More Sketches and Another Steampunk Creature

I saw that a lot of people were coming to my blog to look for steampunk drawings so I thought I'd throw another one up with a couple other sketches.  I love sketching and I'm glad that I can share my sketches with other people who come to visit my blog, even if it is just in passing.   Behold! O_o

 This guy is based off of a very disturbing break in that happened a while back.  This is my mental interpretation of the criminal.

 This is based off of a cool picture that I saw in 3D World magazine.  I took the basic form and added all kinds of creepy stuff. (unfinished) (It says To Babysan: my infinite inspiration)

 This one came from my mind when I was studying art nouveau and wanted to put my own spin on it.

This was something that was inspired by Brian Despain, my favorite artist.

Here is the steampunk degu.  If you don't know what a Degu is, I recommend that looking them up.  We had 2 of them in Budapest and they were the sweetest little rodents EVER! (Not Legal in California, just FYI)

So that's it. Hope you enjoyed it :)

Learning to Animate: The Animator's Survival Kit

I got this book called The Animator's Survival Kit for Christmas this past year. I have been meaning to read it but have not had the chance since it accidentally got put into storage. Anyways, I thought that I would start reading it after I found it and was totally blown away by the first few pages! I have heard from other people and read on blogs that it was an absolute necessity but never really took it to heart. I think I will now. I feel as if I will learn more from this than the 4 years I had in college! I'm going to continue to read it but as a VERY quick exercise I decided to try my hand at a quick animation to see how it would work out. I made it into a GIF but couldn't post it so here was what the process looked like.

Update: I did another animation. This one was not nearly as jumpy as the first and that's why I'm uploading this one and not the other one.

Have You Taken A Door Off Its Hinges Today?

Today was an unusually boring day. That is until Val, Leah, and I decided to get some of Val and I's stuff out of our outside storage shed. We went out to open it and, what do ya know, it wouldn't open.... of course :P. So we began a very rigid search for a solution. We tried some graphite lubricant that we had. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Next we tried some WD-40. Again, it was a big fat failure. Since none of the basics worked we decided to try some drastic measures. We looked up ways to fix the problem and saw that you could just remove the door knob. Duh! It seemed so obvious! Unfortunately, the screws were on the inside of the door. Great.... So we decided to go for the only thing that would work, taking the hinges off the door. So this is what we did! In order to properly document our process and leave notes for future knowledge seekers of door removal, Leah made a list. Here it is:

Oh! and don't forget the "hi five". It's probably the MOST important step!


I also found some of my old sketch books and thought it would be fun to post some pictures! I'll start that tomorrow. Val also found some of her old journals and plans on emailing our old hostesses in France that we lived with! How exciting is that!