Meet Maaren

This is my rough sketch of my newest character design, Maaren the Wombat. Maaren likes snacks and her favorite number is 5.

Watercolors at the Presidio--NOW with Photos!!!

July 11th was SketchCrawl 23 here in San Francisco! A sketch crawl is when a group of artists get together and draw/paint in the same area for a day, meeting up at a planned time and destination to end the day passing around each others' sketchbooks and socializing. We went to the Presidio, and I had no idea how wonderful it is there! Now I am even more excited that I'll be living in the Marina district this fall.

Here's a photo of the gang by Ronnie Del Carmen:


I sketched with a fine-point sharpie (usually drawing over a rough HB-pencil sketch)--the permanent marker gave a nice dark line and allowed me to paint my colors over the lines without worrying about the ink bleeding.

I started painting some flowers to experiment with color.


Then I tried scenery. Down the hill from the Starbucks we met at was this lovely park, with my favorite kind of trees--Weeping Willows! As you can see from the swaying branches, it was a windy day.


I really enjoyed working on this one, it's a doorway of 'Building 38' in the Presidio. As I was roughing out the architecture, this frisky little pup showed up and scampered all over, so I sat him up on the steps.

...and check it out, Ronnie snapped this shot of me when I was working on the drawing!!!

(Another shot by Ronnie: me, Carlos and Fabian hanging out with Claude the puppy!)


I had a great time playing with my new portable watercolor set--can't wait to use it again!

SF Zoo & The Pimowahk!

This summer has been CRAZY! I'm taking 2 classes on campus, plus getting involved with the school's budding new VFX/Animation Production group, plus working as an RA in a building full of 160 pre-college students (high school girls...aged 15-18) has me running around quite a bit. But it's all going pretty great and the time is flying by. I have been especially enjoying my Character Design class--the 2-to-4-minute poses, and focus on pushing shapes and design are exactly what I need to work on, and my most recent assignment was to design a fantasy creature.

I made it out to the SF Zoo last weekend which was a great chance to seek inspiration, here are my animal skecthes:

The most exciting was seeing the Hawk, a handler had it out on his arm for us to see up close and personal--she weighs 10lbs, which is HUGE, and he kept throwing her bits of rabbit to snack on... yummy!

So for my own design I had to pick 3 real animals and combine them into one fantasy creature, I chose features from a Pig, a Mouse and a Hawk to create The PIMOWAHK! I'm continuing to re-work the design based on my instructor's critiques, so here are a few iterations I've gone through along the way...

First concept:

I dont have #2 on me at the moment, but it was similar to the image below, only with a more average-sized body. Tanya (my instructor) challenged me to play with size variety in the different parts of the body... so I did this as the Third version:

then I tried to loosen it up and get more cartoony... Version Four:


Ongoing process... more to come of character design, and the SF Skecth crawl is at the Presidio this Saturday! I'm gonna try doing some watercolors there with my nifty new compact travel palette... exciting!