No DreamWorks Today

Thanks to everyone who wished me well on the DreamWorks interviews that were supposed to happen yesterday. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances on their part, they canceled their trip to RISD and there were a number of us who had rushed to put together portfolio packages to no avail. I've just sent off my cover letter, resume, and portfolio to DreamWorks since they did still ask to see our materials anwyays...it's possible that they'll be coming back next semester. Just thought I'd update y'all on the current circumstances. So I put together a Portfolio CD (I'd like to finesse the production more as the semester goes forward, but the above image is the little cover for that portfolio CD...kinda neat, I thought)
Anyways, to tell you the truth it's kind of a relief...it seems a bit early in the year to be rushing to apply for work. Albeit, DreamWorks is a long shot! So anyways, it's nice to have a little more time to mentally prepare to look towards the future.
Soon enough!

ALSO: I have enabled the "Followers" gadget on this blog...so if you visit regularly and read, click that little button that follows this blog and it will keep you updated when there are new posts. Neat, n'est pas?

Lastly: A friend of mine, Sindy Limin, just sent me her half of the art trade we agreed upon and I think it is, to recoin a streetsharks phrase, pretty "Jawsome". Here it is:

And you should definitely check out her work here.


More work soon,

-Nick

Yes, you can has Veggiemancer!

Hey all!
I'm back and thoroughly alive...sorry for the brief silence. I had the week off and I didn't really know what to do with myself during all the free time :( Still, finally I'm back in the saddle and character is back on. It was a relatively small load this week...just one character. We were asked to thoroughly research a culture of our choice, and then use the research to inspire a character design for the week. So I picked Russian, because I feel like I haven't done much in that way before. It was good fun. I looked into the Russian folk tales a lot and was really intrigued by the visual gestalt of Baba Yaga. So basically I set out to do a riff on that.
So here she is, basically a traveling asparagus-haired vegetable-lady with a magical swimming squash, a giant wooden spoon and, yes, tomato-bells! :) I think I could have pushed it further, but I'm pretty pleased with the result nonetheless.
It's been a crazy week.
I don't generally get too political online in any way shape or form, but I have to admit to a great sense of relief and excitement about the results of the election! I'm thrilled, actually.
On Tuesday night I walked out of studio and onto the Providence streets to be bombarded by a half-naked crowd of my friends whooping and hollering in the street. It was awesome. I ran downtown with them and eventually we joined a group of what must have been over a thousand college students to take the steps of the capitol building and show our patriotism. There was no fighting or contention...everyone in the city seemed happy to see each other. It occurred to be as I was standing with so many other college-age kids singing the national anthem that here is where the victory really is.
I think regardless of your political views you have to agree that anything that gets this apathetic generation on it's feet and passionately engaged in our country, not to mention patriotic, is HUGE. It's been a long time since I could feel unabashedly patriotic. I've always loved my country, don't get me wrong, and I am proud to be an American...but over the last eight years it's been hard (especially living overseas) to feel anything wholly positive about my country without a sense of irony. I'm not saying that's great...but it's true. And I think that's been the experience of a lot of my peers...we were predicted to be so detached and disinterested that instead of being involved with the election or voting, we'd be at home on our x-boxes. But voting was a proud and exciting thing to do...I saw many friends just standing in line waiting to cast their ballot, and the campus was abuzz with activity over the last few weeks. Rather than sitting slack-jawed before our x-boxes, Tuesday night I saw hope and excitement in the faces of an underestimated generation. That's just cool.
There's so much more to say about the whole thing, and I won't bore anyone with further blabbering, but I will give props to my Dad for writing a kickass story that's up all over the web!


Other than that, this week was RISD's famous Artists' Ball (masquerade dance extraordinaire) and I went as Buzz Lightyear with a huge group of friends all in Disney attire. It was a blast. I will leave you with these parting images:

rrrow.

-Nick

The Hope of New-Earth

Hey All! Another week and this time around it's mid-terms and do I have a post for you! It's the big group-project character design mid-term for Shanth Enjeti's Character Design class! This week we split into three groups of six and were set to the task of recrafting the design for the principal cast of Titan A.E.
Anyone remember Titan A.E?
For those not in the know, it was an animated sci-fi cartoon in the late 90's that tanked at the box office and didn't achieve it's potential for iconic character design and epic story elements. SO...we had a go! :) It was a blast and I was truly blessed with an amazing team of cohorts. We each split the workload for the week and tackled 1 character each, all of us meeting up regularly, collaborating and tweaking eachother's designs. So really no individual one of us can take full credit for any one design, but we each had our "babies".
My baby was a particularly swarthy baby named Korso. He's the ex-military captain of the Valkyrie after planet earth is decimated, and at first he helps the protagonist (Cale) to help find the Titan project (a kind of 'ark' with the potential to recreate a new Earth). But ultimately he sells out Cale and the crew to the Drej (an evil alien race made of pure energy). So his character arc is one of despair, deception, and betrayal. We wanted to play with the mythic ideas present in the preexisting plot and emphasize some of the more poignant elements. With Korso (and likewise with the Drej) we thought about the conflict of material and immaterial. It seemed that if Korso was so disillusioned as to sell out the whole human race he ought to have some compelling motivation to do so. Our proposition is that of the conflict between the spiritual and material. Crippled in his escape from earth, he is shackled to a hovering machine and dependent on it to move and to survive. In all ways, Korso desires to be free of his body...he has a certain contempt for his own flesh. What the Drej offer in this way is the promise of transcendence...of freedom from the material and unlimited power.
His hover-chair runs on Drej-power and I wanted it to reflect his personal transformation, so when he turns fully to the Drej and is forced to fight Cale and crew the side compartments of his vehicle unfold to reveal a set of deadly, electrical spider-legs. We also felt that in his despair he might have taken up drinking in an attempt to 'free' himself from...well...himself. (Bradon Cebenka is due full credit for the booze-rack/tray-table arm-rest). Other little details help to play with the themes of his character...the squareish, strong design is meant to evoke the idea of masculinity and fatherhood, though (in the vest) it is unbalanced and asymmetrical) symbolizing the kind of broken father-figure he provides for Cale. His eyebrow and unbuttoned military-style jacket serve to heighten the sense of asymmetry and allude to his military past as well as his current attitude towards his past (rolled up sleeves). The blanket works as a vain attempt to conceal or familiarize his mechanical lower half...the pattern is zig-zagged to signify the idea of inner conflict. Just a peek "behind the curtain" to see some of the extent of the thought one goes through designing these sort of characters. It was LOTS of fun :D

It took a bunch of small adjustments to find the right mixture of silhouette, form and function for his hover-chair-half. It had to look right, while still maintaining a sense of function and hold the 2d-animated/cel-shaded simplicity (and look like the character was able to fit through doors). Here's a look at some of the process sketches I did in preparation:

And I'm also going to post the rest of the characters from the project with the full understanding that while I had *something* to do with the design of all of them the majority of the credit goes to each respective artist. And they all rock. I love my teammates to death and we really had a blast. Here's the rest! There's a similar amount of thought gone into all the following, but I won't write pages and pages on each. Anyways, it's more fun if y'all figure it out yourselves! :P

Cale - Brandon Cebenka

Akima - Lisa Cunha

Stith - Dan Chang

Gune - Kirsten England

The Drej - Ben Bronstein

It was a neat week! :D
And now we have some time off and I'm going to get some sleep! I hope y'all enjoyed these. I'm doing quite well here...I get to draw aliens with friends, what more can you ask for?
In closing, I'll leave you all with some of the sketches I didn't post for last week's 'Generous Bubblewhale'. I went through a few pages of sketchbook on that one, let me tell you! But these are some highlights and you can see how my thought process works if you're interested!
Enjoy!
-Nick

Characters Aplenty!

Characters!
Characters for every disposition and sensibility! Characters with crinkly skin! Characters with glowing pustules! Characters with 'quatrifurcated' beaks!
Another week, another set of characters for your viewing pleasure. Pretty excited about this week's set! It was a very open assignment...all we are asked to do was to design a positive character in cool colors, and a negative character in warm colors! It was particularly fun because I was able to just let go and play...which I definitely how I do my best work. I tend to choke up when I'm intellectualizing the process too much. It's funny how easy it is to silence your imagination when doing these sorts of exercises and stress overly on how the characters will be received. I just tried to envision these more intuitively and less analytically...think about context and story and mood. I went through a TON of pages in my sketchbook really quickly on these...something my Pen & Ink teacher said about loosening up and letting your own idiosyncrasies really enter into the work helped me to approach this week fresh. Anyways, I had a blast (but not much sleep!) And I really hope y'all like them.

Below are some sketches from the previous week (I know, I never posted them). It's funny...for all the past alumni of this class online, I don't think I've ever seen anyone post the results of this particular assignment. It was surprisingly challenging. We had to design an appealing angular, asymmetrical character and an unappealing round, symmetrical character. So there were my solutions. They're pretty "meh" but they worked for the assignment alright...

Anyways, that's all for this week. Hope you're enjoying these! I'm definitely enjoying the work. This week is going to be a doozy! We're teaming up into groups and tackling a complete redesign of the main cast of Titan A.E. ! I'm so pumped for it!
See you next week!

-Nick

Mercy and Apathy

Mercy

Apathy

Another week is over and with it arrive two more characters from Shanth Enjeti's Character Creation class! This week we did a slightly modified version of our last assignment...we were asked to design two characters based respectively on traits we admire and don't admire in others. So (with the full realization that I went a little off the conceptual deep end with these) here are Mercy and Apathy.
Apathy was a tricky one...I ended up with a very intense version of apathy, which belies my editorial opinion on the state of apathy. I went through a number of completely different designs on this...I covered some ridiculous territory (blind, shriveled knights in baby-harvesting machines etc). But I'm happy with this design overall.
Mercy I pretty much overshot completely, in favor of a character design I was kind of in love with. I'm pleased with the outcome, but I'm not sure it communicates the concept of mercy very accurately to a wide audience. What I was thinking was this (with the definition of mercy essentially being kindess/charity despite the right to justice): the character has set aside his natural perogative to prey upon the birds, in favor of embracing them and setting aside his "right". yeah.
:p
Anyways, it's been a good week! Crits went pretty well on these (they were both assigned as cel-shaded, but I couldn't help going in and rendering Mercy after class on Friday was over). And life is otherwise good, and God is better. I've got more work to do, so I can't sit here and blog much more, but I hope you enjoy these!

-Nick

Lustful and Carefree

Lust

Carefree

Psalm 126

When the LORD brought back the captives to Zion,
we were like men who dreamed.

Our mouths were filled with laughter,
our tongues with songs of joy.
Then it was said among the nations,
"The LORD has done great things for them."

The LORD has done great things for us,
and we are filled with joy.

Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like streams of the Negev.

Those who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.

He who goes out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with him.

What a passage, huh? That's pretty much my favorite verse right now...it's been a real encouragement. And there's the second week of Character Creation! This week we had to design two characters...one embodying our best trait and one embodying our worst. So, here they are!
I felt it was an opportunity to be a little uncomfortably honest and open up the discussion. I'm convinced that (with the Lust piece), though the theme may be gross and most people would prefer to avoid it altogether, it should be openly addressed and so put more thoroughly to death!
So, I think the Psalm puts the two pieces in context. Only through Christ is there victory, and how!
I certainly didn't set out to make something gratuitously "dirty" or inappropriate...and I hope nobody's offended by this sort of thing. I just wanted to be honest, and it's really important to me not to make light of evil. To call sin "sin" is really vital! And to put that in context with Joy and freedom! (That's a whole 'nother conversation...but I feel like even in stories geared towards 'kids', evil should be honestly portrayed. The Bible doesn't skimp on it's accounts of sex, death, war and cruelty and neither should we!) Anyways, I hope you can enjoy and appreciate these as such. I can ramble on, but I'd hope these two stand on their own in tension. Hopefully it provokes some good thought and conversation.

Carefree just sort of came together this week for the assignment, but the Lust design I've been wanting to do since last year's seniors completed this same assignment! The actual design has changed drastically since it's original incarnation, and you'll remember the crotch-arm from a previous piece, perhaps?

Anyways, here are some of the recent sketches in progression to that final piece:

Also, I forgot to post one last little color study I did at the end of the summer...it's a palette I want very badly to revisit...I'll leave you with it:

Enjoy!
-Nick

Back to School

Hey all!

Sorry for the long silence...but I've been busy prepping to come back to school and now I am here and the Academic year has kicked off! I've just handed in my first assignment for the year and I thought I'd share it with everyone.
This year has started off pretty excitingly...there's a lot of neat work to do and a lot of cool things going on on campus, not only art related. I'm heading off this weekend for the RISD Christian Body retreat, so I'll be out of communication for a bit, but it should be fun...so even if you can't reach me you can be confident that I am having a good time despite it all ;)

Anyways, so far this year has begun very well. It's busy: I'm an RA, full-time senior, and President of the RISD Christian Body, but all those things are really exciting and I really wouldn't have it any other way! On September 7th I turned 21 years old and had my first legal stateside drink...I wanted to make sure that my experience was a memorable one, so rather than get smashed, I got some friends together and we all went to the local Renaissance Faire and I got Mead and poofy pants!
*yay!*
Also: I got to go see Sontata Arctica open for NIGHTWISH in mass two weeks ago. It was AMAZING. I'm still reconstructing my face. Man...SO cool...

So...the ART!
I'm in Character Creation this semester, which is awesome since it's with one of my absolute favorite professor's ever: Shanth Enjeti. So I've just handed in the first week's assignment. Which was, essentially, to "impress him". Yeesh.
So I took the opportunity to debut another character I've been itching to do from the Alfonse and Domingoverse. Well, three actually! Introducing: Pito, Zee'doh and Jin!

Without giving too much away: Pito's a member of a troupe of traveling performers. He lifts heavy things, lights the stage-lights, and reaches for things on the shelf that are too high up for others to grasp. He is gregarious, mute, enormous, and loyal to a fault...he is especially beloved by the troupe's pair of acrobatic twins: Zee'doh and Jin, who are often seen riding around on Pito's shoulders.

And that's all I'm sayin!
So, since this is the blog, you get some of the prep sketches! I've been tossing around the idea of Pito for a while...but these are just the recent versions. It took me FOREVER to find a face I was happy with for him!

So that's just some of the stuff I'm currently working on...Hopefully I'll get some time to show y'all the other stuff that's going on. And next week there will be two more characters to show by Friday! :) Right now, I'm off to catch a car to New Jersey!
Enjoy!

-Nick