More Goodies

I've been busy working away updating my demo reel, adding more traditional art and drawings to my website, and working on a short Flash animation. You can check out my updated demo reel over at my website here . . .

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/index.html

You can see some of my new drawings here (although if you've been following my blog most of these won't be new to you) . . .

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/images/sketches.html

Hopefully I'll post the Flash short up here soon and I'll talk more about it then.

Aardman Goodness

This has been around for awhile but it is still amazingly good animation.

louie 31 - 32 - 33

The next exciting chapter in Louie's adventure!


Read the story so far here.

Jump Exercise 3

I got him in spline mode now. I need to start polishing the more subtle things now. I posted it up on the AM alumni forum and I'm sure I'll get some awesome feed back to help me take this to the next level.

Louie 28-29-30

Another busy week. I didn't finish my third panel until Sunday. Sorry for the late posting.

KING KONG!

I just rented Peter Jackson's King Kong from Netflix. The entire T-Rex sequence is simply amazing. What could be better than a giant monkey wrestling three Tyrannosaurus-Rexs? Not once during that sequence do I thinking hey this sequence is probably 75% computer generated. Awesome. Possibly the best computer generated movie sequence of all time. Ok maybe that's an exaggeration or maybe it's not. Either way it is crazy good animation.

Jump Exercise 2

Here's another pass of the jump exercise I'm working on. I'm still in the blocking stage and it's almost all on 4s. I next up I'll block out the face.





----update 6-11 I got the first pass on the face in there now.----

Louie 25-26-27

I can always use more time for comics. There just isn't enough time in the day for them. You can really see what I was talking about in my last Louie post represented here in panels 26 and 27. I got the proportions right in panel 25 but check out the size of Louie's head in 26 and 27. BeeGee's head is supposed to be slightly bigger than Louie's head. The way it is drawn now it looks like BeeGee is standing slightly behind Louie. Live and learn. I'm correcting a lot of these sort of mistakes latter on. Louie is an experiment for me and I'm learning tons. It is amazing what I'm learning right now about the power of spotting blacks and texture!


Read the story so far here.

Jump Exercise

I haven't been able to post any animation up here for awhile so I'm kind of excited to get back to animating for myself. I got a couple of little projects in the works so you can look forward to seeing more in the near future. Here's the first blocking pass for my latest animation exercise.

Louie 22-23-24

My youngest brother was in town this week and then I got sick over the weekend. I missed my mountain bike race but I still managed to get three pages done. Louie's story is starting to get interesting!


Read the story so far here.

Louie 19-20-21

One thing I've already learned from Louie is that I should have familiarized myself with my main characters more. The Louie of these early panels jumps off model a lot. It isn't super obvious but it sticks out to me. I've thought about going back and doing some redrawing but I decided against it. I've learned that lesson and I'll move on from here.


Read the story so far here.

Art Dump

I've created a number of different "doodles" in my spare time that I never posted. So here's a catch up post.
This was done for AM sketch club. The topic was Lost. I went with my favorite character Hurley. I colored Hurley differently than Iron Man for the last sketch club topic.


A graffiti inspired acrylic painting.


More morning sketches. The good and the ugly all for you to see.

Louie 16-17-18

I made good progress on Louie this week. Some weeks just whiz by and other weeks it seems like I'm working on one panel all week. I got a long way to go with my hand lettering. There hasn't been much lettering to do but I really struggle with it when it comes up. So for now I'm cheating. When someone speaks for now on I'm gonna use webletter BB a font I downloaded from Blambot.com. For now I'll keep on hand lettering the sound effects.

I went to my first comic book convention today. The Super Con held in San Jose was a really cool experience. I'll post more about it soon.



You can read the whole story here.

Iron Man

Dan Segarra (blog) keeper of the Weekly Sketch thread over at the Animation Mentor Alumni site is getting the thread going again. The first topic is Iron Man. I did two versions of Mr. Stark the first one was more in a comic book style and then I did this one. I slapped some color on it really quick. It was a bit of a rush job and I'm not super crazy about this drawing (the pose is weak) but I think it shows a lot of subtle progress in my drawing ability that wasn't there 6 months ago. For example 6 months ago I would have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the "special effects" right. All the drawing I have been doing for Louie has forced me to stretch as an artist and now I have more of a back log of ideas floating around in my head. Also my style is slow starting to form itself.

Louie 13-14-15

The story is starting to take off.


You can read the whole story here.

Old Omega Videos

Louie 10-11-12

Oops I forgot to post these guys here when I updated my website.


You can read the whole story here.

I'm young at heart

One way to look at this is a I'm younger than I look (which is a little dis concerning) . Or that my virtual age matches my maturity. Either way unless I get randomly mauled by a land narwhal I should live a long time.

Find your virtual age here.

Morning Sketches

Don't tell anyone but I haven't done any sketching this week. But here's some sketches from last week that I didn't post. I did my usual life drawing and then tried to do a more cartoony version as well.

Louie 7 - 8 - 9

It was a busy week this week but I still managed to get in three new Louie panels.





Read the entire story here.