Hello Friend. I'm Still Here: A Recap of the Past 3 Years

Hello friend. It's uh... been a while, I know. Just about 3 years in fact. Probably the most world altering 3 years in recent memory. Knowing what I know now, it's almost comical to look back at my last post and see how optimistic I was to be entering the 2020s. This decade certainly didn't start off how most people imagined that it would. I'm sure you're sick of talking about it so I don't need to provide a ton of commentary on current events. But I will say, like most people, the atmosphere around me has caused me to behave differently. It's like there's been a dark cloud surrounding everything, and with that looming in the air I haven't felt as motivated to share my art. I haven't been going out and doing things as often as before. I haven't been posting on social media much these days. Life has just been different.

But after 3 years, I think it's finally time to move past this. I'm not saying that "we're out of the woods" and everything is back to normal again or anything. But it's time to start looking forward to the future again. It's time to get back to improving myself. It's time for me to get back to doing the thing that I love - making art and sharing it with the world.

Maybe that was a bit overly dramatic, but the point is that I plan to post more regularly here again. Probably just my yearly recap posts, but who knows... maybe I'll go deeper into some of my processes like I've always wanted to as well. So that's this year's resolution. Nothing crazy, just: I am going to share my artwork again.

So let's kick things off with sharing some of the stuff that I've worked on during my absence. Even though I wasn't posting it on here, I've certainly still been creating art.

2020 - 2022 Art Summary

 

I continued my new love of traditional art. The first one that you see here is a piece showing off characters from the Sega Saturn game Soul Hackers. This one was mostly created using the new watercolor markers that I bought. They work a lot differently than regular watercolor paints do, and this was my first time using them so I hadn't quite gotten the hang of balancing some of the rich, saturated colors. I do like the way that I blended them with traditional watercolors to get the skintones though.

And speaking of traditional watercolors, that's how I created the second one. It's the character Abby from Great Pretender. I think it might be my favorite watercolor painting that I've done yet! I've gotten a lot better at blending colors, and I'm proud of the way I achieved the water droplets running down her skin. I've added a few more traditional art supplies to my arsenal (Posca markers, some skin tone markers/pencils, etc) so expect to see more pieces like this soon.

This is a random assortment of things, all pictures of The Nays. Doodles that I did as gifts, a scene from an Eventure that I wrote, and a continuation of The Worlds Portrait Project.

This is from December 2020. I drew portraits of my sister's main characters, the M Nays, and had them printed out on a physical canvas. I'm not sure if I have a photo of the actual canvas on hand, but once I get one I'll share that as well.

This one's still a work-in-progress, but I'm not sure when I'll ever get around to finishing it so I wanted to post it even if it was unfinished. It's a digital painting of Rosie Redknees managing her bar. I like that I managed to get lots of process shots of it. Hopefully I can finish it at some point.

An assortment of prompts about The Nays. We have Topaz drawn in Ghibli style, Chiz drawn in shoujo anime style, Kaenah, Yaro, and Elfno drawn mimicking some concept art from the Venture Bros art book, and a couple of characters from our old " Channel 6 TV shows" that we used to make with action figures.

These next 2 were part of a similar event where we tried to depict scenes from The Nays in the style of various classic video games. I've done a few of these in the past but these were done in more of a "speed" method where I tried not to take too long. It's Gojo in Suikoden 2 and Animale in Toe Jam & Earl.

One of my favorites of the bunch. For this activity, I drew each Nay in the style of a manga panel from current-ish Shonen Jump series. There are quite a few of these in the collage that I'm really happy with.

I normally don't share these much outside the family, but I did some pretty interesting stuff with a few of these so I thought I'd put a few together. For every major holiday (birthdays, Christmas, Mothers/Fathers Day), my sister and I make photo compilation videos for my parents. I usually put together some kind of interesting title sequence in Cinema 4D and After Effects, and these were a few of my favorites over the past few years. I'm especially happy with the last one. I tried to make it look similar to the 2D-HD style seen in Live A Live on the Switch (even parodied the logo for the ending sequence).

Animation Scenes

These are from an animation that I made for my sister called Ralphie and Ted's News. I recently learned how to use Adobe Character Animator for a project at work, so I decided to take those new skills and make a 2D rigged animation about a newscast set in The Worlds. The characters are lip synced and animated like puppets. I also made a short "commercial break" a hypothetical new video game with a parody DLC character pack. It was a fun little project to work on.

So one thing that happened during this time period was that Final Fantasy 7: Remake finally got released! I got really into that game for a while, so a gift that I made for my sister in 2020 was a parody animation of a few scenes from the original PS1 FF7, using our characters in their place. It's pretty goofy but I really enjoyed replicating the original PS1 style.

Global Game Jam

Lastly, we get to our entries to the Global Game Jam. I've participated in this event for the past 9 years and I intend to keep that streak up for 2023! This is one of the few things that I actually posted about on social media during the year, so I'm not going to devote too much time to it here. I'll just link to each of their project pages if you want to check them out.

2020: The Note Competition. This was a tower defense style game where you rapidly try to build up your base before your opponent. Game mechanic-wise, I think this is one of the more fun ones to play.

2021: Slumbered Apart. This is an adventure style game where you switch back and forth between two characters, Pam-chan and Gojo, to solve puzzles and progress through the story. I really like the look and feel of this one. It feels like one of our most complete games that we've worked on!

2022: Prisoners of Time Fabric. Probably our best GGJ project yet! It's based on an Eventure about alternate realities, which is represented by two parallel worlds - one modern and one in the style of an old Gameboy game. This game has a hunger system and crafting mechanics, so it's one of the more technically advanced projects that we've put together as well.

And on the topic of Prisoners of Time Fabric, this is a big project that I put together for my sister's birthday in 2022. It's probably the highlight of this whole blog post for me. So I built a diorama out of an old shoebox based on elements of the game/eventure. Megumi (the girl in front) is double sided so you can see her from multiple angles. As is Gregorn (the man in the suit). In the story, the timelines split based on whether he wears a green suit, or a brown suit, so I put him on a rotating chopstick so you can spin him around in both directions. On the right side, you can open the time traveling refrigerator to find Clove inside eating popcorn. Pressing the corner of the door will play a sound byte from Clove and then part of the music from the game. This is a recording that I did with a little microphone. On the left side of the diorama, there is another sound device, but this one is loaded up with an mp3 file. It plays music from Chrono Cross, which was a major inspirationn for all of these alternate reality ideas. This was a pretty involved project but I'm really happy with how it all came together.

And that's just about everything! Thank you so much for reading this novel of a blog post. The next one will definitely be less than 3 years from now, so it should be considerably shorter and easier to digest. I hope everyone has a wonderful and productive 2023. Until next time... Adios!

Welcome to the 2020s - A Look Back at 2019

Hi everyone, it's once again time for my annual New Year's post. We've officially entered a the 2020s and we don't even have flying cars yet! Not exactly how I pictured it back as a kid, but there are still plenty of cool things going on to be excited about. It's hard to re-examine the 2010s as a whole because there was just so much that happened during this decade. Crazy to think that in 2010 I was still an inexperienced college student who had barely even ventured far beyond the confines of Ohio. Since then I've started a career in 3D animation, attended tons of conferences around the country, traveled to many different cities to teach students, and even made my way to Japan. It's been a great 10 years and I'm even more excited about the next 10!

Focusing in on 2019 though, I had a few goals that I set for myself and I'm pretty happy with how much of those I accomplished. Let's take a look at the breakdown.

2019 Goals Review

Draw more personal illustrations
I didn't really do a great job at this one. I did some drawings throughout the year and even did a few traditional watercolor pieces, but I think the overall frequency was a bit less than some past years.

Continue studying Japanese
This one has been pretty successful. I have continued learning a lot of Japanese grammar and vocabulary and I've managed to brush up on it fairly frequently. I mainly use the app LingoDeer and to date I have completed 50 modules which consist of 137 lessons in total. I've still got a long way to go and probably couldn't even hold a conversation with a Japanese pre-schooler yet. But I'm steadily making progress. Onto kanji in 2020!

Take the stairs more often than the elevator
This goal has been a huge success! I originally wanted to take the 5 flights of stairs at work 3 days a week but instead I managed to take them nearly every day of the year! I took the stairs going down 100% of the time and of the 213 work days in 2019, I climbed them 197 of them, or 92% of the time (the original goal was 51%). That's only 16 days of using the elevator, and nearly half of them came in January when I was slightly less committed to the idea of just doing it every day. Honestly, at this point it has just become second nature to avoid the elevator. Aside from days where I'm sick or carrying something heavy, I plan to continue taking the stairs all through 2020 as well.

Vegetarian week
Another goal that I one-upped the original plan. Instead of spending a week as a vegetarian, I took it one step further and went full vegan. It was a fun challenge and I discovered a lot of tasty new recipes. I wrote up a post with lots of pictures over on my travel blog. I definitely want to do this one again in 2020 and I'm hoping to find some fun way to add another spin on it.

All in all, I'd say it was a very successful year. I might not have done anything extraordinary in terms of art skills, but I went above and beyond on some of the other life goals so I feel pretty accomplished overall. In addition to continuing on the stairs and vegetarian challenges from this past year, my biggest New Year's resolution for 2020 will be learning Kanji. I still have a few more modules to go in LingoDeer until I reach level 2, but as soon as I hit that level I plan to jump right into studying kanji characters. I'm also hoping to be better about getting a full night of rest. It's far too often that I go into work on only 5 or 6 hours of sleep and that will definitely catch up on me sooner or later. That's why in 2020 I want to get more sleep. Not setting any strict rules or tangible goals on this one, but it's a mantra that I will keep in mind throughout the year.

So... 2020 goals: Learn Kanji and Get More Sleep. I think that sounds pretty reasonable.

Before I wrap up this post, I want to share a few pieces of artwork I completed in 2019 (this is supposed to be an art blog after all!). Most of them were simple sketches or concept pieces for The Nays, but I also did 2 different watercolor pieces. Here are some of the various things that I worked on this year:

2019 Art Summary

Starting in January, I took part in my 6th Global Game Jam. My sister and I had one weekend to create a game centered around the theme "Home." Naturally we decided to base it on The Nays and we came up with a pretty cool little project. It's honestly probably our best one yet. Head on over to our itch.io page if you're interested in giving it a try.

These were some of the backgrounds that I drew for our GGJ game. Not bad considering I did a few of these after 36 hours of no sleep!

This was the second of my ink and watercolor drawings of the year (you can see the first in a previous post on this blog). I backed the fabulous crowdfunded project Indivisible and had a great time playing the game when it finally released a few months ago. This is my favorite character from the game, a small little botanist with his trusty living turnip buddy. It's got some really unique character designs!

I bought a brand new water color set for this project. It definitely has a lot more colors than my previous one so I didn't have to do as much color mixing. It's nice to step away from the computer and do some art on paper every now and then.

Just a quick little doodle. I re-read the Scott Pilgrim comics earlier this year and felt like replicating one of the covers with my characters Shaw and Megumi instead of Scott and Ramona. Nothing crazy but it's always fun emulating other unique art styles.

This is just a few random drawings that seemed too minor to get posted on their own. The three on the left are character concepts (One-Sixteenth the cyborg, Punchy and his new ninja outfit, and Copit the Zargo family limo driver). The next two are more major characters from The Nays, Summer and Chozu. That one was from an activity that involved drawing familiar characters in different outfits than they usually wear. These are the kind of things I had in mind when I wanted to do more personal drawings, so I definitely need to do more in 2020!

Shifting gears a bit, this is a 3D character from a game I worked on with the crew at Endless Terminal. This creepy looking creature is called a NasNas and it's one of the first enemies you see in the game. Planning this out for rigging and animation was certainly a challenge because it has such different anatomy from real-world animals. It is fully rigged and game ready though, so I stuck with it through the whole character pipeline.

Here's a quick turn-table of the NasNas from different angles. If you're curious about the game, be sure to check out Endless Terminal on social media. They're posting lots of progress shots and scheduled work streams, and the game should be pretty cool once it all comes together.

This was a short animation that I created for my sister's birthday called Chozu Versus Cimc. As you can likely infer from the "remastered" in the title, this is a remake of an animation I made a very long time ago. Like... "back when I still drew things with a mouse" long time ago. Thankfully I think this version looks quite a bit better than the original.

This was new to the remastered version. I created a simple 3D version of Chozu's house and rendered in C4D using the toon shader. Most of it has really simple geometry but creating it in 3D allowed me to do some fun camera rotations without having to draw so many background frames.

Speaking of animation remakes, this is a scene from my big project Nays 2018. One of my favorite animations that I've ever created was a 5+ minute one called Nays 2008 (which I ironically didn't actually finish until 2009, hence why I let the remake spill over into 2019 for the 10 year anniversary). I didn't have the time to fully remake every single scene shot-for-shot, but I gave the visuals a much improved overhaul.

I used tons more real world references and tried to make the backgrounds a lot more interesting than the original. I'm really happy with how some of these shots came out and I'm very excited to post some comparisons.

I want to go further in-depth with the comparison analysis though, so I'm going to save that for a full post of its own some time in the coming month. Ideally I'll edit a video cut so both animations can be watched side-by-side simultaneously. Overall, this animation was definitely the most elaborate project of the year for me, so I want to do it proper justice with a full blog post.

And with that, my 2019 review post comes to a close. I felt like I was kind of inactive art-wise, but when going through and gathering things for this post, it turns out I did a bit more than I realized. In a perfect world I would post these things more frequently throughout the year, but I've grown to like this year-long recap approach. Maybe 2020 will bring a few more posts on this blog than past years. Either way, thanks as always for reading this far and I hope you have a wonderful year/decade. Until next time... Adios!

2018 - The Year of Fullfilled Dreams

Hey everyone, Happy 2019! I know I'm a few days late, but I spent the last few days of 2018 out of town so I didn't get the chance to write this up before the end of the year. I always like doing a recap around this time of year though, so today I'm going to take a look back at my 30th year on this planet of ours.

2018 was an incredible year for me, probably one of the best ones ever. I did a lot of traveling and throughout the year I made my way to Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver, and Lexington KY. Most importantly though, I achieved my lifelong dream of visiting Japan! You may remember from last year that my big goal for 2018 was to start studying Japanese in hopes of making my way to the Land of the Rising Sun some time in the future. Back then I viewed it as a crazy pie-in-the-sky goal, but I turned that crazy possibility into a reality this past September with a 2-week adventure to Tokyo, Hakone, Osaka, and Kyoto. It was an amazing experience, and you can read all about it over on my new travel blog, Nimbus Travels.

Speaking of which, this past year I made a travel blog! (I know, I barely manage to post on this one. How am I going to update TWO blogs!?). I think that one will be a bit more casual than this blog, so it will mostly just be full of goofy photos from all of the places I visit. I definitely want to go on more crazy adventures in the near future with hopefully some more trips abroad, so keep an eye on the blog to follow along.

That said, it's time to evaluate my overall goal for 2018. While I originally hoped to learn enough Japanese to play Pokemon Green (a Japan-only Gameboy game), I don't think my reading skills are quite good enough for that yet. I did master the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets however, plus I actually bought a copy of Pokemon Green from a used game store in Japan. Couple that with my real world experience of practicing Japanese with locals and navigating the largest public transit system in the world... I think I more than met my expectations.

For 2019, my goals are a little bit less tangible. Mostly just little personal guidelines to keep in mind throughout the year.

Draw more personal illustrations - This seems to be a goal every year. But as someone who does art professionally 40 hours a week, it's important to remember to draw for myself as well. Hopefully 2019 is full of lots of drawings and animations of The Nays!

Continue studying Japanese - Even if I learn this at a slow pace, I really want to keep up my Japanese studies. Hopefully I learn more useful phrases this year, and maybe even move onto the dreaded Kanji at some point.

Take the stairs more often than the elevator - I work on the 5th floor of an office building. I usually try to take the stairs one day a week but I want to bump that number up to 3 days a week this year.

Vegetarian week - For one full week in 2018, I followed a strict vegetarian diet. It was a fun challenge and helped me discover some new healthy foods that I enjoy, so I'd like to try that again in 2019.

And there we go. Should hopefully be pretty realistic new year resolutions. Before I wrap it up, I want to leave you with a handful of drawings I did in 2018. Not a ton of fully detailed, "finished" pieces but I did come up with a bunch of character designs and other related concept work for The Nays. If you're interested in reading more about this ongoing story that my sister and I have been working on, check out our website.

This past year, one of my favorite Twitch streamers (Kyle Bosman) played a weird old Gameboy game called  For the Frog the Bell Tolls. He encourages viewers to send in fan art each week, so I made this little animated gif.

Inspired by a scene from DBZ World's Strongest. I always thought that movie had a weird art style so I animated my character Coyote making strange faces while getting zapped (a scene from the Aiml World Eventure).

Speaking of unique art styles, this is Gojo in the style of one of my other favorite anime films, Tekkonkinkreet.

Just a few concepts trying to figure out what Malik looks like. He's the creator of The Worlds and is pretty much the most powerful character in The Nays.

This is a locale from a new place that The Nays went to called Psyciao World. Everyone in this place is obsessed with taking spoon baths because they grant you mystical powers.

A scene from a recent eventure I just finished, the Ziroma Eventure. As The Nays go on their first big mission, they discover a giant mech emerging from the forest beside the Party TV broadcast station.

Concept design for a character that helps The Nays out on their mission during the Ziroma Eventure. She actually appears much later in the story as well, but I went back and did this earlier introduction story for her.

These are characters from an Eventure that's still in progress. I don't want to go into too much detail yet, but I liked their designs a lot so I wanted to include them in the post anyways.

Just a random activity with my characters wearing the outfits of different characters. (We called the event the "Clothes Chamber of Secrets"). Aquina dressed as Ralphie, Summer dressed as Scott, Gojo dressed as Spicco. I also tried to color them in a style reminiscent of colored pencils.

Speaking of colored pencils, I decided to make my sister's birthday present entirely in that style. I made an animation about the aforementioned Psyciao Spoon Bath Eventure, all in the style of a colored pencil story book. It was a pretty fun project.

Another shot from the Spoon Bath project. This is Urom celebrating her victory in the contest.

Another fun project that my sister and I did was re-creating scenes from Eventures in the style of old video games. If you couldn't tell, this is in the style of the original Legend of Zelda, depicting Iggy in his first visit to The Worlds.

Yet another weird drawing activity we came up with. For this one, we watched a random episode of a new anime we had never watched and tried to draw a Nay in the style of the animation. It was a fast, messy project as the goal was to finish the drawing throughout the course of a single episode.

I can't even remember the names of the shows that I watched, but this one was about a military and had a pretty neat art style. We also plucked quotes from the episodes so we tried to tie that into the fake screenshot as well.

Over the summer, I got really into Octopath Traveler for the Switch. Alfyn was one of my favorite characters, so I decided to do this quick doodle on my Cintiq during a lunch break.

Last but not least, this was my Christmas present for my sister this year. We both played a lot of Persona 2 this year so I thought it would be fun to make an animation in the style of the game.

I based the story of the animation on the Dusty Dimes vs Bleeding Libras Eventure where Yaro faces off against Lonny's gang.

I tried to make the style as close to the game as possible, using very similar sprite poses and UI elements.

At the end it is revealed that Topaz was the one playing this game on his PSP. It was fun contrasting between different styles.

And that's about it when it comes to 2018's 2D drawings! As always, thanks for reading my crazy ramblings. I hope you have a great 2019 full of completed goals and fulfilled dreams. Until next time... Adios!