Improve your use of Value

James Gurney has a great post on his blog about using value.  I have to try this out.  Seems like a great exercise.

Cure for Middle Value Mumbling

Drawing Dragons!

ROAR!!!  ROAR!!!

Last night my almost 3 year old son and I had a sketch night.  We broke out the crayons and watercolors and scribbled some dragons.  I had so much fun drawing with crayon!  Then I went over it with this cool brush tipped pen I bought.  I also made a few line drawings for my son to color in with his watercolors.  The mouth is red because that's where the fire comes out!  ROAR!!!

We decided that we'll start a field guide to the local dragons.  Like the ones we find in the garden and such.

A going away gift.

My friends Aisleen and Chris are moving to San Francisco.  It's really cool and exciting but at the same time it's sad to see them go.  They are both amazingly talented artists and I'm sure they're going to be really successful out there.  And they get all that nice weather!  So I painted a watercolor piece for them in the spirit of San Francisco.  Maybe when they look at it they'll remember good times on the East coast.  Good luck guys!

Distinguished Lecture :)

My friend Ric Giantisco invited me to give a talk at Mercer County Community College as a part of their Distinguished Lecture Series.  He's the Head of their game design department and an awesome animator.  The speech went really well.  It was a powerpoint (It was all pics with only 3 bullet points at the end) that went through my entire career, showing different work I had done and discussing the process of designing and creating art assets.  It was scheduled for one hour but I ended up staying for two hours answering questions. The students were really enthusiastic.  I hope to go back again and talk with them some more.  I just love giving those kinds of talks and interacting with students.

oil painting of raydeen

Collage of some of the companies I worked for.

mini-golf level for a Wii game

More luck dragon work.

I spent a little more time on this.  I added some little dragons and started throwing some color around.  The boy on the dragon is having the BEST time ever :)

If I had a luck dragon...

I always liked the Never Ending Story but if I had to design my own luck dragon it'd look like this.  I was thinking about how neat it'd be to have your own dragon, and a suit of armor, and be a kid, so I just did this sketch tonight.  I think I'm going to keep working this image up and maybe build it into a story?  He should have a little sister who rides a griffin :)

Samurai Jack Background Painting

Really cool demos of background painting for samurai jack.

http://www.youtube.com/user/renwaldo5#p/a/u/1/o-eS_xZbgtc