Arrival

 

I discovered that this ink brush I have is very useful. It emulates the bumpiness of lines that is drawn on textured paper, and also leaves a clear solid marks similar to inking in real life. I used this brush in the forest piece I did last week and instead of incorporating into layers of painting, I tested to see how the brush works when used for inking by itself. Here’s my result and I think it turned out okay. I like the brush but I’m not exactly familiar with this method of work and I think there’s more to uncover. More to come!

Intersect

This painting was supposed to be rough color practice but I ended up liking it so I went more in depth. I’ve been noticing the amount of buildings I draw in comparison to organic environments, so I decided to revisit the mother nature.

Ode to the Bouncer

I just started tumblr and that gave me excuse to make updates so I started doodling a lot of pictures. Just kidding, I just graduated and have nothing to do at the moment so I'm just spending more time with my lover art. So anyways, I painted a character named Cherry from a music video called Ode to the Bouncer by Studio Killers, its a super catchy song with awesome sass and perky visuals. If anyone’s interested, all of their songs have great rhythmic dance feel, and their music videos (I think there are only two so far) are very well made. Its worth checking out!

Aerodynamos Teaser

So here's the latest update on my animation thesis Aerodynamos! I finished enough footage to compile into a short teaser for the animation. Here are also some of the updated concept designs including 3d projections and characters. From now until graduation, I will be focusing on the designs for the project instead of production so that I can make improvements on my portfolio. After graduation I'm planning to finish up the rest of the animation so stay tuned!

Self Portrait and Color Study

I've been working on a lot of thesis lately and it was really nice to do something different and refreshing. Fist up is a self portrait I did for MICA senior party's poster. I had fun using a slightly more saturated pallet than my usual style. The second drawing is from a character design class I TA. For yesterday's in-class assignment we exchanged each student's characters and designed environments that are intended to complement the scene, character, and bring sense of narrative interaction. I participated in this assignment and drew a scene from Kate Guthrie's story about a protagonist who lost his memory and tries to put his fragmented memories together by using a psychological therapy machine that allows him to dive into a cyber world of his own mind. With this study, I focused on how to convey mood and tensions through color. I had a lot of fun choosing complementary colors and resolving compositional problems through color intensity and differences. I'll put up the thesis progress in the coming days!

Thesis - Shot 2

Here's my current progress on the thesis. I changed the storyboard a little bit and instead of having the camera do a long spinning descent from the top of the tower into the interior, I decided to just have side scroll to avoid having to deal with too much extra detail. Over all this shot took 11 individual paintings to complete along with a 3D set up. The 2nd shot of the thesis has been by far a big challenge for me because there were so many technical problems along the way. Although at first I thought that this technique was some kind of dream trick that allowed me to do anything I imagined, I soon realized it had limitations. In the beginning I planned to have Tiger's head in the shot and the camera would pan sideways across its head. But I realized that this was almost impractical due to the amount of time it would take me to model a surface for the projection and painting the tiger texture from multiple angles. The ears of the tiger became a big issue because for it to look fully projected as the camera slides across, I would need to break apart the model into smaller parts and draw textures for left side and the right side of the ears, not to mention there are two ears and a whole face to worry about. So the solution I came up with is to get rid of the head all together. Instead, I just had the tiger's body in the shot and thankfully that was manageable. Still, modeling a mock up of a donuts shape and then painting in two sets of textures from different angles was not as easy as I imagined it to be.

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Another thing I had trouble with is the discontinuous work flow. So far my workflow for projections have been 1) building a primary 3D set up from a sketch, 2) drawing in basic forms to fill the environment, 3) camera test, 4) painting in final details, 5) repeat 3-5 until everything is filled. This allows me to make sure each projections works properly but since I had to paint in everything by parts, keeping the color work together as a whole was a challenge. This shot took me almost 2 weeks and it probably took too long considering the amount of time I have left to finish this project. So far I would like to have at least 1 shot a week. I have around 23 shots total so I might be in a bit of trouble if I want to get this done by May. I'm just hoping that some shots wont take as long and that I would get faster. If worst comes worst, I may have to cut down a few shots and make a shorter animation. I hope I won't have to do that. Crossing fingers.

LAIKA works

Here are the links to the LAIKA commercial works I did over the summer. The clients include: Toys R Rus, Honda, and Orville Redenbucker. I was working as a concept artist making characters, environments, set designs, layouts, and colors. Unfortunately I cannot show the raw drawings I did at LAIKA but here are the final products!

LAIKA - Toys R Rus Big Book from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Toys R Rus EX from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Toys R Rus BCSE from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Honda Pilot from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Orville Redenbacher Adios Trans Fat from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Orville Redenbucker Whole Grain from William Niu on Vimeo.