Castle and A Glass of Liquid

I haven't posted any of my sketches from AM's weekly sketch thread/group/association/thingie. So here ya go. Actually the thread has been pretty quiet lately, which is too bad since drawing is so important to animation. But if you don't believe me about the importance of drawing maybe you'd believe these guys.

Temple of the Seven Golden Camels (read parts 1 and 2 of this post too)

Spline doctors

The more I understand animation the more I realize how hard it is to get right. You have to be a master at so many things before you can master animation. I admit when things get crazy I don't get to draw as much too. But even a couple of minutes here and there is better than nothing.

Calvin and Hobbes Cartoon?

Is this for real?

Astronauts and Octopuses

Whee! I've played around more with my paints!




You might be wondering why I always post two paintings at once. Well there is a very good reason for that. Mainly it is because painting is just a hobby for me and paper and paint is expensive. So to cut down on the cost I decided to paint really small till I can have more control over the medium that means I've been doing two paintings per piece of 12x9 spiral water color pad. I know that working small has its own set of limitations but I'm fine with that for now.

CalArts Funny

Testing 1, 2, 3?

This is Griebel the garden gnome. He's a hard working gnome but he has a soft spot in his heart for trolls. This isn't a good thing if you don't know anything about gnomes or trolls. Even the smallest trolls are trouble.

This photo and drawing is a proof of concept for a 4-6 page comic I've been working on. I did this in about 15-20 minutes so it is a super quick job. I colored Griebel with the help of a cool photoshop flatting filter. The coloring isn't right (his skin is too orange) and I think the inking is a little sloppy. I wasn't planning on posting this but Josh (my super cool brother) wanted to see it. So here it is.

Favorite Literary Character

"Favorite Literary Character" was the topic of this weeks Animation Mentor weekly sketch. So here's a quick interpretation of Edmond Dantes. I don't know why I decided to draw Edmond as a prisoner instead of a more happy time in his story.

Week 602: First Pass Rough Blocking Complete

After three weeks I got my first pass of blocking done. Sort of. there are still a ton of things that need work here but I really wasn't able to do even the smallest revision on these blocking passes. I just didn't have enough time. If anything I'm learning how to work faster. Here's the link.

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/VV blocking_ex.mov

602

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/602_blocking_ex.mov

Here's my assignment for class 6 week two. I didn't post last week because my 601 assignment sucked pretty bad. There was a bunch of reasons for this . . .I was still finishing up my layout, it took me a while to acclimate to Maya after three months off, etc, etc. Our assignment for weeks 601-603 was a rough pass of blocking. For all you animators out there I interpreted "rough blocking" as key poses with a few inbetweens scattered in there when necessary.

Hybrid Beast

This week's topic in the weekly sketch thread is hybrid beast. Here's my chicken horse.

Pepe Valencia for President!

So here's the culmination of class 5 at Animation Mentor, the layout for my short story. I'll have to say I don't enjoy layout nearly as much as I do animation. Storyboarding was a ton of fun but layout was really hard for me. It might have been I really haven't done a lot of layout in the past so it was new to me, but storyboarding uses a lot of the same skills as animation or comic book drawing so it's stuff I've done before and it came a little easier to me. I don't know.

My mentor Pepe Valencia the layout/storyboard ninja from Sony Pictures Imageworks was a HUGE help this quarter. I owe an enormous debt to Pepe for everything he taught me. I went with a story that was much more difficult to layout than I realized at the beginning and Pepe was with me the every step of the way.

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/Jacob Kalsbeek Layout.mov

Two More Paintings

I'm still having a lot of fun painting. I'm happy how these turned out but I still got tons to learn.

Final Layout?

Almost done with the layout! I'll be neck deep in animation before you know it. Only 13 more weeks of Animation Mentor. Wow.

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/VV Layout 511_ex.mov

AM week 508

Starting to layout the short. I'm thinking that first shot has too much action going on. Something needs to be done about that. You'll also notice that I swapped characters. I was going for a shorter fat character but I decided that the lead roll would work better as the AM character called Ace.

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/VV Layout01_ex.mov

AM Week 507

I've already got my critique on this work. There are plenty of changes to make but they are all minor tweaks. I've decided for now to get ride of the new credit sequence that I added this week.

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/507anamatic_ex.mov

MTB Race

This past Sunday Lisa and I did our very first mountain bike race. It was more fun than a barrel full of monkeys! The race was the second race in a series of 9 races held down in the Fort Ord area (south of Santa Cruz). We both entered in the beginners race which was three laps around a 5 mile course. The course was pretty flat but when you are racing hard and a short steep hill can be really painful. I was a little worried that Lisa wasn't going to finish well and then swear off riding a mountain bike ever again, but I should have worried more about myself. Lisa finished 6 out of 12 with a time of 1:29:37. I finished 14 out of 17 with a time of 1:17:17.

I would have finished a little higher and quicker if it wasn't for some technical problems, my chain got jammed in the front deraileur three different times. Once it took me almost a minute to get it unstuck again. My bike computer read 1:15:29 but I didn't check it until about five minutes after I stopped riding, so I'd guess my total racing time was somewhere around 1:15:00 which would have put me around 11th or 12th. If you want to see the results for yourself go here http://www.cccx.org/mtb/2007/race2/2007_CCCX_MTB_Race2_Beginner.htm

I'm not too concerned about my time though. I hadn't done any riding at intensity so I'm glad I just survived. We plan to race again on March 31st and I plan to throw in some intervals to get some snap in my legs.

I'm a strange duck

I did these four pen and ink drawing for Joe Koski, Glen, Joe, and Josh. The inspiration came from the documentary "How to Draw Bunny" the life story of artist Ray Johnson. I mailed out these puppies to my friends just like Ray did with his art. Each drawing is also inspired by the person I gave it to.


The Godzilla rip off went to Joe Koski. Joe is a youth pastor who likes monsters, so what better to draw for him than a giant lizard terrorizing a town.
The B movie brain monster went to my brother Josh. As a seminary student he often spends 14 hours a day studying Greek. My brain would grow tentacles and attack me too if I had to do that.

The most graphic drawing went to my brother Joe. As a San Jose police officer he trains long and hard for the inevitable zombie invasion.


Last but not least, and probably the weirdest out of the bunch went to Glen. What's that you say? Yes it is the same Glen from the amazingly creative thegato.net. The signing bird was blatantly stolen from one of his shirt designs. The fanged cloud came from . . . well there's just no good explanation for that.

The lastest. And greatest?

www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/505anamatic final_ex.mov

Here's what I turned in for class 5 week 5 assigment. I'm still ahead of schedule. We only had to turn in the first half of the anamatic but I got the whole thing done. I figure this way I'll get more tries and getting the whole thing right. Next week we get to do a walk cycle with our main character. That should be a lot of fun.

Head Gags

Hey people here's some head gags I've been working on which two are your favorites?

www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/head gags_ex2.mov

Acrylic Painting

I've started to play around with Acrylic paints. Its a lot of fun and a totally different experience than painting in Photoshop. I really like the messiness and imperfection of paint. In Photoshop everything looks too clean and you really have to work to get any kind of personality or character into the color.

The trade off with Acrylics is it's really hard to get the color you want. I must have repainted the orange guy seven times before settling with that orange. It isn't the orange I wanted. Although the scanned version looks a little better than the painting. But the blue background in the scanned version looks worse than the painted version.

Final Pitch and 1st Anamatic

Here's the last pitch I'll do for the short. From here on out it will anamatic's and layout. For thoses of you who don't know an anamatic is kind of like a comic in time where one still image will reprsent the action. The video pitch is about 12 MB and the anamatic is 2.5 MB.

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/504 enemy head pitch ex.mov




http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/504 anamatic ex.mov

There are many things that I'm trying out here.

-The first two drawings are supposed to be a pan. Also with this shot I think I want to start closer in.
-I think I want to switch the toilet bit with the weapon bin bit. I'm not sure about how I reveal his solution for hiding the head. It might be better just to show him swapping the vase and the head.
-I went with this different ending with Mr. Viking running across the screen at the last minute. I might go back to the ending with Mr. Viking sitting out side in the snow with the head.

What do you guys think?