I just got off a flight from Hong Kong to San Fransisco. I had the iPad, Artrage, several long hours to kill. This depiction of Wakefield’s living room was the outcome.
One problem that I’m running into while painting on the iPad is color quality. Most of the time can’t tell where I am in color space. Is it blue or is it turquoise? It’s rather impossible to tell for instance when the lamp behind you is yellow or the walls are red… that sort of thing seems to happen a lot on the iPad. When the brightness slider is adjusted making color choices really is nothing better that a wild guess. Back home I had to readjust this painting in Photoshop to more closely match what I thought I was seeing on the plane. I wonder if the ipad screen can use the camera to detect lighting conditions? That would be pretty useful when you move between different environments. These problems aside, its still pretty amazing to have a portable digital canvas.
Above is an painting I have been working on for the last few days. Not Steadily but in short little busts. It is exceptionally nice to have the ability to paint anywhere I go. I think over the last few days I put in a minute or two on this work in all sorts of places; On the train, in the car, restaurants, shoe stores, shopping malls, children’s parks and of course cafés.
I must say I do like ArtRage, It’s so handy to be able to paint on a whim. The Ipad still doesn’t replace the power of a sketchbook but I think that day is steadily approaching. Pressure sensitivity and a some sort of precise pen is greatly needed but until that day comes it does the job pretty well.
The one thing I that has been puzzling me is saving files for the web. Surprisingly, I haven’t been able to find an apps that can optimize .jpgs so even though I can create art on the ipad I still have to process it all through my desktop computer. This is rather annoying to say the least. With book you just have to close it and keep it dry but all these digital mediums come with the ball and chain of file management, ugh. Its a real time waister.
Below are some exploratory character designs from the “Dragon” project. Most of this designs are about four years old and where made right after I finished up my time working on Space Chimps. The script was finished by then but because of Space Chimps reception all of Vanguards projects were put on hold or outright shelved. It was a frustrating time for me so I started drawing Dragon art whenever I could, hoping that some fresh designs would help push the project forward.
This didn’t really work but it did open the door to a bigger movie and what was once just a little tale began to grow into a romanticized epic adventure.
I had a pretty clear visual idea of what i was going to make and jumped straight into the animation. There were a few pieces that I did make, some colour tests and a few character scribbles.
We spell scouts S-C-O-U-U-T-S which makes us a completely different autonomous organization.
This was my masters thesis from USC Animation. It is an improvised comedy about the woes of scouting in the middle of urban Los Angeles. Scouuts came into being when I realized that my original thesis proposal was far to ambitious and needed to be scrapped. It was late in the semester and I needed something fast and so I turned to my best friend Devin Westberg, who just happened to be an improv comedian, for help. Devin gathered a talented group of friends from the Improv Olympic over in Hollywood and brought them down to the USC sound department for a two hour session in the recording booths. it was free form and fast and within an hour or so we had Cub Scouuts Pack 213 in the can. It was a bit to long so I cut the audio down a little which give it a bit more structure and punch and then spent the next two months animating.
For this project I did all the animation in Toon Boom Animation, which at the time was pretty new and was lightning fast compared to the tradition pencil and paper method. It allowed me to completely bypass a dozen steps and be one of only a hand full of students to finnish their thesis on time. The b&w vector art was then exported as an image sequence which I coloured in Photoshop and composited in final Cut Pro. This was a brave new digital world and compared to the three years it took me to make my earlier film this one only took five months start to finnish.
Improv by: Devin Westberg, Tom Warren, Jimmy Zerda, David Ury, Ben Tolpin
Directed, Animated and Produced by Sterling Sheehy
This project is dedicated to the memory of my friend Jimmy Zerda, who passed away not long after we made this film. He was the scouut with glasses, avery talented comedian and a friend. He will be missed.
This sketchbook was made while I was a student at USC Animation. It is dated 2002. There are a lot of figure drawings and surfing doodles in it which is very fitting since that is all I really did back then. It is a notable book as it was in this sketchbook that I first started to develop my own style.
I really should have a lot more work to show for this project. It has lived in my head for years. I really love it. I’ll leave the story for a future post but expect me to write a good deal about it in the future. Its my baby and I love it. Out side of friends and family this is the first time I have put any of it up for others to see.
Dragon is the story of a poor street sweeper in an ancient Himalayan city who sets out to clean up his city and in doing so uncovers more dirt than he was expecting. Our humble young hero is pulled into a world divided by greed. As an army of wild mountain bandits threatens to invade the isolated city its people see little hope for survival but to pray desperately to their dragon god for protection. From the grit of the gutter to the lavishness of the city’s palace our street sweeper must use all of his sweeping skills to uncover the truth about the dragon and find a way to save the city he loves before time runs out and all is lost.
The project is based upon the book “Everyone Knows What A Dragon Looks Like” BY J. Williams. Vanguard had the rights to the books and paid me to write it with a writing partner, Sejung Kim. The project has sat on the shelf for years. It’s a beautiful story and I would love to see it get its due some day. In my free time I have donated a ton of time and artwork for the project hoping it would help grease the wheels and get it moving. Every now and then I get a phone call and then the excitement fades and its back on the shelf again.
Above is a pitch trailer I made for the project and below are the panels I used to make it. Interestingly enough I drew all of this while I was in Jerusalem.
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There was a time when Space Chimps was being tossed about as a possible musical. This was one of the sequences I was asked to make while exploring that idea. Somewhere I have the animatic for this sequence. I will post it when I find it.
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