Lark - book cover illustration

A friend of mine asked for an illustration for a book cover. I experimented a lot with the line, as well as the colors, until i settled with this result. I love exploring new ways!

PS: Sorry for the watermark, but as it's a commercial thing, i just have to :o)

We lost the body, comrade! (aka. Kim Kardashian)

You might find it hard to see, but YES, this is Kim Kardashian. She looked more like her, before painting it. I'm no particular fan of her, but i saw a photo of her the other day, and i got inspired to do a curvy sketch of her.

There are still issues that i'm not happy with, but at some point after realizing those, there was no return, since i drew it traditionally.

Inspired by Fred Moore and Chris Sanders. I hope you enjoy:

For those who wonder what the heck i'm talking about with the title of this post, well it's a greek expression :D

Sexy girl

Got excited with this one!! I didn't expect it to turn out so well, since it started as an experiment mostly. On the process, i decided to try out watercolor pencils, but due to its small scale, i didn't have much room for details. So i did some small retouches on the computer.

I hope you like it:

A good drawing day

Yesterday i got excited with afternoon's croquis! The lines were put in the right place so easily! I hope this great thing will continue happening more often...

If you see misplaced shoulders or limbs abnormally long here and there, it is not by mistake, but because i was trying to caricature the figure. But without success obviously.

Andreas Deja

Yesterday and today was a glorious day for animation in Viborg! We had Andreas Deja giving a 2 hour lecture this morning, and yesterday i was honoured and lucky to interview him for the school's website!

For those who don't know who Andreas Deja is (shame on you), he's been an animator at Disney for 30 years, since The Black Cauldron times. He's been a supervising animator for characters like Roger Rabbit (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), Gaston (Beauty and The Beast), Jaffar (Aladdin), Triton  (The Little Mermaid), Scar (Lion King), Adult Hercules (Hercules) Lilo (Lilo & Stitch), and Mama Odie (The Princess and The Frog).

What can i say more... Just that Lion King was the first movie i saw at the cinema when i was a kid. Very strong movie, and his work speaks by itself!


You can visit his blog with great material for study:
http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/


I'm outta here...

Drawing Gaston 

Drawing Roger Rabbit (Who Framed Roger Rabbit)

Drawing Jafar (Aladdin)

Comparing the design of Shere Khan (The Jungle Book) with that one of Scar (Lion King)

Comparing the design of Kaa (The Jungle Book) with Juju (The Princess and The Frog)

Acting croquis

Bonus post coming!

Today there was an acting croquis afternoon session. So, chance to upload some more sketches (the first 2 pics) forever forgotten in my hard drive. 

It was mostly 1 min sketching today. I have a lot of fun with those! It differs from nude croquis a lot, since it contains acting, and there's not much time for details, so the focus is in the essence of the pose, with the neccessary details to establish the "set up" of the pose. These are for example props that communicate what the model is doing. Facial expessions play also quite an important role in some of the poses.

Short live action film

This last week, we were supposed to come up with a story and shoot a short film composed of 5 shots only. The theme was "someone giving something to someone else". We had to explore the tools of cinematography and choose those that best communicated our story.

Thanks to my awesome team (Edith, Unnur, Lars, Anne Katrine, Søren) for making this week a blast!

Showreel 2012

Ladies and gendlemen, I present my showreel to you. Made some small changes in my "official" blog as well




Some of my older videos will disappear, because i have deleted them, since i have newer, better versions in my showreel

Randers Rainforest

So i finished my showreel, but there are a few small things i'm considering to adjust, that's why i haven't uploaded it yet.

On Thursday, i went to this Rainforest-zoo place in a city one hour from Viborg. It was great, a very interesting experience indeed!! There were three domes, three different regions of the world: South America, Asia, Africa, and in each one of them, they were trying to simulate the environment as well. A non-artist friendly environment in a few words! Very humid and warm, especially at higher places that you could reach with stairs. There was this bird, that was at the highest place of the zoo that you could reach, warm as hell, that i couldn't help but take out my watercolors and sketch its colors!! It's the first sketch below.

You could also enter a cave-like, dark and kinda scary place, where bats were flying free. Eeeeek!! The monkeys were running free like most of the animals, and i had the chance to get very close to them. I touched this very small one, and after that a guy was looking weird at me. Later i saw this sign saying: "Don't touch the animals". I guess that was the reason :o)


Note: All the sketches, apart from the last one, are watercolors. I hope you enjoy!

Quadruped project

So, a lot of things have been happening lately... Spring has arrived (almost), Glen Keane quit Disney, Andreas Deja is visiting the school in April (!!!!!), and the CGs are done making the quadruped project look beautiful with rendering and compositing.

A few things about the quadruped project:
This was a 2 people project, one animator and one CG artist. In total, it spanned over a period of 3 months. First, we were collaborating with the CGs to create a design (i was sick, so unfortunately wasn't involved in that stage). The CGs modeled, rigged, textured the creature, and then the animators took over to animate it. After we were done, the CGs did the rendering and the final compositing.

Us, the CAs, were done with the quadruped animation 2 weeks ago. The actual animation for this creature was made in 3 days, so bear with me if it's not perfect...and it's not.
These past 2 weeks we had acting with 2 characters interacting with each other. I'll probably post this animation (rendered with textures and lights oh yes oh yes), even though it's far from done. We also did a one day side project, which i'm also planning to post!
Lots of things to show in general!!

This week it's Easter holidays for the school, but not much of holidays for me, since i'll be staying at Viborg to work on my showreel for a summer internship, and also helping out the bachelors with their films.

The quadruped:



Design, CG work: Bastian L. Strube
Animation by me