I think until school is over, I may just be posting a few art pieces here and there. I really haven't had much to write about since the reviews ended back in February, and school is continuing to bog me down with a lot of work, pushing all of our noses into the grindstone until they bleed. Oh well. Just two more weeks!

So, today I present something I did back in my freshman year.


When enrolled in a figure drawing class, you should expect to draw perhaps hundreds of basic human figure poses -- and equally expect your big projects to be drawings of human figures. There were many times during this particular class in which we were encouraged to do portraits, whether of yourself or other people. The idea was to help us understand human anatomy.

This was the result of numerous portrait exercises. After drawing ourselves, we were also tasked with including images of things that reflected our interests and personality. The drawing shows me holding my guitar. Back then I was much more interested in learning guitar (I REALLY need to get back into it). The sort of cloudy atmosphere surrounding my head was meant to imply the fact that my head is generally in the clouds. All my life I've been the type of person who tends to get lost in his own world.

The other images simply represent my liking of reading, writing, music, and art in general. Simple, really, but it met the requirements.

Wow, I haven't made one of these posts in nearly three months. I hadn't realized it was so long. Well, a large part of the reason for this is because I'm currently in the process of putting together some pieces for my animation portfolio. As I looked back through some of my more recent work, I came across one in particular I was really happy with.


I've been a longtime fan of hand-drawn 2D animation. For most of my life I had a certain dislike toward 3D work. That was, until some of the early films of the last decade changed my mind. Besides, 3D is slowly becoming the standard for animated films these days, so I suppose I should get with the program.

Autodesk Maya is a highly sophisticated CG Modeling, Texturing, and Rendering program that's worked its way into many of the major studios. Some of the animation you see in these more recent films -- Avatar, Tangled, and TRON, to name a few -- is the result of beautiful rendering thanks to talented animators and modelers using this program.

The above is no where close to what Maya is fully capable of doing. However, I love the result here, just on my personal level of skill. I'm relatively new to Maya and the 3D animation world -- despite my love of computers. Ironic, yes? The truly amazing thing about this program is the amount of objects you can create with only a few techniques. The apples and pear were created with a curvilinear tool, while the bananas and oranges were created with spheres. And even the texturing applications are truly outstanding. While I feel I could have done a better job at creating the texture of an orange, I'm pleased with this current result.

As of this past Monday, I'm officially in my last semester at college. I've taken on 18 units (translate: 6 classes, for those of you who don't know what I mean), four of which are three hour long Art classes, one English class, and the last is a Computer Technologies course. And as of yesterday, the first week is over. Only fifteen more to go.

The English and Computer courses are lower division, which I chose in order to help balance out the workload that I'll no doubt be receiving from my Art classes. One of these courses is called Senior Projects -- a class where you learn the business side of the major you've chosen, and how to market yourself in that career. As I've never been the type of person who's confident in his abilities or outgoing enough to seek out people, this class is scaring me at the moment. It doesn't help that I've also got a ton of homework to do over the weekend.

So why am I posting a blog instead of working? Don't worry, I'll get to it as soon as I'm done.

I just wanted to post my thoughts about what this means for me. The truth is that I'm scared. I don't think I know of too many people who aren't, when this time finally rolls by. After several years of work, some of it involving the constant changing of majors, you're truly not prepared for what's out there. I guess that this reality finally hit me, because it's my last semester and I'm just as clueless as the next person where I'm headed and what my life will have in store for me. I've got some short term goals: move out, work hard in what field I can afford, practice and get better at my skills. The long term goals... well, I'm still working on those.

But, in spite of that, I'm choosing to continue to do what I've always tried to do: take each day a step at a time. I'm not expecting to land an awesome job right after I graduate (and I've always hated that some of my classmates DO expect that), but I do hope that once this is all over I'll have time to take a breather and relax. I might take a whole year off and just work, and might go on the grad school. I'll use the time to hone my skills day after day, so that I can benefit myself and any future family I might have.

In the meantime, it's time for one final stretch of working hard, so that all this work will pay off. So, I say to all of those out there, in college or not, who are making such big decisions and changes in their lives: Good luck!

And I end this with a quote from one of my favorite t.v. series of all time:

As if I haven't shown this enough already, Coheed and Cambria have been a big part of my life in the last half decade. From music to books to comics and to art, Claudio Sanchez's story has influenced me and inspired me in many ways.

Since I've been working on the song reviews for No World for Tomorrow, I felt it would be appropriate to show another drawing I did several years ago.

With the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 two weeks ago, I've been in a bit of a Potter mood for a while now. When I attended the midnight premier I brought with me my own hand-crafted wand. Today, I'd like to share it with you.

You may want to click on the image to get a better view of it, but this entire drawing was done in hatching and cross hatching. That is, every line, every form, every shade, and every mark on this piece of paper was done with short strokes of lines. The point of this piece, an extra credit project, was to demonstrate that I could give form and volume to a 2-dimensional space through hatching principles and ONLY though hatching, rather than using contour shapes and lines to create the image.

The subject was a corner of my living room as it looked back then (the giant hutch still remains, but the darker hutch next to it has since been removed). Much of the shading is off and incorrect, and as my professor pointed out there is not enough contrast. However, for a simple extra credit project, I'm most proud of how the forms came out. For me, the result looks very much 3-dimensional.

After finishing up the first set of song reviews last night, I remembered a drawing I worked on a few years ago that was based on The Second Stage Turbine Blade album cover.

I'm not sure if I'll get to a song review today since this is my second post of the day thus far. Instead, I wanted to do something a little different.

I've mentioned how I'd post some artwork here and there, and I decided today's the day to kick that off. Without further ado, I present my first art piece.