Well, obviously I haven't posted in a while! I've fallen into the void that is the video game industry, so naturally nobody sees what I've been doing till 2 years later. Also, I'm expecting in July, so I had to make a baby shower invitation. I like it a lot, but looking at it I can't help but think: "I used to do nothing but record covers for punk and metal bands!?" It blows my mind how things have changed...and how much I've taken to working in vector.

Distillation show

I am going to be in a show at Phidias Gold. Haven't been accepting a lot of shows for the past year, but I took this one because it sounded fun, and the line-up is killer! I took 360° photos that I want to make into an animated gif or something, so that will be up later.

Quests UI

I badly want to get into designing user interfaces for games. I think it's the perfect job for me because I get to do a variety of technical and creative work. For some reason that makes no sense to me, people don't want to do UI design in the games world. You get to do illustration, design, animation, and some light coding—while solving the puzzle of how to clearly communicate information to the player. I think it's fun, but I guess it's not for everybody. This would be an overlay menu for a fantasy MMO like World of Warcraft. It was given to me as a test. The company decided not to hire me because I don't have experience with a specific technology they are using, but have been very helpful and gracious by recommending me to their friends and colleagues.

This was the wireframe. The art direction was to be an edgy, mystical, fantasy hardcore MMO style like WOW and League of Legends. I want to talk about the UI decisions I made, but I think it would become a TL;DR situation. If you have any questions, leave me a comment :)

Head Labs

This is a Flash Project I did a little while back. I had so much fun that I thought I would do a lot more Flash animation projects, but it looks like my life is heading in a different direction. I'm not sure how technical I can get of this blog without losing you guys, but I'm gonna go ahead and explain the project anyway. It started off as an HMTL5 project that was meant to just be for fun and learning. I thought I would do some simple animations in Flash and use Grant Skinner's Zoë air application to export sprite sheets that I could manipulate with javaScript. Well, I ended up getting really into the Flash animation part, and what I thought would be around 25 frames ended up being around 180 (even though it's shot in 2s). The sprites (as you see here) got to be WAY TOO BIG to use, as they are 1.2 MB, whereas the Flash swf was only 143 KB. I probably could have cut down the number of sprite images by programmatically jumping around the frames, but it seemed too tedious. I decided that this kind of animation was not going to work for sprites, and since I basically already had it built in Flash, I continued in that direction. Then in further digression from the goal, I started doing sounds. I had no idea how to do that, so I taught myself Adobe Soundbooth, and got pretty good results considering that I just used the mic on my laptop.

The project lives here: Head Labs Site

you do tattoo comisions for free? for friends? for what? haha u draw pretty well and that would be pretty awesome :3

I've drawn some tattoos for my friends. I am willing to consider doing a tattoo commission if you send me the details, but be warned, it's not cheap! :)

Ask me anything

New Scanner

My old trustee Epson scanner finally started to go, so I had to get a new one. After a lot of research I decided to get an Epson V30 photo scanner. I went totally low end, and I'm glad I did! Truthfully, more expensive photo scanners are WAY more powerful than I need to scan artwork, and often the only difference is a bunch of software that I also don't need. I got this scanner for $75 total, and it scans at over 12,000 dpi. That's over 4 times higher than the capability of the scanner I was using and happy with, but because I never need to scan slides or negatives, I still have no need to to crank it up that high. I'm really happy with the color, it looks dead on, and because it's LEDs instead of a florescent tube, it starts up and scans SO much faster. Take away: Don't waste your money on a high dollar scanner for your art.

Skull Avatar

Skulls are just too fun!