Critter Doodles

I hadn't been doodling outside of work for the sheer sake of it nearly enough over recent months - and given that practice is the best path to improvement, that just won't do. So, I've been cracking into a new sketchbook over the past few weeks whenever I am able. and drawing... whatever, really. I'll make an effort to start posting batches of sketches here.

That said, here's a couple of favorite recent doodles of the critter variety - a wary pup, a bemused bear, and a spider-shy giraffe. (I know that feel, Mister Giraffe. I know it well.)

-Mel

Sugar Rush Racer

Something quick and silly on the side. I keep seeing these great "Sugar Rush" themed fan characters cropping up all over the place. And who can blame folks, with as adorable as the designs happen to be from Wreck it Ralph? So, I'm jumping that bandwagon with bells on. Can't resist! This little lady's based on a favorite of mine: Sour apple candies.

Cheers,

Mel

Cameron

Cam, baby! Headshot 3 of 7 completed for Renee, this time of her character Cameron.

Cheers,
-Mel

AdoraBub

Heeere's Lil Bub! I had so much fun drawing the little gal, I thought I'd lend her some colors as well. Check out progress on the image on this post here, and Bub's blog here.

Cheers,

Mel

Fun with Lil Bub

 

It's worth noting that Lil Bub has been a huge source of smiles since discovering her blog recently. So it's really little wonder that a silly little doodle of her in my sketchbook this evening started to gain life of its own. I'm hoping to take colors on her further - she's been all sorts of fun to draw.

Thanks for the smiles, Lil Bub!

-Mel

Brunner

Completed character headshot 2 of 7 for Renee, this time of the leader of said characters, Brunner. I'm finding this collection to be a great opportunity to study lighting, and I'm learning a great deal. It's quite a bit of fun indeed.

Cheers,

Mel

Charity

I cannot put into words how good it feels to be painting on an illustrative basis again! It's a breath of fresh air, for certain. Here's the completed first of 7 headshots for the wonderful Renee Atkinson, of her original characters, in this case, it is the sassy miss Charity.

Also, I wanted to lend a tremendous THANK YOU to everyone here for checking out my friends at Alpha Omega Animation and I's recent Kickstarter relaunch. We did in fact reach our funding goal, and we couldn't have done it without you. Again, our whole group is deeply appreciative, and we look forward to doing you all proud with our further endeavors in the ARMSmasters Project.

Cheers,

Mel

ARMSmasters and Flight on Kickstarter!

Hi everyone! My apologies for my quietness and relative inactivity over the past few months. I've had the pleasure to be hard at work on a rather large scale project, and it has had my nose to the light table for as long. I'll be able to tell you more about this soon - I'm quite excited!

Also, great news! The animated action-adventure ARMSmasters project has returned for round two on Kickstarter! We have 30 days left in our fundraiser, and we have already reached 40% of our funding goal (Thank you SO SO MUCH to everyone who has already contributed and gotten us this far, we are elated and incredibly grateful!) So the momentum is strong. We have a bunch of exciting new updates to our production blog as well (Link below) which include new concept art and multiple proof-of-concept storyboard animatics.

If you would be so kind to check out the new Kickstarter, spread the word and lend if you are able, we would really appreciate it. And again, a HUGE thank yo to everyone for so much support. You guys inspire us daily!  

The ARMSmasters Kickstarter

The ARMSmasters Production Blog

The Official Website

Also of note, my talented friend and fellow CCS alumni Mel McCann now has a kickstarter up for her traditionally animated short film, Flight. Mel is a wonderful gal, and this film has a ton of heart and skill packed into it - I would love to see it reach its funding goals! Check out Flight on Kickstarter here!

Cheers,
Mel

A Color Design Exercise

 2008                                                2012

As a quick practice exercise outside of work-related-art this evening, I decided to grab an old PSD file from 2008 of a character of mine, and completely re-tackle the color design. I wanted to try to grasp the warmth and mood I'd hoped for but failed to attain a few years ago. Around 15 minutes of tinkering snagged me the newest version of the image, whose color I'm infinitely happier with. Thank goodness for an improved eye and skill with each year's passing experience.

Cheers,

Mel

CCS Film Showcase Article

Much thanks to Tiffany Esshaki for including my work is a recent article for candgnews.com. The article features information on the work by myself and a number of good friends of mine to be hosted at the CCS Film Showcase on, July 28th, by The Stratton Foundation. The article also mentions the ARMSmasters Project - promotion greatly appreciated as the Project itself furthers its Kickstarter campaign. You can read the full article here.

And as always, you can help make the ARMSmasters animated pilot episode a reality through our Kickstarter fundraiser, and get awesome swag for your donations!

Charity And The Boys - Completed Lines

Finally, line art complete for all 7 gangstas! The above are Voth, Brunner, Paz, Charity, Marquard, Zahn and Cameron on commission for Renee. These will be in full color, and are currently all completed up through the flat-color stage. Now, on to paint.

-Mel

New ARMSmasters Trailer Track

Check out our updated Animation Teaser for The ARMSmasters Project; now featuring a demo of music crafted just on our behalf by Andrew Prahlow who was an assistant composer on The Legend of Korra and Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness among other things. His generous donation of time and creativity yielded us the first of our ARMSmasters specific tracks and enabled us to update our teaser. Thank you, Andrew! More updates from this past week are forth coming on the ARMSmasters Production Blog.

Help make the ARMSmasters animated pilot episode a reality through our Kickstarter fundraiser, and get awesome swag for your donations!

Tyr In Action

Here's another quick collab with my buddy ~mikewinn - his drawing and flat colors, my lighting and shading of Tyr, one of the main characters from The ARMSmasters Project.

Want to see more of Tyr in action? Help us reach our funding goal on Kickstarter for ARMSmaster's animated pilot episode! (You'll get some awesome swag for your donation as well!)

I ended up unexpectedtly having quite the ARMSmasters ART weekend there - added some snapshots from my Art-and-XFiles-o-thon below.

Thanks, all!
-Mel

ARMSmaster's Aeslyn: Magic Caster

Another collaboration with Michael Winn - this is Aeslyn from The ARMSmasters Project. Mike drew and flat-colored this one, I added shading, lighting, and VFX.

For anyone who has not yet had the opportunity, I'd like to encourage you to check out our fundraising efforts for this animated pilot over on Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/760823342/the-armsmasters-project-the-animated-pilot

It's an exciting opportunity to not only make this action-adventure animation a reality, but to support Michigan artists and our local film industry.

How do Kickstarter donations work? Here's a great explanation from Mike:

Kickstarter is a crowd source funding website where you can back creative projects financially.(No withdraws happen from your bank account until after the end of the funding deadline)

As a result: If you have intentions of backing us and haven't done so - it's actually a good idea to just go ahead and pledge. You can always adjust your pledge amount afterwards and it helps push our project further by increasing our backer numbers and our current figures. The more backers we have and the higher our totals the more we get noticed, so please back us sooner rather then later if it is your intention to do so. :)

Thanks again!

- Mel

ARMSmasters on Kickstarter!

Hi everyone - great news! I am proud and excited to note that The ARMSmasters Project has officially launched onto Kickstarter!

We've set a goal of $25,000 to enable us to produce and finish a short film which will double as a brief animated pilot and introduction to the ARMSmasters animated series. We are extremely excited as well as ambitious because we want to be able to share this project with the world at large and expose what we've been working on to a wide audience.

With the help of backers, we will be able to truly focus on getting ARMSmasters developed with the attention to detail and the quality that it deserves and also in a -timely- manner, uninterrupted by the needs of other projects stepping in. Success on Kickstarter is a game changer in a lot of ways and we have high hopes it will open up many doors and enable us to push forward on this effort and on future ones as well.

 Please pass the word around and help us. We're going to need all the help we can get. We are going to be diligently campaigning on a weekly basis through our social networks and on as many sites as we can find that will allow us to push this project ahead. Furthermore, the ARMSmasters Production Blog will be updated more frequently now - on Monday's and on Friday's - to continue to keep you up to date on our progress and to share the plethora of back logged imagery and information we have to show you. So here's to a successful Day 1 Launch and a count down to seeing what we can accomplish.

Thanks everyone!

 -Mel & the AoA Team

AoA Art Book Pages

Another quick post for you all. My fiance Niles and I were recently invited to add our own artwork to the Art Of Alpha Omega Animation book printed and bound for showing at conventions - the latest addition of which premiered at Motor City. The book is basicaly a collective portfolio showing what each artist who is part of AoA can create - I was very pleased to be able to take part. Above are the pages I created for my section of the book.

Thanks for viewing! :)

-Mel

Motor City Comic Con 2012

Hi everyone! So, this past weekend was my first foray into a comic book convention, as I attended the Motor City Comic Con with my friends and artistic cohorts from the ARMSmasters Project crew, as a part of Alpha Omega Animation's artist alley table. Admittedly I'm still completely dazed from such an awesome experience, but suffice to say, the con was fantastic, the huge collection of artists gathered there were wildly inspiring, and the sheer quantity of amazing geek merchandise available from the vendors? Well, lets just say it was very hard to show any spending impulse control. I'm still amazed that the only thing I walked out with was a red shirt Star Trek house robe, because let me tell you - I wanted all of the things.

We had so much fun though, my friends, fiance and I - I was able to sell quite a few prints as well as create a number of on-the-spot sketch commissions for a bunch of lovely folks as well, which just added to the excitement. I'm already looking forward to next year's event!

A huge thanks to everyone I had the opportunity to speak to at the con - it was great to meet you , and your kind words and support mean so much. The AoA crew and I are already talking about attending more conventions this year - I'll let you know as soon as we have our tables booked, and where. For now - here's some photos from MCCC.

 A couple of the various sketches I created while there as well (Lots of requests for pretty ladies! lol. Including my own OC Remi, though, which was especially cool. Also pictured: Black Cat and Red Sonja.)

Cheers,
Mel

A Menagerie of Mugshot Sketches

A quick, sketchy update for you. Above are the rough sketch versions for all 7 headshots for Renee, cobbled together in a rough approximation of what their final layout will be once cleaned up and colored. Having a great deal of fun with these guys, as I always do with Ren's wonderful characters. The characters are (Top L-R) Vothan, Zahnen, Paz (Middle) Charity, (Bottom) Marquard, Brunner and Cameron.

-Mel

Proof of Life

Flats! I've had approximately nilch for time to work on anything outside of what's been an awesome, challenging, all around brilliant job recently - so this image hasn't received so much as a glance in a few months, since flat colors were completed. I'm still positively itching to get some paint work in edgewise on it (and personal projects as a whole) so.... hopefully soon. For now, here's the flats.

Also part of my Need-To-Somehow-Manifest-More-Hours-In-A-Day list are a series of great images I have lined up to create for my good buddy (And ridiculously talented artist/writer) Renee. Thought I'd post a couple of rough sketches for that lot as well.

Glad to get a few updates in edgewise!
As always, thanks for viewing.
-Mel

Javadoodle!

So in efforts to eek my work into yet another websphere, I just opened up a shiny new Tumblr blog dedicated to daily postings of completed pieces of mine from over the past couple of years - likely 2008 or so to present. It's called Javadoodle! And you can find it right here.

This will be particularly handy as I can queue several posts ahead to pop up each day, so regardless of being to-the-hilt busy recently, there will be continual updates. While that blog will be polished, complete-image based, my blog here will continue to be host to the latest images I create and the process work behind them all. So never fear - this blog will always be my firstborn (I'm such a terrible blog-mom, choosing favorites.)

Thanks for the looksee, all!

-Mel

Foxy Jake is Foxy

Any sleep for the night be damned - here's a twofor! Jake's commission, completed, and with that, my commission list (Apart from two projects for some awesome mates of mine - Images for Ren and a tattoo for Pat) is now squared away. Commissions will be closed until further notice, as my current studio gig has me fully committed otherwise (And having a blast, I must add.) As always, a tremendous THANK YOU to my commissioners both for their support and patience when pro work swoops in and scoops me away out of nowhere. You guys are amazing ♥

And now... to "Work-work."

Today is going to be very interesting, indeed.

Coffee. Now. Get.

-Mel

Cat Sass for Poeso

Finally managed to wrangle a little squeaker's worth of time to wrap up Darne's commission. On to Completing Jake's! Hope everyone is doing well. Thanks for viewing!

-Mel

TKP One-Shot Line Art

So as it happened, February was completely gobbled up by freelance concept work: Last week alone, I pulled over 80 hours, for example. That work appears to be leading to a full-time staff position with the studio, however, which is positively wonderful - I couldn't be happier.

I wanted to start adhering to more blog posts again, though, so here's something new: I drew this in January, actually, before this latest job and I crossed paths in full force: A large one-shot illustration of a number of characters of mine, from one of my own personal projects - the largest, in fact, being TKP. This drawing, really, is purely self indulgent - for the fun of it. I've completed flat colors as well, and will be painting away at it on the side, amongst job, commissions and other things as, hey, everyone needs that little extra fancy. TKP reminds me often why I do what I do - this crazy art for a living thing - the pure, honest, passionate creation of it all - for curious characters in far-off worlds. I love it.

-Mel

Checking In

Greetings, all! My apologies for a slow month for posts so far. I was, quite fortunately, pulled onto a great new animated project for work at the end of January, and it's kept me quite busy since. Thought I'd share progress on a couple of the multiple commission images I currently have in the works as well. Above is Poeso and Vociferous for Darne, and below is an image-in-progress for Jake, of his character persona. Thanks for sticking with me! :)

-Mel