Another Present

Here's another portrait for a friend's birthday:

Although she's actually getting it long after her birthday, sadly.  Why did she have to be born on what would become my Finals Week over two decades later?!

Anyhow, wish I could've gotten it to her on time.  She's totally rad and gives me awesome haircuts.

Here's the final from my Digital Illustration class.

http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/c34256114e4977980264125787d27b13

Right now it's sitting on Newgrounds because I haven't found the best way to host it directly on this site.  Try clicking around on stuff.

The assignment was to create an illustration of an environment in Adobe Illustrator, then animate it in Flash.  I wish I'd had more time to work on the illustration; I'll probably get around to finishing it up at some point.  Flash is a pretty great program, much easier to use than I thought it'd be.  It can still be incredibly frustrating, though, especially when you start throwing in programming.

I learned a ton during the course of this assignment, but sadly, it can be hard to go back and fix areas you've already done without breaking the entire piece.  I now know why the cherry blossoms can cause huge lag, but am a bit leery of going back and reworking them.  Overall, though, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

Also if you can identify the music it plays on startup, my hat's off to you.

A Present

Here's a portrait of a friend I did, for his birthday:

Portraiture is one of my favorite things to do.  The only problem with birthday portraits is that I like them to be a surprise, which rules out asking for good reference.  I usually get a picture through Facebook, which can be a little hit or miss.  On the other hand, it can lead to interesting poses and lighting I wouldn't have thought of on my own, and working from lower resolution reference is good practice.

One thing I really need to work on is a better way to finish these.  I sprayfix them and mount on black matte board, but the mounting is the problem.  So far I've gotten best results just taping up the borders with black tape, but I still think that's a bit tacky.  This one I affixed with acrylic matt medium, which I've only used a handful of times before, and it ended up not affixing flush, so there's some ridges where airbubbles were present.  Thankfully it's not super noticeable, but still, pretty annoying.

Puttin' some drawings up

Here's the first one:

For my comic book inking class.  Brush pen and crow quill.