Gobble Gobble Gobble

Hanukkah Harry wishes everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

About two shepherds

So i've been... "working" on this comic for a bit.
I haven't done any layouts, but i've got some story points scribbled down in a little notebook and i've drawn some characters! Nominally, it's about two shepherds, but mostly it's about one of them.

I've been trying in vain to color this but alas, my coloring skills are rusty.


Those are both relatively old. I did them over summer when i was bored, then stopped working on them when i was lazy and uninspired. However, today i found myself both inspired and motivated (during a story meeting when i should have been paying closer attention!) and doodled me some doodles!
Here're my thoughts on the Other Shepherd. I like the idea that he has a mustache but no nose. It just kind of grows out of his eyebrows.

The two shepherds next to eachother, mostly for size comparison. The Other Shepherd will probably get a little bigger.

The Little Shepherd trying to keep some kind of monster from eating his sheep. Other Shepherd will have some kind of monstrous flock, but not like this guy. He looks identical to way too much like Kingdok from "Bone", and that just won't do.

I'm doing work at work, and I've got a freelance illustration job that's been riding my back since September, which all adds up to a very empty sketchbook and not much "me" art at all this past month.
So i said to myself,
"Lissa," i says, "you've gotta do some art for you or you're going to lose it"
To which i replied "okay".
Sketch and inks that i'll color at some point:

I tried to research motorcycles, i really did. I came out with kind of a mish-mash in the end, but i'll just throw caution to the wind and call it a "chopper", because that's what this drawing's all about :)

Figured it was time to update!
Some highlights pulled from my sketchbook


I'd gotten in an argument discussion with a friend of mine about evolution and i'd been looking at a lot of T.S. Sullivant and BOOM, this quagga happened.

Demond!

So, workin' at Disney!
Only two days in and mostly it's been a whirlwind of orientation and becoming acquainted with the production pipeline. Our schedule for the coming weeks looks exciting, though, and busy!

I'll probably have some more stuff to post a little later, but for now, this is a demon i drew. I wanted a nice, simple shape to get some watercolor exercise on. Scanned on the new scanner (early birthday gift from the parents... i'm 22 in 2 days!)
rar!

My post-college plans

I made this comic as part of a thank you card for graduation gifts. I was going through the stuff on my comuter that thought i'd post it here.
Thankfully i was fortunate enough to find a job with relative ease. Disney actually called me the day of my graduation :)

It doesn't grow on trees.

Jen's been playing Twilight princess lately, and i've been spectating.
I've never actually played a Zelda game before, but i've learned one thing watching Jen play: There's a lot of grass that keeps growing back, and sometimes it has money in it.


Sketchbook fun!
A rough pen sketch all dressed up in photoshop...

...and some cats & dogs. I saw some special about shepharding a while back. I'm thinking about drawing some sheepdogs.

Horse sense

I couldn't get to sleep the other night, and for some reason all i really wanted to do was draw horses.
I don't care who you are, horses are damned tricky to draw.
One of these things is not a horse.

catCHOO!

Disney apprenticeship starts in two weeks!
I got sick last week, so i'm glad i got that out of the way.

And just for kicks, some sketchbook stuff!


(that chicks left foot is totally broken. but that's what's cool about sketchbook doodles is they're allowed to have mistakes :) )

Update! Cat Update!

Well, it's been a dry summer, both in terms of moisture and art. My Disney 'apprenticeship' (now re-named "talent developement program") has been pushed back a third and hopefully final time to Sept. 4th, so i'm still waiting around.
Went to ComiCon and that was great! I finally bought a Claire Wendling book. I've been putting it off for fear that having a tome of that caliber of talent around would give me some sort of inferiority complex, but instead it's been quite inspiring. One thing that Wendling does really well is she can see the structure under what she's drawing and that really informs her designs and poses. Good gesture is important, but good structure is something that i've started to lose sight of. So i've been drawing my room mate's cats. They're pretty lazy around mid-day so they make decent targets.
(the scan is pretty bad, but then again my scanner is pretty bad, and since i don't have a job, well... at this point my birthday will come around before my first paycheck, so we'll see what happens.)


I'm also trying to come up with a decent idea for some comics. Comicon reminded me what i loved about the format in the first place. I used to make comics all the time because i didn't stop to think about whether my ideas were stupid or not. Now i come up with ideas and i don't do anything with them because they're all stupid and lack substance. I'm pretty sure doing nothing at all is worse than doing something that's stupid, so i'm trying to work something out :)

Specs!

Spent the weekend up in the Bay Area! Saw some good friends, ate some good food, had a good time. Didn't get a chance to swing by Pixar (well, we DROVE past it, but not the same thing). Maybe next time.

I got glasses! Now i can see EVERYTHING!

Flambillo!

Uh... flamboyant armadillo, i guess.
I was kinda out of the blog-o-sphere (a word i swore i'd NEVER say, but... there you have it) this last week and got a late start on this one. I tried to do a nice hand-on-hip pose, but it's kinda hard for 'dillos to realy stick their elbows out there.

Anyway, the little guys are fun to draw, so we'll see what the next week brings. Check out the links on Austin' CharDes post (the link, again) to other brave souls who take the challenge.

Telescopic Placebo pt. 1

Submitting this one early, because i have another one in the works that might come a little late. When you balance them out, they'll both arrive exactly on time ;)

This weeks CHARacter DESign Challenge came from Adrian and Emma, or so i am made to understand. The challenge, made seemingly from two words drawn randomly out of a hat, was Telescopic Placebo.
While i understand what each of those words mean individually, it took a little time to fathom what they might mean when taped together like this.
here it is.

An impatient haiku

O Katamari.
Sitting inside the office
Where i can't get you.





I ordered Katmari Damacy off Amazon.com last weekend. By the time it arrived yesterday the leasing office (where all packages are picked up) had closed. Now it is trapped there, with many other eagerly awaited parcels.

Got some pretty dumb stuff cookin' for this week's CharDes challenge. You stinkers hatched up a wierd one this week. May we all be equal to the burden.

[EDIT]
I have retrieved the package! Katamari Damacy has been received!

Char. Des. Challenge!

Old Mermaids ahoy!
First we have ancient mermaids(men).
There's nothing more ancient in the sea than whales. I figure that mermaids (or mermen in this case), when they get old enough, must turn into whales.


Then... OLD mermaids...
... who are always young at heart.


And finally... TOO old mermaids.

Just some doodles from sick-ville. You know, being sick when you're a kid is great because you can just sit around and watch t.v. (unless you had parents that were of the mind that if you're too sick to go to school then you're too sick to watch t.v. which makes absolutely NO sense). But when you're an adult and don't have cable it totally sucks. I've... been watching a lot of 'Buffy'.
On the other hand, it give me plenty of time to get ready for the CharDes challenge!


Picked up a copy of The Rabbi's Cat when i pre-ordered my copy of Harry Potter Book 7. I first saw this at a comic book store in Berkely last summer and wrestled with buying it for a while. A month or so ago a friend of mine left a copy of Vampire Loves in Jason's appartment and one by one we all read it and fell in love with it. Once i realized that The Rabbi's Cat was by the same guy i had to go out and get it. Joann Sfar is great, i reccomend anything he's done.

Went out to Nova Cafe and Molly Malone's with Kelly, Lars and Jojo the other night. Nova is pretty much the coolest place to eat anywhere. It's this little hole in the wall place right in the middle of the Jewish section of Fairfax, and inside it's decked out floor to ceiling in years worth of collected sci-fi decor. Good food, too. After that we went a couple miles down the street to Molly Malone's, the Irish pub where Flogging Molly first got their start as a bar band. It was fun atmosphere, and okay drinks, but the band playing was non-spectacular and after a while people watching got dull. The same people were standing in front of me, or people that LOOKED like the same people were standing in front of me, so i did a little doodling and after about an hour we left. It was fun, though. I kept hearing about that place and i'd always wanted to check it out.
Kelly's gotten wind of another pub a little closer (?) to us, so i think we're going to have to investigate at some point in the future. Bars seem to make for good gesture drawing, a little more so than coffee shops. In coffee shops you get people having conversations, which is good, but they're always sitting. In bars you get people sitting, standing and leaning, and it's also good for drawing groups of people. that's a thing i've never really thought much about before. In life drawing classes you usually get one person on their own, but not much opportunity to draw them physically interacting with another person.
In any case, my gesture drawing skills have gotten flabby, and it helps me stay in shape.
Similarly, my body has also gotten flabby. i need to get THAT into shape. I bought some bright blue exercise pants :)

She stole the fish.

Although one can only wonder why.








Went to an ASIFA screening of 'Paprika' last night. It's by the dude who did 'Tokyo Godfathers', which i've heard is very good and should see someday.
'Paprika' was pretty schitzoid, and a tad hard to follow, but a cool idea and a lot of fun. In some ways it's the kind of film idea i've always wanted to see realized, only it never made enough sense to i never made it. 'Paprika' never made enough sense, but hey, it got made and i enjoyed watching it :)
If nothing else it's theme song is positively captivating. I've been listening to it on a loop all day. I'd post a sample of it if i could... it's on itunes, go take a listen.

Well, this new blogger is completely retarded, but somehow i've managed to get through it all.

So! A few weeks ago i shuffled off the bonds of student-hood and traded them in for the bonds of real-life.
I graduated.
In a few months i'm going to start a six-month apprenticeship at Disney Feature in the story department, so i'm totally excited about that. (don't let the lack of exclaimation marks detract from the implied levels of excitement)

In the meantime i'm chillaxin' hardcore in dull, sunny Valencia and tryin' to draw whenever i can.
Here's some sketchbooky stuff (kinda old-ish stuff, from my senior portfolio, but it's not like i actually updated this blog at all this year, so... who's gonna know? *grin*)


















And a comission i did for my mom (two summers at pixar, four student films and a BFA, and my mom is STILL the only person who'll give me comissions). Happy early Dia de los Muertos, everybody!




More to come! i'm aiming for daily blog posts this summer. After so much downtime, if there's anyone stil checking this out, you've gotta hold me to it.

Until i finish my film this year, this is going to be more or less a film progress blog, because lord knows i can't really do much else these days!
Middle of February and i'm forgin' on ahead into backgrounds. Two weeks on backgrounds, I'll have about a month to make an animatic, scan, edit, and fully animate what i can, then two more weeks for sound.
HWOO!
Here are some designs for the gas station logo. Yeah flying fossil feuls!

And THESE are all the boards i've done on the the film so far.
They're all thumbnails, not necessarily in order and not all of them will be used. But there's a fat stack of these sitting in my cube, so i thought i'd spread 'em all out and take a look at 'em.



I'm pretty much freakin' out. Like if i had another semester to work on this i think i'd be able to get it done the way i'd like it. I'd like it to be in color, i'd like it to have totally badass lighting, i'd like it to be fully animated. I'd want it to have it's own original score, and i'd like time to really get the hang of doing some cool photo composites for my backgrounds.
I do not have time for any of these things :)
I will probably have to settle for some cool backgrounds and some alpha-channelled story-telling poses... at best.

*explodes.*

It's really, really tough to board a sequence of someone playing a musical instrument and still keep in interesting.
Unless that instrument is an air guitar. That's almost always interesting.

The A stands for "Ass"

Bank of America is pretty much terrible. I mean, they're fine as long as you never overdraft. Or need to talk to a real person over the phone... or the internet. Or have any sort of problem. As long as you are a person for whom problems never. EVER. occur, then you're fine.
I am not such a person. Long story short, BY NO FAULT OF MY OWN my checking statements were being sent to Pixar for the past six months .
So yeah, extra-embarassing. Plus some wierd restriction had been placed on my card seemingly for NO REASON AT ALL.
I went in to Bank of America to straighten the whole buisness out, ready to punch some heads in. The lady teller i talked to was very nice and solved all my problems and suffice it to say i'm not quite as upset as i was when i drew this.

I'm totally still switching to Washington Mutual, though.

It's been a while since i've taken a real vacation.
Unless you count the cruise i went on last summer. I was on a boat with my family for a week. They're good folks, don't get me wrong, but... a whole week. Trapped on a boat. Plus cruises wierd me out. The primary activity on cruises is eating. Their job is to make sure that not a moment goes by without food immediately on-hand.
There were days i'd forget to put the "do not disturb" sign out and the cleaning crew would wake me up at 9 in the morning to change my sheets. They weren't even dirty! I had just spent all night breaking them in.
*sigh*
Anyway, suffice it to say i didn't count that as a real vacation. I'm taking a real vacation this weekend. I'll post pictures if i get any good ones.

Have monsters!