SketchSunday means more faces...

Lots of people watching today...

SketchSundays!

My good mate Jeff Williams, otherwise known as @AnimationCosmic on Twitter, and I have started hanging out on Sunday mornings to get some breakfast, catch up on the week that was, and get an early start to what otherwise would end up a wasted day. Jeff's a mean sketcher, as well as a kick-ass animator, so he always forces me to raise my game. Or at least crack open the sketchbook for a good try. Here's some of the better ones from today.

Getting closer

Always tweaking this guy aren't I? Maybe at some point I'll actually start writing up his story.

Self portrait

My fiance is off in California working on a big FX movie coming out later this summer while I'm holding down the fort here in Chicago. I missed her so much that I started drawing pictures of her. :)

In other news, how crazy of a movie season has this been so far? Watchmen was a terrific exercise in futility, Terminator Salvation was mindless fun filtered through a videogame inspired point of view, Star Trek made me a true believer of JJ Abrams as well as slightly more interested in the future of the Star Trek universe, and Coraline was a tiny gem that most missed. I'm still looking forward to Up, Inglorious Basterds, The Brothers Bloom, and the synapse shutdown of Transformers 2.

For some reason I finally watched The Spirit & Dark City in the same weekend, and I was pleasantly surprised by both. For the life of me, I don't know what people were expecting from The Spirit, but I loved it! There was something about it's manic wackiness and snappy energy that reminded me of a mix of old WB Looney Tunes and the anime FLCL. On top of that we got some of the most ham-fisted campy dialogue and scenarios Frank Miller has ever let free from his raging ego. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I was all over it.

There will be another day to talk about everything that's right about Dark City, but it's right in my Terry Gilliam, Akira, City of Lost Children, Blade Runner wheelhouse.

Incredible Hulk in 3D

Started playing around with the newest release of Silo, & besides a few perplexing bugs (saving files to an unopenable extension?) it's a great modeler. Lightweight, with most of the commands working the way you'd like them to, plus the ability to retopologize your mess of a mesh puts Silo at the top of my list when all I want to do is sketch out some ideas in 3D. This weekend I started a layout for a quick little short with the Incredible Hulk and this was my first rough pass at a cartoony proportioned Hulk. So much more to do in terms of fixing muscle masses and getting edgeflows correct, but it was lots of fun.

Project: November

Here's some sketches that I did for David Stripinis's Project: November short. David's been working on James Cameron's Avatar since the beginning of time itself, yet he's somehow put together a crazy-skilled team together for this project. I was lucky enough to stumble into doing some concept sketches for him. I'm quite stoked to see how it all turns out!

Rush Job

Between GI Joe and the Fast & The Furious oil tanker tragedy, there sure were some rushed comps during the Super Bowl ads. Take a look at that leg or Heavy Duty's ear: I'm not entirely certain that this guy's head belongs to his body. Ouch, I have mega-tons of sympathy for anybody who has to push a trailer out for the big game.

Ghost Rider in progress

Thought Faucet

So the Ghost Rider designs are humming along: working out head shapes, as well as researching reference images of Shibuya at night. I also finally dove into some 3D modeling again with a new update to Silo. There's a little Kinada-on-Bike figure sitting on my desk that is serving as a great reference for 3D sketching up a bike to draw over. We'll see how all this Frankenstein design work goes for me...

Hey, I just clicked thru to this wicked neat intro cinematic for Valve's zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead: incredibly inspired character models and animation along with some great cinematography make this one a post-Halloween treat. I haven't seen this tasty of facial animation for a game since, well, since Valve's last set of cinematics for Team Fortress 2.

It might be time for another game company to start thinking animated features...