Celestial Concept Art

So as some of you may know, I'm currently working on a short film called Celestial. When making a film, concept artists have to come up with a variety of ideas as to how the film might look, so that the modelers, texture artists, animators, and effects artists know what to do. Celestial takes place in two main locations; an ethereal Nebula environment and on an alien jungle planet. For both these locations we needed concepts for some very specific things. For the planet, we have a destruction sequence that we had fleshed out, but still needed some work. For the Nebula, we needed a look for our main characters workshop. I had recently read the Art of Monsters University and felt inspired to do some concept paintings, so I decided that I would tackle those two concepts.

This was my idea for the Planet destruction sequence. I wanted a wide shot in order to A) show the scale of our satellite character Titan B) increase the severity of how dangerous this planet had become.

This was my concept for Gan's workshop. As we wanted a design where Gan could look up and clearly see the star that inspires him, I went with a really open design. I looked at wooden domes for inspiration. I also messed with the color of our star as I had pitched an idea that its color had to be vastly different than the planets he created. I illustrated that by placing a green planet in the scene as well.

I'm really happy with how both of these concepts turned out, especially the workshop one, as I feel they conveyed the ideas I was going for really well. Regardless or not if these designs get selected by the Art Directors, I think that both of these paintings show progress in my painting skills and I'm very happy with them.

Enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Breakdown - Darth Vader Lip Sync!

So the first week of classes have come to an end and I thought it would be appropriate to post one of the animations I did this summer! Now this animation was a little different than what I normally do. Normally I film reference from the start. However for this one, I had a clear idea in mind and decided to just jump into it. Now I wouldn't recommend that, but this was an idea I had for so long, and had acted out enough times that I knew what I wanted to do. The second thing that makes this animation strange is the fact that I did the whole thing in a day. Since class was starting soon, I set aside an entire day just to animate, and I'm pretty happy with the result!

I found this really cool rig called the RC Rig and I just knew I had to do something with it. I was trying to come up with a cool animation when suddenly it hit me. I've been doing so much Star Wars art lately, why not do a Star Wars animation! I decided that I wanted to do something where a really geeky voice transformed into James Earl Jones' voice. I later decided that after RC became Darth Vader, I wanted him to force choke the "cameraman." Now that I had my concept, it was time to animate!

The first thing I did was get some of the basic movements where I wanted them and to begin messing with the camera.

I then began to refine some of those movements, add some blinks, and start messing with the lip sync. I also changed the hand gesture from an open palm, to a more choke-like pose.

The next step was to add some eye movement. I needed RC to look at the camera as he did his force choke. Also I needed the eyes to move slightly around while he was holding to make them seem more natural.

After that, I touched up some other movements and began to slightly refine the camera some more.

All that was left was to touch up any final movements, get the camera exactly where I wanted it, and to add sound! Once that was done I ended up with this!

Well I hope you enjoyed this quick breakdown! Next time I'll go into more detail, showing you all the stages of the animation from start to finish. This was just to give you a quick insight into how I work!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Family Photo Touchups - Civl War Edition!

One thing I really enjoy is touching up photos. Whether its simply fixing a few small mistakes or completely repairing a damaged photo, I really enjoy it. The other day my family and I decided to get old fashioned portraits taken. It was a lot of fun, however, none of the group photos turned out nice. The photographer missed a lot of things so none of those photos were useable. There were good photos of us individually so I decided to make my own family photo. Since these photos were shot with a busy background, the toughest part was to cut out each member of my family. Normally for something like this I would key out the background, or use the magic wand to help to get rid of chunks of the background, but these backgrounds were so busy I had to mask out each person individually. Initially I was going to fuse the backgrounds from each image together, but as I soon found out, parts of the background overlapped ,which resulted in me being completely behind my mom and my brother basically sitting on my dad's shoulder. Instead I looked for a Civl War era background before finally finding the one I used. After that, all that was left was to make sure that each person was the correct size and then fix the lighting so it matched the background. From there I was able to add an old paper texture to the background, toss in a vignette, and add some light scratches and dust to sell that this photo was an older photo. I like how it turned out, what do you think?

~Josh

The Joker

One of my all time favorite Villains has to be the Joker. There is just something about him that makes him the perfect villain. Now when I think of the Joker, I don't think of Heath Ledger's Joker. Don't get me wrong, Heath did a great job, but as a die hard comic fan, he didn't really capture what the Joker is. There are two people who I think perfectly take on the roll of the Joker, however for very different aspects. For the voice, there will only be one man who will be the Joker to me, and that is Mark Hamill. His voice is SPOT ON as to how I've always read the Joker, and I honestly don't think anyone else could play him better. When it comes to the look of the Joker, however, that role goes to Anthony Misiano. Anthony is a FANTASTIC cosplayer, and I'm pretty sure he was born for the sole purpose of becoming the Joker. If you take Anthony's look and Mark's voice, THAT is how I imagine the Joker. With that being said I decided I wanted to do a painting of my interpretation of the Joker.

The first thing I did was search the web for pictures of Anthony cosplaying. I found this awesome portrait of him, but I really wasn't a fan of the lighting, or the background. Similar to my last piece, I started out by drawing a grid and sketching out the piece, before using techniques I learned from Roger Fletcher's tutorials to paint the piece. Finally all that was left was to mess with levels and I was done!

I actually started this piece before the Captain America piece, but I placed it on hold for a bit because I really wanted to make sure I did this piece Justice (haha get it? Justice, like the Justice League? Gosh I'm hilarious). This piece probably took as long as the last one, mainly refining small details (like that left eye, which took forever!) I really love how this one turned out as it perfectly encapsulates the essence of the Joker.

Enjoy!

~Josh

So something cool that happened after I uploaded this image to facebook was I got THIS notification, asking me to tag whoever was in the photo. Guess I did a better job on this than I thought if facebook thought it was a real person!