Between being sick and being preoccupied with work I haven't had much time to post up here... Blah...

 

Anyway, here... Have some Hatsu :)

I just in case you forgot...

Done in Flash CS3

I finally have the time and resources to take on some art commissions. If you're interested, please refer to my deviantART journal for more details :)

*New Character* 09-09-11

It's my mom's B-day today, so I drew her a gift.

The character's been in my head for a while, but I finally drew her today. 

This is Princess Aoi, she's a pixie. She's also Hatsu's best friend. I'm so in love with her character design! I'm so proud of myself and I hope I get a chance to draw her more soon :)

I'm posting this and I don't care!

Yeah...

Usually, I try not to post my fan art work up here because I don't free that it always showcases my best work and in some cases I don't put as much time and effort in to them.

This is not one of those times.

A few months ago I got into the wonderful series, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic created by the amazing Lauren Faust. It helped break up the stress & insanity that was my last semester of college, so I extremely grateful for that.

Since I'm out of school and finally have free some time (to much free time) I decided to make some fan art based on one of my favorite MLP episodes called, "Suited for Success".



I wanted to draw this traditionally as opposed to digitally because I seldom ever see anyone make traditional MLP fan art and because I haven't worked in maker in a while. I know there are a lot of mistakes, I still might go back and add a couple of things... >.>

It took me forever to finish... I tried to keep to the original designs as much as possible. Each girl took about a day to complete.

Also, in case you were wondering, here's what the characters looked liked originally:

Website Buttons! :D

Find me at these other places! :D

Slideshow of my artwork

Slideshow of my artwork. I will still put up certain pictures individually if I want to talk about them more in depth.

Hatsu Timeline: 2007-2011

I think between all the confusion and craziness running around during my graduation this past May I totally forgot to post this. It's my final project for my Graphic Novel class. I felt that curriculum of the class could have benefited from a little more structure, but I can't complain to much... I got to learn much more about the art of comics, while still earning academic credits. Couldn't ask for a better class :)

Anyway, my final consisted of making a summary, character sheets, and a comicbook page. I thought I'd use my character Hatsu Moto, the mini forest emp, since she's been present throughout my time in college.

2007:
Hatsu is a relatively recent character. She was created during a watercolor drawing practice assignment during my first semester of college:



2008:
I was finally able to get my hands on my own copy of Photoshop CS3! I was so excited that I thought I'd try my hand at digital drawing.

This was my first completed digital drawing in Photoshop ever. Not to great, but it was a start.



Later that year, I completed my Animation 2 college course by creating a faux animated opening title sequence called, "The Days Of Hatsu Moto" :)



2009:
2009 was the year I tried my hand at digitally coloring a full animation for my Animation 3 college course. The animation was never finished because that kind of digital coloring took way too long to complete for each individual frame. However, Hatsu, and several of my other original characters are featured in it.



2010:
Hatsu is one of several of my original characters to be featured as a guest in my degree project talk show animation, "DTV". She was only featured for a few seconds, but so far she seems to get the best viewer reaction than any other character in the animation. She is voiced by me.




2011:
Finally, for one of my last classes in college, The Grapic Novel, we had to make a summary, character sheets, and a comicbook page. So, I thought, "why not use Hatsu?"

Summary:

The Days Of Hatsu Moto takes place in present day Los Angeles. The story chronicles the life of a mini forest imp named Hatsu Moto and her quest to save a man’s soul from his own ill-deeds and crude personality, which has been prophesied will lead to is death 3 years from now.

Hatsu plays the literal conscience to Rodney, the man who she’s supposed to “save”. She does this by accompanying Rodney where ever he goes and by putting him through many seemingly ridiculous tests, much to his dismay.

Despite her tiny size (she’s only 5 inches tall), Hatsu is very resourceful, and having magical powers doesn’t hurt either. Rodney initially despises Hatsu’s presence and finds her constantly chipper attitude and high-pitched voice extremely annoying. However, he very slowly starts to warm up to her.

Character Sheets:



Comic Page:



--
And that's about it... Hatsu's history since '07 :)

I felt happy doing this because it made me feel so sentimental. As a character, Hatsu was born during my first year of college, in one of my first courses. For those who don't know, Hatsu means "first" in Japanese (初). Throughout my college years Hatsu Moto has been a resource for me to use to push myself to try new things. And while all those things may not have worked, I still learned so much from doing them and I'm a better artist/person for it.

So thank you Hatsu, my little forest imp :) <3

My left eye often hurts...

When all attempts of trying to get out of an artistic rut fail, throw ink at it.

Self-portrait-ish

Ascend

:)

"Phi-Phi on the TV" Complete-ish...

Well it's done... It's not perfect but it's as done as it's gonna get for a while...:P

Final Animation:


Original animatic with first recording:


I had to rerecord the audio of me speaking because my teacher's said the first reading was kind of dull and and didn't really showcase my personality. So to remedy this me and one of my teachers did a test rerecording wherein he (gently) punched me in the leg repeatedly to get a more... "enthusiastic" reaction out of me. It worked so he told me to get someone else to do something like that when I did the new recording. So I got my mom to do it and she threw books, tape, towels and water at me through the whole duration of rerecording. You can hear it a little in the animation.

The soundtrack itself is not really a 100% in my opinion because I didn't have time to properly clean-up the new audio and I didn't get the updated musical score from my composer on time. So I had to speed up the original music he gave me, (which was timed to the first recording), and match it the new recording. It works... sort of.

I originally wanted to line and color my animation work in flash then shadow it in Photoshop, but my teacher pointed out that I really didn't have the luxury of time to do that so he suggested
I settle on a more simple coloring.












We went back and looked at the style tests I did in 2009 for my first Degree Project and both decided that "number 5" would be a reasonable choice.




Now that's it's done, I need to enter it in as many festivals as possible and start looking for a job... Crap.

We'll go together...

I'm at the home stretch for my "Phi-Phi on the T.V." animation. I need to finish it this week for my school's animation festival.

I was watching my Powerpuff Girls DVD a few months ago and was again inspired by the background work of Joseph Giardina. I will always be amazed by his artwork. He doesn't over-complicate this and it's beautiful.

I'm at Anime Boston from April 22-24!

As the title says, I'll be at Anime Boston this week from April 22-24 in the Artist Alley, Table 81! I'm sharing a table with my animation buddies Rebecca Wong and Makeba Bostic.





I usually don't like to post fanart stuff up on here, as I don't think it always showcases my best work and besides I have my deviantART account for that. However, I'm posting this because I'm venturing into my second real chance to sale my artwork. My first time two years ago was rather unsuccessful... Hopefully this year will be better.

I also made a tutorial video on how I colored my "Vocal Moon" print in Photoshop CS3 to promote our table:




This is the finished product when you repeat the video process several times...



If you're going to Anime Boston please come by and visit us! We would really appreciate the support! If not, please just wish us luck! :D

"Phi-Phi on the T.V." Style Test

In my last post, I explained I was making a new animation.

Long story short, this is what it's going to look like:



I have no idea what I'm doing @___@

Making a new animation... :O

I originally wanted to create this animation back in 2009 for my Senior Animation Degree Project, but was urged not to, as I was told that most animation companies would not be interested in hiring me after seeing it because, "Everyone does animations about robots" and it's nothing new.

:(

So, I created DTV instead... And I while I'm proud of myself for getting though a such difficult & aggravating project, and learned a lot from working on it, I'm generally dissatisfied with the animation and wish it could have been better.

Anyway, a couple of months ago I showed to my original pitch idea to my animation advisor and he loved the idea. So, we decided that during my last semester I could finally animate my first DP idea as an independent study.

The animatic uses most of the original audio from my 2009 pitch. My advisor thought it might be a fun idea to make a full animation using the original audio as a narration. Why not? :)



Hopefully this will be done by the end of April this year, but I doubt it... I will be graduating soon after all... :)