Composition Breakdowns

In a recent class I took at the Animation Collaborative with the inspiring and seriously talented Armand Baltazar, we had an assignment to break down the compositions of narrative illustrations from visual development artists. 

We had to 

1. write one sentence describing the story of the piece, 

2. describe the point of view (POV) of the piece, and 

3. describe the emotion intended by the piece. 

After that, we drew over the composition breaking down these elements:

 4. the division of the graphic plane (the graphic shapes that make up the composition),

5. Redline the division of depth and mark the foreground, middle ground, and far background,

6. Mark the center of interest,

7. Redline where the eye moves across the piece.

This was an excellent exercise in understanding the architecture of a picture and the thought that goes into guiding the viewers' eye directly to the center of interest. I highly recommend analyzing compositions in this manner for anything from drawings, paintings, and even sculptures to increase your own narrative compositional chops.  

Although the exercise appears simple, I learned a great deal by analyzing each piece. There were some pieces that I haven't posted which failed compositionally; the artist meant the eye to go to one place but unfortunately the eye focused elsewhere. 

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In other news, I am still working on painting illustrations, about 20 in all, from three personal projects that I am really excited about. My paintings and development pieces have been on pause since January because I am designing on an exciting unannounced project at Ghostbot. 

In the mean time, I've been doing some digital speed paintings which are akin to exercising. I usually dedicate about 3 hours a week to either digital speed painting or alla prima plein air sketches done traditionally, either Friday morning or Saturday morning, and then spend maybe about an hour for editing video and posting. Starting in two weeks, I'll begin posting my efforts once a week on Mondays here and on my youtube and vimeo channels.

Please stay tuned!

Hello 2015

Instead of coming up with New Year's resolutions for 2015, I've been compelled to think about 2014, and all the years that came before it. 2014 was my 20th year as a working professional artist in art departments of all kinds, from commercial animation, game art, short films, print and packaging illustration, gallery shows, auctions and finally, in the last few years, as Art Director. The ups and downs of being an artist are, well, pretty extreme, but thankfully over the years my experiences have taught me to try to keep a lid on the drama in the most disruptive/stressful times and try to be the best problem solver I can be. Curiously, in more recent years, I've had the experience of non-art departments questioning the value in having any quality art at all - a strange thing for a life-long artist to defend and justify my own existence when obviously visual communication is more important than ever in this globally interconnected age. 

In my personal work and on-going portfolio refinement, I've tried as best I can to challenge myself, usually by taking course work with various artists outside of my usual day to day work as a designer. I like to expose myself to ways of art-making that are different than the ones I was brought up on and I especially enjoy research of traditional methods of the past that have been handed down (or not) to our present age. I honestly find any hand made and traditional art utterly more satisfying than digital art, and at the same time I enjoy the challenges of creating images digitally that deliver on the expectation the audience requires. I also enjoy the profound way that artists are interacting with the culture at large today, which is different than it was in the past, mainly through film and games as well as other interesting points of distribution via smart phones and devices. At no other time in history has art been so accessible.

Surprisingly, I have found that even with the rise of the atelier classic education, storytelling and narrative visual design has been strongly neglected - again, strange, given that we are in an age of storytelling unlike any other. I feel as though I've focused enough for now on traditional methods and now I'd like to expand in other important directions. I have been actively seeking out narrative based artist-teachers like the fabulous James Gurney and teachers (and working artist) Armand Baltazar, and other amazing visual development artists who teach at the Animation Collaborative, the Pixar founded film design school in Emeryville, where I currently take classes while on my extended sabbatical.

This is a great time for me as I've not had a break from working since I was about 16, my very first job being as a cashier at McDonald's just outside West Point Military Academy where my father taught and where we lived. I've been working hard ever since, all throughout art school and after, often accepting freelance work while working full time and trying to fit painting time in at the Palette and Chisel in between. All the while, it seems that I neglected, usually by life circumstance (translation = very little money to survive), to develop my own voice in my art, since most often I've focused on "how to" rather than grander concepts. Being completely independent since I was about 20-21, I feel like I've been in a constant panic to pay the rent and bills, and that has led over time to some neglect of my personal artistic development. I suspect this is a very, very common problem amongst those of us who aspire to become artists in the first place and then gamble on making a living as such.

So I've decided: 2015 is going to be a pivotal year for me. Currently my days are packed to the brim working on some new projects that I am excited about sharing over the coming year as they gain legs and come to life. I have a couple of projects for clients I am busy with and a few stories that I've written which I am busy designing art for in order to expand my visual development skills and deepen my storytelling/narrative painting chops. 

I am excited to share my endeavors throughout 2015 on this blog. I hope that your artistic journeys are also bringing new avenues of development, challenge, and most of all - joy.

Happy 2015! Let's demand it's a good one.

Julia

"The Toad"

I've been taking part two of Armand Baltazar's visual development course at the Animation Collaborative in Emeryville, across the street from Pixar. 

It's been an excellent course for stretching basic visual development skills; it is restricted to sketching in black and white with many exercises designed to challenge design skills. I feel so fortunate to be taking this class with Armand. His teaching and feedback demos are nothing short of fantastic. Watching his draw overs of both my homework and other student's work has been a profound learning experience I will carry with me for a long time on the road to becoming a better designer and storyteller. 

Here are a couple of finished pieces from an assignment. I wanted to explore the "Toad" character to show who he is publicly and semi-privately. I wanted to bring the main image, "The Act" into full color in order to show the glory of his celebrity in the fairy forest world. :)

"The Act"

"Flirty Toad"

 "Fan Mail"

"Promo Shot", Toad's celebrity promo shot in the fairy forest world.

 I have a couple more sketches that expand the portrait of who the Toad is and will update this post when I complete those. I'm tempted to paint all of these in full color - and I may do that after CTN when I have a little more time. A short story is brewing in my head about this guy and his band of fairy-circus performers.

At the end of the course I'll post a bunch of the sketches from class too. So much fun stuff to inspire me working on illustrations for awhile! :))

Thanks for reading!

THE TIME MACHINE: Visual Development with Armand Baltazar/Animation Collaborative

I recently took a visual development course at the Animation Collaborative, taught by senior visual development artist Armand Baltazar, who has worked for many years in animated film, with credits on Dreamworks, "Shark Tale", "Spirit", and "A Bee Movie", as well as Disney's "Princess and the Frog", and more recently Pixar's "Cars 2", among many others. Of all the classes I've taken in recent years, I found this course to be perhaps the most exciting. I've always been deeply interested in visual storytelling, although I've not always had ideal opportunities to practice that very fine art to the fullest I've wanted. So when Armand's course came up on the roster and time in my schedule allowed, I jumped.

Aside from my own interests,  I feel a good visual development class is an excellent experience for any artist at any level to go through. So many of us have grand ideas around stories, world building and stylization, but how many of us have really gone deep into our visual storytelling skills? If you've not had the opportunity to take such a class, I encourage you to find one or else pick up a few good "art of" books for film, games, and television.

 Regarding this specific class at the Animation Collaborative, I felt it was absolutely worth it. Armand was a fantastic teacher and really put in a lot of extra work and effort in teaching the class, even staying late to give back really valuable individual feedback, paint overs and advice tailored to each student. Each class was chock full of fantastic information about visual development, portfolio development, and tips and techniques for working quickly, as is required on any project in development.

For the class we each picked a classic book to visualize as an animated film. I picked HG Wells', "The Time Machine", a book that I illustrated years ago, but unfortunately didn't do a very good job of it due to the extremely rushed deadline. For years now I've wanted to revisit the story, and have imagined a reboot tailored toward an animated young adult film. I thought I'd share my character design concepts here, and later will share more development. Over the course of the next year I'll be working up ideas around this story and will share more as I solidify ideas.

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My Time Traveler in my reboot of "The Time Machine" is a young woman in present day. When I draw character sketches, I like to keep a very, very simple line with almost no detail. I like to save any modeling or texturing for painting. I really enjoy the challenge of trying to capture a gesture in as few lines as possible.

I envision the Time Machine device to be wearable tech made up of everyday things like hacked ipads, iphones and a laser tag vest. Like in the original book, the time machine does not move the individual through space, but only through time.

Imagine what happens to those digits after thousands and thousands of years of swiping/touch technology… I enjoyed working on my take on the ELOI quite a lot. I envisioned them growing tall and thin with elaborate hairstyles and lots of adornments. 

 The Morlocks live in underground caves where they have evolved eyes that allow them to see in the complete darkness. They live amongst the ruins, pollution and grim of thousands of years of human corruption.

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Below are some quick color comps and sketches of what I have been developing around story moment ideas. Most of these are pretty quick, like 2 hours each or even less in the case of sketches. All of these are meant to be exploratory in nature, and will eventually become more finished paintings. I can't wait to work on these!

 I've long been a fan of Douglas Trumbull, well known in the film industry for his innovative special effects on movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I wanted to emulate his effects in some way, and have envisioned the bottom row of images to be my take on time travel effects.

 This is my quickie version of a future city, although I have plans to iterate on this a bit more. Given that our class was only 12 weeks and I only had the weekends to work on it, I felt that I didn't have enough time to really dig through this juicy subject. Looking forward to exploring some more concepts!

Hey, who doesn't need a hot Eloi boyfriend in the future? Actually, this is one aspect of the story that I am quite excited about: the friendship between The Time Traveler and Weena, in my version female (time traveler) and male (eloi). I think this can be resonate with the story themes in some unusual ways - I'm so excited to work some more on these ideas.

I actually have a number of additional sketches and comps, but they are still a little too compy to share. Hopefully soon! 

As I continue to develop my ideas I will post. I hope to put a little book together by sometime next summer, if all goes well. 

Thanks for reading!!!