From The Vault: Li'l Jose

I was looking through some of my files today and I came across this one.  My friend and great artist Rod always hands off a drawing across the bar at work and just cracks me up.  you can see some of his drawings on his blog The satchel of life.  Check it out when you get a chance.  

Anyway Jose is a food runner at our restaurant and Rod just makes and awesome rendition of him.  I had to import it onto my mac and mess vectorize it in Adobe Illustrator and color it in Adobe Photoshop.  

I just love this, he reminds me of a chicano Pikachu doll or something....

BBQ Invite

I was looking in the vault and found an invite I made for my kids birthday BBQ party.  It's been about a year and I have to design another one.  We had a great time, the wife and I rented out this park and invited all the kids friends.  We had volley ball, softball and a bocce tournament as well all the food you eat.  I brought the ipod and ran it through some speakers it was a blast.

Samurai Champloo

I have been looking through some of my old files, to try and post them up on the net.  i have never really been good about keeping up with that sort of stuff, so I am making an effort about it.  Anyway I figure it will make for at the very least content for the blog and will keep my posts regular.  

I found this little pic.  I had just gotten my cintiq and wanted to test it out by coloring in some line art.  At he time I was watching the entire Samurai Champloo run.  An awesome mix of animation, hip-hop and Japanese samurai culture.  Three things that fascinate me on a constant basis.  (I have a idea that I keep tying to outline called Codename: Hip-Hop Samurai) something I will eventually write and direct but not until I have access to the type of funding on the scale of a summer block buster (so who knows when that will be).  Anyway you should check out that series.  It rocks!


So back to the pic, right.  I was just testing out color on the line art.  I thought it came out decent.  What do you guys think?

From The Vault: Vita is Video Games

 

I was digging through the vault again and I came across this logo that I created a couple of years ago.  It was part of an idea I had for producing a podcast on video games.  My good friend Pete Vita is a master when it comes to knowing the inside scoop on the industry.  I was looking for something to make that would hone my skills at all around production of content.   

I remember taking this picture at my job one night as I hung out with Pete.  I was talking about the idea of creating this podcast based on him and his knowledge of video games.  of course he said Yes. I literally snapped this pic when he agreed. 

I sent the pic over to my good friend Rod, a great artist, he runs his own blog The satchel of life, go check out out if you haven't yet, it is hysterical. 

On the left you'll see the illustration he made.  I brought it into Adobe illustrator and made a vector drawing out of it.  There I made the titles and imported all of that into Photoshop for color purposes. 




From there it was pretty easy to import all of that into either Motion or After Effects.  I used them both on a regular basis but recently I have proffered After Effect.  I was able to keep everything on it's own layer.  I made the music up in Garageband, they offer of array of sounds that you can throw on a timeline and just try different  stuff.  it was a fun little program to mess with.  I have no musical inclination and it helped me out a lot.  

I figured why not use all the characters from video games we played as kids, so it was just googling the names of them and bringing them into Photoshop and basically creating a green screen around them and then keying it out in After Effects where you can move everything around.

I would have liked to see this take off.  I thought it had a lot of potential, especially with how popular video games are and how powerful a marketing tool social media is.  Oh well.  I can say I did learn a lot from this project.