Ultimate Christmas Gift

A sketch that I did for Travisty's Beard.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!

Learn To Pop with Invent

Hey there! I'm really sorry for the lack of updates. I've been busy with life and a new project at work that I didn't have time to do personal work for a while. But I promise I'll be back soon. Meanwhile I want to show you guys a small side project I did. My friend/dance instructor just launched his site www.learntopop.com. He is offering instructional dance videos for the dance style popping at a very low price. All I can say is that I've been learning from him for a while and he's an amazing instructor. Knows how to break things down. So if you're interested in the dance style popping make sure to check out his videos. He also teaches at City Dance Studios in SF www.citydance.org.

I did all the filming for the demo video below and the lessons too.
Filmed with:
Nikon D7000
24mm f1.4

Moonshine Documentary

Sorry about the lack of updates. Work and Life have been keeping me busy lately. Hope I can start posting some new personal artwork soon.

The Fellow artists from DreamworksAnimation in LA produced a short documentary about some of the artists behind the Moonshine project. Check it out!

Moonshine : Artists after dark from alexis wanneroy on Vimeo.

I Love LA - Photography Exhibit

A bit of a different post today. I didn't paint but I pretended to be a photography model
bwahahaha ^^;
My friend Sven Dreesbach took this photo of me when I visited him in LA. The most amazing thing is that it got accepted by the I Love LA photography exhibit! And there was a post on the LA Times website and the Huffington Post featuring this image! Haha I can't believe it. Make sure to check out the Gallery if you live in LA.

I won't be able to make it to the Opening reception tonight but if you are in the area,

I Love LA
Gallery Reception and Book Signing

Thursday, August 11 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Wilshire Grand Hotel

930 Wilshire Blvd

Los Angeles, CA

If you can't make the opening reception for the artists, the show installs at Duncan Miller Gallery, 10959 Venice Blvd in West LA on Saturday August 13 and runs through September 17. There will be another reception on Saturday, Aug 13, 7-10 pm in the gallery.

In 30 Days Around the World

Three Travisty's Beard pieces I did. Character Design by Lindsey Olivares.

Update:
I also used this as an opportunity to learn mudbox. So this is a few hours of Maya, Mudbox and Photoshop...Needs more work but I'm too lazy to finish it :P

Mega Smiley Unit & Space Invaders...

Clouds over PDI

I recently upgraded my cam from the Nikon D70 to the D7000. It was about time.
The D7000 has an integrated intervall timer and I decided to shoot some time lapses.
These are all shot from the DreamWorks rooftop. More to come...

Light Painting over the Golden Gate Bridge

My friends visited SF this past weekend. I had a chance to do some light paintings with them above the Golden Gate Bridge.

Nikon D7000
18-105mm f16
30 sec exposure
iPhone Flashlight

B-Girl

Forgot to post this one...

16 Year Old Genius

My friend/co-worker Stevie sent me a link this morning which left me speechless. It's the blog of 16 year old DeVon Stubblefield. He's currently interning at Disney. I instantly became a fan! This kid is ridiculous. Just check out his work and you'll know what I mean. Remember he's still in high school...

Check out his blog

Raw Talent....

Doodling

This is an iPad workshop I did a while ago for the imagineFX magazine.
All painted with "brushes" for iPad.

Horse Race Lady

Through the Alley

CRYKIT

This is awesome B-Girl "Crykit"! I only got to take her class twice but she's great! I think I'm going to do more of those stylized versions of my friends in the future. It's was super fun!

Just a Penguin

Photoshop Battle!

About two months ago I started doing daily paintings with my buddy Stephan again. The other week I was complaining to him that he should use more colors in his pieces since his recent paintings where all monochromatic.

He replied with this image:

But now I complained about the lack of lighting and threw this painting back at him.

His answer was simple ^^

Now Basti, another fellow artist took this to the next level and made this:

How cruel XD!! I couldn't sit still and came up with this:

But Stephan finished it up beautifully by doing this:

"Schnauze" is German and means "shut up" ^^

This one gave me a good laugh XD

I just love those spontaneous battles. Good times!

Breeding

Character Design Blog Interview

I have been a reader of the Character Design Blog for a while now and I feel honored to be featured with an interview. Yay! Check it out at here.

The Mask

Gorilla artbook vol.1

I'm honored to be in a group of amazing artists called Gorilla Artfare. Today we came out with our first art book!
Big huge mega thanks to Clo and everyone who was working so hard to make this possible! (I only provided a few paintings^^) I'm excited and looking forward to the book!

Now go and get it! ;)

Gorilla Art Book Vol.1!

Welcome Back

A remake of an older painting of mine.

Shooting Star

Spotlight on Autodesk

A short article about me on the Autodesk Sketchbook news. My paintings were used as splash screens for Sketchbook Pro (for iPad) for almost a year now. I think they're going to get replaced soon...Check it out.

Spring Fever

This month's entry for Travisty's Beard. Topic was "Spring Fever".

Frozen In Time

I recently stumbled upon this amazing photographer who does animated gif images. I've seen similar approaches before but this totally blew my mind. So beautiful! Make sure to check out this link. I gave it a try myself today. This is my friend at a cafe. I'm certainly gonna do more of those.

update:

I did two more of those today. Gotta find a way to keep the file sizes a bit smaller. The jumping pic was impossible to keep small cause the whole background was moving. So it ended up being over 1MB. It's super fun creating those pics. It requires a lot of thinking.

Light Painting Madness

It's been a while since I painted with light.
I went to Death Valley with my friends this past weekend. It was an overwhelming trip. After watching a beautiful sunset I decided to do some light paintings. Most of them are 30 seconds exposure and painted with the iphone 4 flash light. I explained my technique in one of the earlier posts. It was super fun. (Shot with Nikon D7000 18-105mm 3.5-5.6)

This one is done with a different technique. The letters are extruded with the iPad screen. There is an app called holographium. You type in a word and the app cuts the word into slices and plays back the individual slices over time. Now if you use a long exposure in your camera and move the iPad slowly you can extrude your text in space. Pretty amazing.

And last but not least this is something I did with my co-worker. It's the same technique like above but in this case it's a real human body that was cut into slices. You can find the video and the process here. 

This is a lot of fun and I want to experiment more with it. (Canon 5D Mark II with 24mm 1.4 25sec exposure) 

Inexperienced Hateful Magical Boy

My friend send me a random character generator. It's generates some pretty cool character descriptions. This one was an "Inexperienced Hateful Magical Boy"

Lecture at SJSU April 8th 2011

Last Friday I went to the San Jose State University to hold a presentation for the Shrunken Head Man Club. About 200 students showed up. After a lot of talking from my side I did 3 painting demos. The first one was a simple setting to show the basic concept of lighting and to explain what is going on in my head before I start painting. The second demo was a more complicated setting using the same technique. I refined the first demo a little bit once I got home since it was too rough and my macbook screen was not calibrated well.

The image on the left is a night scene with the desk lamp as the main light source and a little bit of moonlight coming through a window on the right side causing the rim light. The image on the right is a daylight scene. The main light is coming through the window on the right side.

The second demo was the image on the bottom left. This demo also included how I organize my layers when I paint at work to be able to address changes quickly.

I painted the scene on the right side beforehand to show how lighting can be changed easily.

SJSU people thanks for the warm welcome and being such a great audience. I had a lot of fun presenting! I hope I could inspire some of you guys to do daily speed paintings and to set some "unreachable" goals :D

This is the thread of the sijun forum I used to post at back in the days.

Best of luck everyone!

March 11th 2011

The Disaster doesn't seem to come to an end yet...

Artists Help Japan raised $54,077 so far. But also, don't overlook corporate matching.

Let's hope that they can get the reactors under control...

Artistst Help Japan

I don't have words for the disaster that's happening right now and it doesn't seem to stop. I got a hold of my  family and they are fine so far. My fellow artist Dice Tsutsumi set up an emergency fund to help the people in japan. I'm going to repost his post.

Hello everyone

I hope you and your loved ones are safe in the catastrophic disaster in Japan.
The earthquake was the most powerful in the history and the outcome is devastating without showing any sign of calming down.
It took me and my wife to get in touch with our families in Japan. Some of our relatives are still out of reach in the hard hit areas.

Aside from it’s my home country, I would simply want to ask for your help.
As you may know, artists have done numerous charity projects such as Totoro Forest Project, Art Block for Ghana, Picture Book Project, and Sketchtravel.
Artists once again can get together to bring our inspiration together to respond to the immediate needs from far east.

Working with Give2Asia who we worked with for Totoro Forest Project to help preserve Sayama Forest back in 2008, we set up a simple fund called Artists Help Japan.

Artists Help Japan Earthquake & Tsunami Fund is responding to the immediate needs of survivors as well as short-term to long-term recovery projects undertaken by the affected communities.
Give2Asia has a local team based in Tokyo to assess the current situation and to obtain more information on the needs of survivors. Give2Asia helped Totoro Forest Project efficiently send fund to Japan and has a great reputation when it comes to humanitarian efforts in Asia as a part of Asian Foundation.

Having worked with them, I can trust the fund will be used wisely and efficiently to help people in Japan.
This may be just a small help we can only provide from far away but I hope our prayers will reach people in Japan.

>>>>DONATE NOW!
You might have already helped through other venues? Then please help spread the words on your blog and facebook!

***Give2Asia is a US 501 (c) (3) public charity, to which contributions are tax deductible (Federal Employer Identification #94-3373670).   

Sincerely yours Dice Tsutsumi

Stone Age Housewife

Sorry about the few updates lately. Have been busy with a bunch of stuff ^^
Here's a painting I did this morning.

Obese Pet

Cat: Nope...too much work