inspired me, so here's the result!


If you wanna see the video it's at http://www.audiogram.com/nouvelles/20060621/ . Enjoy!

Various stuff

Hello hello! I'm back home safe in Montreal, now there are only 3 weeks left 'till the beginning of school. What a summer! I had a blast in San Jose at Gaia, the San Fransisco Bay area is definately a cool place to live in... at least judging from the 2 months I spent there. Anyway, here are some sketches!

Some portrait of a made up 80's rocker type chick. I was kinda thinking about Chrissie Hynde and Joan Jet there, although what I came up with kinda lacks the attitude. I still like it alright.

Some sketches for a short scenario I'm developping, it's nothing epic but I'm having fun with it.

Drawing people at the San Fransisco Airport.

And finally a fashionable chick taking a stroll. Listening to KT Tunstall's "Suddenly I See" song makes me think of pretty girls happily strutting down the city streets, it's a good song!

Little Miss Sunshine

Woah, I don't usually advertise stuff on this blog, but here's something worth mentionning: Little Miss Sunshine. I went to see it with some friends yesterday in Emeryville, and I gotta say I haven't enjoyed a movie that much in a long time. The story and characters are just so amazingly well written and developped, the cast is amazing, the movie just sucks you in from the very first minute. The whole thing is so well paced with a good balance of comedy and drama, every main character (or almost) have their own story/subplot that ties in perfectly with the main plot. It's just such a satisfying, moving movie. I'll leave it to that, now go see it!

Face doodles

Just a quick update before I get back to Montreal, enjoy!

Dragons!

Those were really fun to draw! :D

Monsters!

I've been doing concept art for a game at work lately, drawing monsters, characters and environments. It rocks!!! The team is great and the project pretty fun, good times. Here are some monsters, it's all development stuff so... I'm guessing it's ok to post 'em up here. Besides, the number of visitors this blog gets is probably below the 2 digits, so yeah, no big deal. Enjoy!

Some Lifedrawing

I thought I should post some of my lifedrawings, those are from my 2nd year final portfolio. In order, a 5 min, 10 min, 2 min and 10 min. Enjoy!

Coloring discoveries

Ok so this won't look like a big deal or anything, but boy oh boy I've just found a way to color animation drawings in photoshop which is like, too easy to be true. It took me like, a minute to color the drawing below, from it's unaltered scanned state. And if I make actions for the process, it could take like, 30 seconds. Given, it's a pretty simple coloring "style" (if you can call it a style), but it's just what's needed for animation. I also think I've figured out how to shade animation in flash, but that's fancies. But yeah, that means coloring the animation for my film next year will be a breeze... after cleaning it up nicely, that is, which will probably be more of a time consuming process. Well, at least that's one thing I don't have to worry about.


Poor guy... I kinda robbed him of his dignity.

Giants and doodles

Ok! Here are the very first concept sketches for a short film idea I'm currently developping. It's about an insomniac Giant who got a little stupid on a sleepless night, and now he's gotta fix his mess. The whole screenplay is pretty much all fleshed out on the first draft level by now, but I won't reveal too much of it yet. But oh, it'll be fun, it's got all the works and stuff: drama, action, sci-fi, comedy, religious taboo (all in good doses of course). Well, I'll stop hyping it up now because that's always a double-edged sword, enjoy!Notice how the background is just totally slapped on on this one. But it gives information!


That last page of doodles isn't concept art, of course. I just thought it was a fun page :D

Woooh color!

I'm thinking I should do drawings with some actual context and/or story behind them instead of just random characters all the time, because yeah characters are fun, but I'm realizing I'm missing out on a lot of other fun by not delving into that. It's just a bit daunting since I'm not that familiar with that kind of stuff. But anyway, enough talk, here's a starter, it's simple but I kinda like it. Markers and colored pencils.




That last one was done with a really, really dried out brush marker, but wow those things are awesome for doing subtle shading. Fun stuff.

Some sketches

That guy in the second pic is dedicated to the angry person inside all of us. Well, at least inside me. He doesn't take too much place but he deserves some attention every once in a while, so there.

Centaurs and other weirdos

Yay for markers! I was looking at Stephen Silver's artbook , which I think influenced the look of that centaur dude. He's such an awesome artist! Those horse bodies here were totally bullshited, I need to brush up on anatomy... but somehow they still look kinda plausible to me, hmm. Let me know if I'm wrong.

Russian adventures!

Or something like that. Been listening to Russian folk music and it gave me ideas, nothing too elaborate (or even remotely Russian related actually...) but fun! Hey!

Some of the aforementioned anime-art

That second one isn't really anime-style per say... depending on your point of view I guess. It's used as a new header image on a website I work for. The website has a strong anime-oriented userbase, and boy they really didn't respond well to the image on the site's forums! "Weird happy beach bums" "pseudo anime style" "Disney style" are among the terms that were used, in a negative sense. Frankly I don't really care about all that, I'm fairly glad with how the pic came out, but as a professional work it got me thinking "maybe I didn't evaluate my audience adequatly". Anyway, it got OK'ed from my superiors, so I guess it fit what they wanted.

Btw, the awesome inking on that one was done by my friend and coworker Kidkoum/Saka in Painter 7, he's frikkin awesome, go check him out!

It's been a while!

So yeah, I'm back from California, the trip was great! Here's some sketches from the past weeks :D






That last one has major drawing issues, watch how I try to hide this by adding artsy coloring! :D

When I was in California for the past 3 weeks (well, I've been back for a week now), I was hanging out a lot with some friends who are truly amazing artists, Jeannie and Kid. They're among the artists I used to idolize when I first started out as a manga/anime fanartist online, back in the days. Anyway, this kind of got me back into drawing anime style, because it's so pretty and stuff, but then it got me wondering, what style do I want to draw in? I've been trying to draw more "European style" (whatever that might be) for a while, but now I get back to Anime and it's all delicate and sexy, and I really enjoy it, but it's really lacking the dynamic and fun qualities that the other style has. So yeah, here I am being a classic young artist going "Waaaaaah, what's my style, where do I fit in, insecurity, existancial questions, Waaaaah" and then I think "shut up existancial artist, who cares what 'style' you draw in, stop thinking about that crap and just draw, for Pete's sake". And I go "ok"

And now my Brain goes "Ooh look at you, you're writing all weird on your blog, ladida mister artist" and then I go "No, I'm just writing stuff for fun, I'm trying to be looser in my thinking and expression", and then Brain goes "Nan Han, you just wanna look all free-spirited and artsy" and I'm like "Gosh, aren't we over-analyzing here just a bit?" and then Brain goes "Hmm, maybe we are". I worry a lot about what people might think of me, weither it's about my art, my writing, or just my plain being, and it's really dumb.

If you can make sense of this above, good job! I just felt like letting some thoughts out, I guess this is part of what blogs are for.

Caricatures and lifedrawing

I'm leaving for California and will only come back in 2 weeks, so I thought I'd post some stuff before I leave. I've been delving into caricature a bit more lately, those weirdos up there are some friends from Montreal, I hope they don't find this out! The last one is a 10 minute pose I drew yesterday at a session in downtown Montreal, I'm a bit rusty but it's still good fun. Later!