NEW Painting Update!

So, my first week of my internship is going pretty darn well. I think I'm making a good impression on the team. I've had to do a bunch of grunt work, but it looks like next week I should be able to start doing some animation stuff. I've already started to do some style sheets and character exploration of the company's characters. The characters are already cool as puppets and illustrations, but they don't work as animated characters. So, I've been sketching away to get more appeal out of them as well as make them work-able in the 3D space without losing the identity established with what the company already has. I think I'm on the right track, but I'll find out on Monday whether or not the boss approves. And I'll also find out if I'm allowed to post some of those drawings up on here.

But in the meantime, while I'm still going through my new sketchbook of train drawings and cataloging them, I have a new painting to show off! It's quite different in style comparatively to my last two paintings, but I think I'm starting to understand my "style" of painting.

I'm actually quite proud of how this turned out. I'm going to keep painting like this for a while until I feel comfortable again to start hitting gradients. The goal eventually is to be able to render my paintings as if they were rendered in 3D. Slowly and surely!

Stay tuned for my next update with more sketches from the subway!

MOAR! MOAR! MOAR!

Okay! So life has been extremely eventful lately! I've been going to a couple of NYU game conventions, which I must say were VERY eye-opening. There were quite a few things that I knew about the industry, but only became very apparent to me when I was able to see and experience it firsthand. It's been extremely informative for what I have going on in the wings right now. Unfortunately, I can't speak much about it. But what I can say that is what's a-brewing is extremely exciting! I plan on going to as many New York conventions as possible so I can absorb more and more information.

On top of all that vague excitement, I am proud to announce that I have just gotten an internship with Super Sprowtz (supersprowtz.com) in Brooklyn! The team over at Super Sprowtz are doing some really cool things that I feel can have a HUGE impact on our youth today. I'm so amped up to share my talents and skills with them to help them reach the level of success that I can already see that they're capable of achieving! Ohhhh, the ideas are already a-brewing for this too!

I am working on all cylinders right now and don't know how to stop! But I suppose that's the snowball effect that I've been hearing so much about! Anyhow! Enough banter! Here's a painting I've been working on.

I think I'm done with this painting. I feel like everytime I go back into it, I'm noodling too much. But even with that said, I had a LOT of fun painting this. I learned quite a bit and I'm stoked to get started on my next painting!

Sketches from the Subways... And other random places an NYC

So, as I expected when I was first thinking about moving to New York, there is no shortage of people to draw and time to practice. With most of the transit across the city being via the subways, I've been soaking up as much of it as possible. I've yet to let my sketchbook lead me all over the city on a drawing fest, but I think I will have to buy another sketchbook and dedicate that sketchbook to days like that because honestly in the 4th week of me living here, I've nearly blown through a semi-used sketchbook already. Perhaps this isn't a big deal to some of my really savvy illustration friends, but for someone that has just rediscovered his love of drawing, that's astounding. It just makes me wanna buy more sketchbooks and let my hand go.

But enough with the gushing over my amorous affection towards life right now. Here's some of the stuff that I've been doing.

I think I'm finally getting over being afraid of making the "wrong" lines. Hopefully with more practice I'll be able to start seeing what I can really do.

Bed-Stuy Do or Die

WHOA! I can't believe it's already been three weeks since I've moved to New York... Give or take. I've been feel mighty, mighty inspired as of lately. The amount of drawing I've been doing is incredible. Being in such a big city like New York has definitely got me working on all cylinders. I'll be updating this weekend with plenty of pictures from my sketchbook. So many characters to draw in this subways. I feel like my hands really coming alive. Which comes to the reason of this blog post!

I finished my painting of Mistress Missy. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. It was a good learning experience and a good start into get myself back into digital painting. I'm really doing my best to understand how to use color properly and how to really set the mood for a painting. I think the only way I'm going to get better is to make some bold choices and ride them all the way through. I'm really learning to accept the "mistakes".

This is just a preview of a much larger concept painting that I'm making. First of many airship concepts that I'll be making. I had a compulsion to start this one night and so I did. It was basically an exploration painting to try and dig out this story that my buddy Miguel Lantigua have been conceptualizing. More on that in the future.

That's it for this update. Stay tuned for some sketchbook pages this weekend!

Painting Missy

So with my big move to New York settling down, my precious, precious free-time is definitely being dominated by painting. The transition back to working on my last animation piece will begin on Monday, the start of the second week of my New York residency. But for now, I'm really enjoying digitally painting again. I feel like I've learned quite a bit from painting this piece which I hope helps me with the speed of my next painting.

Anyhow, here's some rough work-in-progress.

Mistress Missy

Here's a quick little update with a drawing that I've been working on.

This is only a start to the drawing right now, but so far I'm liking how it's feeling. I do feel like it may grow into a bigger illustration, but I wanted to focus on getting Mistress Missy (a character created by my talented friend Eric Drobile, co-creator of the HateFarm web-comic) and see if I could get her right. Stay tuned for later developments and the eventual digital-painting version of her.

ANIMATION!

Alright! So, been getting some of my illustration stuff that I've been doing lately up on here, but now what about animation?! Well, wonder no more! Below are my demo reel and my Senior Thesis from 2008!



Demo Reel 2013 from Daniel Demerin on Vimeo.

Drawing Update (2/2)

Ah! So! Finally! The latter half to my last update! Kinda got side-tracked in terms of updating. Full of plenty of working on animation and tweaking my demo-reel fortunately which will be part of my next post... which will not take another month to post up.

So the first part of the update is a couple characters that are from my children's book I'm writing. I suppose if the last update was the "good guys" from the story, these next characters are the "baddies".

So these two young gentleman here are Samosh and Dalos, the two bullies that pick on Icarus in my story. I'm thinking of renaming them, but I'm not going to concern myself too much about that since I'm still going through different variations of them. These drawings are just the initial ones I threw down from some old designs I have.

Now this little guy is essential a hybrid of a bear and a lion. I thought about naming them "Liears" in my story, but it's awkward to say and I think most people see it as "liars". I may just call it a maned-bear or just a bear, but I'm still toying with the idea. If anyone is struck with a name for these animals, by all means leave a comment about them. Any feedback is appreciated!

And finally a hero shot.

That's just a thumbnail of a big drawing I will be making which will eventually become a digital painting. Pretty stoked to explore this piece.

So I was looking through some Al Hirschfeld drawings and decided to take a stab at them. I love his style so much! The way he can convey so much movement and life with a single line is incredible. It was definitely an interesting exercise attempting to capture his style. I'll probably do a couple more studies of his stuff. I'm doing my best to pick up the sensibilities of line quality from his drawings. 

Also took a little stab at drawing from a few shots from Tangled.

Next are few pages of caricature studies. 

I definitely enjoy drawing the cartoony stuff and searching within that realm. But the more and more I think about, I feel like I need to hone in on gesture drawing again. Next are a few gestures that I did in preparation for my next animation piece.

I think it would be a good idea looking into finding a figure class that I can do once a week so I can work on my gestures. That or setting aside a few hours during my weekends to sit around downtown and people watch and sketch. Probably a good break out of the routine will open up some new avenues and turn on some lightbulbs!


Next posts to come: Demo Reel 2013 and a blast from the past... My Senior Thesis back from the old college days! DUN DUN DUUUUUUN!

Drawing Update! (1/2)

Alright! Here we go! First OFFICIAL post for my new blog!

So, as I've mentioned in the last post, I've been hard at work, drawing and animating like a mad man to be able to put some content up on this blog. Unfortunately I don't have a scanner so all of these drawings were taken by my phone camera and then adjusted in Photoshop. I feel the drawings themselves lost a bit of personality because some of the marks I was making when I was drawing these got lost. Oh well! They still read pretty well in spite of that! BEHOLD! A massive update of drawings that I've been doing!

So this guy is a shaman character I made for a story concept I've been working on for a while. I took quite a bit of inspiration from Rafiki to get a grasp of what shapes to base this character on and I feel pretty good about the direction this character has been going. I'm continuing to push these expressions and start really digging into how his overall body shape is.

So the next load of drawings are actually party of a children's book called "Over the Mountains" I started writing back in college. Been revisiting it and redrawing the characters in the story. I'm still in the process of finishing the story, but I felt like I had to really dig into their character designs before I can write the ending of the story. A lot of these drawings are exploratory. I'm closing in on how to draw the main character, Icarus (the little boy). Already starting to play with drawing him in different poses to match some of the expressions I've been making. Here are are few examples.

These next two characters are also from the same story. One is Icarus' mom and the other is Mr. Belay, Icarus' teacher. I'm still exploring how to draw them. They're more or less close to my liking in terms of their design, but they're still open to exploration. I'm probably going to do some more research before I totally solidify their designs though.

Next is something I'm working on that features Mistress Missy from the infamous Hatefarm.com, a web-comic co-created by a super good friend of mine, Eric Drobile. It is still in a very conceptual stage so the possibilities of utter depravity and frightening arousal are still very much up in the air. Needless to say, I'm going to have fun with this one.

So, this is the first drawing update out of two that I'm throwing up here. I have another couple pages of drawings I'm going to post up along with two animations I've been working on and and polishing. I'll also be throwing up my a link to demo-reel on here once I have that squared away. I'm still hard at work putting together my portfolio and all the aforementioned things so stay tuned. I just wanted to get this post up so I can at least show a few of the things I've been working on!

Stay tuned for the next post! More drawings and animation!

Any feedback/critique/comments are always welcomed!

FIRST POST!

Hey guys! So here is the premiere of my new blog! FINALLY!

So, I've been hard at work getting my act together and been drawing and animating my butt off. Been really doing my best to show all the facets of what I can do. But I'm still in the process of compiling everything that I have right now so this first post is just so I can take that first step on getting on the blog-train! My goal is to be updating this on a week-to-week basis just for the sake of making sure I'm keeping myself in check.

So without any further ado, FIRST POST!



( Next post will contain drawings and animation... I promise! )