One of them that also caught my eye was their line, “Canvasworks“. It’s basically a canvas of black and white art but a part of it (such as the clock) works as it is intended. It’s pretty cool to think that originality and innovation can be this simple. Their works are mostly black and white so it gives off this minimalist style. So, I’ll leave it to you to visit their website to discover what other neat things they’ve designed!

As you can see above, the initial idea was like a weird mash-up of neat organization often found in corporate websites with the artsy touch of post-its, thumbtacks, and handwritten notes. The blank space would have some header image that I had not thought up yet at the time. After thinking about it some more, I scrapped this design and began thinking of some elements that I have been interested in lately and that is: coffee and birds!

I took the basic colors of coffee (and other related elements) and used it as my color theme. I was lost when I was thinking of what to use as a header image. I decided on something fun people would likely do during the summer like a carnival, hence the ferris wheel. I found a beautiful picture taken by Troy McCullough and decided that it’d be perfect (although a little random) to use as my header image. At this time, I was heavily inspired by creative paper art and adapted that to my layout as well in the form of subtle paper cut-outs. Since it’s summer time, there must be birds in my theme! As a side note, it’s also a shameless plug to my recent short film, Sqawk, which is about a bird who got kicked out of the nest. Most of the bird silhouettes used throughout this layout were brushes from Obsidian Dawn and Nate, although there are specifically two birds somewhere in this layout that were drawn by me. I’ll leave you guessing which ones those are.

After creating a mock-up in Photoshop, I converted it into XHTML and CSS and then split that up into segments for the WordPress theme. Unfortunately during coding, there was a problem involving the footer area that I could not solve and had to sacrifice a portion of the swirl design found in the footer. It’s too bad but at least it’s working fine now. So that was my entire process! I apologize for not having any sketches of my ideas to share. I’m afraid they’re too messy and hiding them from the public will certainly save me from embarrassment.

The year 2009 went by so fast, it’s unbelievable! I got accepted into the local animation internship so I’ll be busy with that next semester starting January. While I don’t have new year’s resolutions (yet), I am working on some renovation during this break so be looking forward to that soon. And of course, I’ll definitely be trying to squeeze in work on a new short film during next semester if I’m able to handle it. So have a Happy New Year everyone!

For my final animation class this semester, we’re collaborating on two short films one short film. Production is already under way for one of them and everyone created concept art and character designs (and they were all so incredibly awesome by the way)! So here is my concept depicting the two main characters. I decided to try my hand at digital painting and this is the result.

This was done entirely in Adobe Photoshop using my tablet. I admit, it is very annoying to draw large fine lines in Photoshop because I’ve grown accustomed to Manga Studio’s line smoothing feature. So I didn’t draw any outlines and started out with painting. The major problem in this painting is the lighting. I’ve done some more touch-up at the end but it still does not seem to be illuminating the characters correctly. And because of the light, I should’ve added more depth and shadows to pop them out more.

I’ve also been assigned to do sequence design for one scene in the film so I’m pretty psyched up. I’m already getting all these ideas in my head. I’m sad this is my last animation class so I’ll definitely have to give it my all!

The shirt designs I did back in July were finally approved and printed. I was in charge of designing Alliance Bible Church’s special 10th anniversary shirts. The colors were of their choosing and they chose bright green and orange (not shown) for the T-shirts, dark purple and dark green (not shown) for the polo shirts. Since this was my very first official shirt design, I was pretty nervous about how it would turn out, especially with the gradient in the logo. But it turned out just like I thought it would! This was actually pretty fun and I’m excited to do more in my spare time.

Actually, long before I designed that, I took my shot at doing a tribal design and this was what I came up with. This is just a mock-up, since it was done for fun; it is not printed. Not much thought went into the design as I just experimented with lines. In the end, I seemed to have drawn “31″ for unknown reasons.

By the way, what is my attachment to “yesterday” I wonder? My web comic was titled “Tale of Yesterday”. The short story was titled “Something Amiss” but I felt that “From Yesterday” feels more well-rounded without giving away too much.

What kind of layout do I want for my blog? What are the commonly used elements on the blog for my readers? After I thought about that, I sketched out some general layout and graphic designs. Much like the design for this blog, I wanted to incorporate lots of swirls. I also wanted to show my latest works for each category on the main page. As you can see in the screenshot below, I mapped out all the sub sections that I was going to make.

I then went into Photoshop to create my mock-up and here is the result. I chose a bright green/yellow summery theme since I seem to have a liking for that. Because it’s an artsy portfolio, I went crazy on the grunge effects. Here is the result so far. I then took my mind off it for a while and when I came back to it, I found that it’s a bit too bland for a portfolio. So it’s back to the drawing board. Here’s my second attempt below at making it more artistic and nice. I thought this would’ve been the final product but I gave it some time. Actually, too much time. I sort of left it there and went to finish my animation final for this past semester. Anyway, after I finished that, I came back to this and found that it’s just too flashy and noisy with all the swirls and colors. Sigh, back to the drawing board again.

I was more happy with this design above because of the neat and clean corporate look. At the same time, it’s very cute with the characters interacting with the page contents. I went with this and created more variations of the characters for the footer. I wanted to make them in the style of my comic strips for Ka Leo, “Life’s Wonders”.

Here’s the final product! While I did away with the characters in the header area, I made a character for the “contact me” link in the footer instead. I went one-step further to make it animated. Since at this time I have no knowledge of Flash yet, the only thing I can do is to make a hover effect using the image replacement technique. In this way, when a user hovers over the link, it would change the picture to a smiley face. This image has become my favorite part of this design.

Surprisingly, the CSS for this design was not too difficult. It was very easy to get it working. The only hard part was getting it to work in IE6. I know that it wastes time to edit the design for an outdated browser but I must at least make it look presentable instead of leaving it as a broken layout. Thank goodness for alternate IE6-only stylesheets! At this time, I thought it might be a good idea to integrate it into WordPress. I had not done this before so I was quite worried but it turned out pretty well!

Finally, the portfolio is done! I did change the latest work showcase on the main page as updating each time to include the words and hover effect would be too time-consuming so I just settled for plain images. If you have any constructive criticism on this design or ways to make it work better, please feel free to leave a comment. And I’m happy to announce that I’ll be starting freelancing so please check out the services that I offer.

It’s official, the animated short is now titled “Sqawk” instead of “Rawk”. We had to turn in the animation we had done so far as well as a film poster today to show Max Howard when he comes to class next Tuesday. He’s in Hawaii for an animation festival. And here are the posters. I created two because I was experimenting in Illustrator but I ended up printing the first one at Kinko’s. I used their glossy card stock and it looked so cool!

The deadline for this film is May 17th. That includes the submission packet for the Hawaii International Film Festival as well. I hope I’ll make it. But making films is so fun! We had a bonding session with the class today at Yogurtland. Pretty fun, I cannot imagine going our separate ways after next semester. We only have one more class together.

I forgot to take pictures of my work-in-progress so I have no pictures to show what it looked like before I added clay. Basically, I used 1/8″ armature wire and bended it into the skeleton of a bird (head, neck, spine, legs, etc). I drilled two holes into the wooden platform and dropped the ends of the wire through it, then bended it on the other side so that the figure would hold upright. For the body parts that require large masses of clay (the head, and the body), I wrapped foil around the wire and shaped it into a ball shape for the head and an egg shape for the body. Then I added Super Sculpey on top of it.

Super Sculpey is easy to work with compared to clay because it is not messy. It feels like play-doh except you can bake it in the oven like normal clay. It says on the box that it’s non-toxic but just in case, wash your hands before eating! Another advantage to Super Sculpey is that it does not harden (but it’s recommended you complete your figure as soon as possible). It took me two days to complete this. The next day, it was still as soft as it was the day before. Here’s another picture.

My major hassle was smoothing the bumpiness. I was really caught up in it and almost ran out of time adding the beak and eyes. Even now, it’s still not perfectly smooth because even if you lightly touch it, you’ll leave some sort of fingerprint or bump. I really like the beak but had immense trouble with the eyes since I only have a thin amount of clay in that area and right underneath it was the foil. After that hassle, I no longer felt like working on the feet so I just left it like that.

If you didn’t know me, I actually hate ceramics and crafts with a passion! I’m really bad and clumsy with my hands. But to be able to make something that resembles anything like a bird is a miracle for me. Comparing this bird to my fifth grade clay sculpture of a kind-hearted monster (which I won’t even attempt to show the public) is like comparing a semi-shiny quarter to decomposed matter, so I’d say I’ve immensely improved (but am still not good).

Anyway, after this, normally one would take this into an oven and bake it for around 15 or 30 minutes. But since I have an ominous feeling that something would break or fall off (just like clay did in the past because they’re evil like that), I won’t be baking it. Maybe I will someday after I finish animating my film.