Tag Archives: pixar

September 12, 2010

Back for more

By jay

Well there I went again, falling behind in posting my daily images. Feels nice to be up to date again. How can I keep on top of it? Just need to draw earlier in the day! Invariably the reason I fall behind is by doing any of these drawings in the last twenty minutes before I go to bed. By that time I’m crashing fast and do a quick sketch, then collapse. So here’s to continuing to work towards not doing that anymore.

I had my first Pixar class last Tuesday evening, I’m really not used to night classes any longer! When I first started at this school I had lots of night classes, but eventually shifted towards early morning. It was much harder to actively concentrate, I need to have coffee a little later in the day and make sure to eat a good meal before heading to class. That’ll keep me charged up!

The class is really focused on the fundamentals of animation. My animation classes the past few semesters have been focused on more advanced topics and it’ll be really helpful for me to get back to the core skill set that I need to build.

Over at Sketchoholic they’ve started running drawing marathons during the week. The format is very similar to the Intensity Club or ChiuStream, in which there’s a topic that you have one hour to draw or paint for. In the case of the marathon, whoever gets the most votes chooses the next topic. They’ll run these back to back, usually doing around 2 to 3 at a time. I’ve started attending as much as my schedule allows and I want to keep up on it as much as I can, it’s really helpful to work with these types of deadlines.

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August 5, 2010

Hello World

By jay

I sure have fallen behind in posting my daily images. I think I’m almost three weeks behind, ouch! I’m taking a summer class, Color & Design, and it has been extremely time intensive. Last Thursday I was painting one of my finals, this one a landscape, for almost 13 hours straight. It has been hard to make the time for my personal drawings, so I’ve been doing a lot more sketches, rather than paintings.

I’m almost done though and while I had initially had no interest in this class, I’m very glad I took it. I’ve taken color theory before and so the thought of retaking such a class sounded like a drag. This class though ended up being more of a painting class and we just applied color theory to our projects. I like that.

I have a few work related projects that are really coming together, I’m having fun drawing in my style, but for others projects.

My main computer got hit by a virus of some sort yesterday, so I’m in the process of getting that taken care of. I really hate it when my computer goes down (for whatever reason). It ends up being a splinter in my mind that I can’t really forget about until I’ve fixed it. Luckily there’s a lot of scanning time involved so that’s allowing me to step away and get other stuff done.

Some exciting news, last Friday I got an email that I had been accepted into one of the Pixar animation classes. This class is taught at the Academy of Art, but has instructors from Pixar coming over to work with us and run the class. I’m looking forward to really nailing down my core set of animation skills and building out from there. A good goal for myself is to do more animation “studies”. The same idea as quick sketches in drawing, I need to be exercising my animation skills in smaller, easier to finish, projects. My drawing skills have been really benefiting from that type of exercise, it’s really time I applied that to animation as well.

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May 15, 2008

Animation Final, A Work In Progress

By jay

I’m just about done with finals week, I’m finishing up my perspective piece tonight (a three page comic) and then I’ll be done!

I turned in my animation project on Monday and got some nice feedback. It’s still far from finished, I unfortunately got way distracted by Lord of the Rings Online. I like where it’s going though and I’ll be finishing it up over the next week. In fact I’ll be working to have all the animations I did over this semester polished by June 30th, the deadline to submit demo reels for the Fall ’08 Pixar Class.

[display_podcast]

The premise for this animation is a businessman sits down at a park bench to eat his lunch, when he notices a group of pigeons watching him. He gets nervous and transfers to another bench, for a moment feeling safe, until he realizes there are even more birds in that area.

I have the first section blocked out, I need to add in the second bench section and then refine all the keys (as well as adding the pigeons and lunch box).

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December 26, 2007

A turning point perhaps

By jay

On Monday Kimi and I drove over to the Compusa in Emeryville, they’re closing down and we wanted to see what sort of deals they might have. As it turns out, not a lot at that point. We’ll check again in a few days and see what we can score.

A half block away we saw the Pixar Animation studio. It was pretty grand looking with a big archway and everything, I felt chills. I’ve always been so impressed with their storytelling and seeing how close they were to where I live really made the place seem approachable. I’m thinking of trying to get a job there. I do have some qualms about working for such a large company, but I’ll talk about that at another point.

I’ve always had a hard time disciplining myself and it has hurt my progress in the arts. I want to get better at drawing and animation, but I don’t put serious time into working on those skills. Instead I sit at my desk and think how much I want to be drawing, but I don’t draw. I have a mental wall that keeps me from getting started.

If I want to have any chance at working for a company such as Pixar I really need to focus. And so I’m going to try and do that. I have some story ideas I’ve had percolating in my mind that I’ll use as a training ground.

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