Summer Sketches

Summer is almost over! This summer has been a busy one! In the beginning of summer, I was really excited to be able to finally have time to work on finished pieces for the portfolio. To my surprise, it didn't quite happen exactly as I expected. I made a list of goals and eventually knocked out maybe a third of what I wanted to get done. While working at my job, i was able to finish a couple of summer classes and get my license! Also, i did a bit of reading,sketching,studying and maya learning.

Instead of trying to tackle a lot of color or value I decided to get better at drawing form,pushing my sillhouette/poses, inventing anatomy from my head, thinking about movement, caricature, and try to figure out what makes a good character design.Instead of mindlessly drawing, I tried to think about what i wanted to achieve before I started to draw. My major inspirations this summer came from Walt Stanchfield, Glenn Villpu, Tom Bancroft, and character design blog.

Lastly I've been trying to learn a bit of Maya. There are tons of tools and buttons! I'm super excited for CA next semester and I can't wait to be around motivated people. Going to my local university was a great experience and a big eye opener. There are many people that work just as hard in their major and many people who just try to slide by or are just naive. I've learned better study habits through experiencing my psychology class.My psychology class was more challenging that any liberal arts I've taken at Ringling but it helped me realize many concepts that are important to art, education, and life.

Some of my goals for next semester is to do the best I can in my major classes, participate in more clubs,contests, and work on improving my line quality, value and color. I hope everyone updates their blogs with their summer work and I'll see all my buddies in a few days!

Here are some of my more favorite sketches from June-August. In May, 90 percent of my drawing were anatomy studies and invented anatomy sketches. So here are some imagination gestures



Experimentive/animatable/nonanimatable Character Drawings



Drawings inspired from Life


Drawings From Life



And some anatomy studies...


To end the post here is an interesting read about a stripper/artist/Art Institute Ft. Lauterdale graduate.

http://kotaku.com/5610985/how-a-bad-degree-robbed-a-stripper-of-her-video-game-love

Ringling Last Day: Freshman year

Well Ringling freshman year is over. Second semester definitely picked up especially since I overloaded. I even worked till the last day for traditional animation. Here are my final projects in Communication design, Observational Color,Animation, and Figure. For my final com design project I designed Chinese zodiac animals. Tried to practice my lighting and color. Then in color class we did 1 hour paintings from life. I also have my last 2 walk cycles from animation and 10 pages from my final figure figure portfolio.

Thibodeaux Walk from Kevin Lu on Vimeo.

Heavy Sack walk from Kevin Lu on Vimeo.

More schoolwork! My naughty mardi-gras flashing character jump animation, observational color still lives, hatching drawing from drawing last semester,and my maze game for communication design.
One day i will post something that is not school work.

Mardi Gras Character Jump from klu on Vimeo.

Ringling Spring 01 Week 11

First is a picture of my birthday surprise. I have some of their blogs linked to the side. Be sure to check out their awesomeness! Thanks everyone! Then I have a still life of a loaf of bread. Painting neutral colors was really tough. And finally, are some gestures. 1-10 mins.

Ringling Spring 01 Week 10

Last week I had the most amazing spring break. To start it off, I saw Alice in wonderland,rode with 13 people in a truck,went to an arcade,ate chinese food,went to the beach a couple of times, sketch crawled downtown with friends, volunteered at habitat for humanity,got to be on television,and enjoyed the hot tub at someone's apartment. To end the week, Stevie took a group of us out to eat Korean food! I definitely had fun in Florida. This past week has been pretty busy and yesterday was my birthday! Too bad I only got 2 hours of sleep and had classes from 8 am to 6 pm.

I have my TA character design, and an Alice in Wonderland themed digital gray-scale painting. I might add color to the Alice in wonderland painting later in the future.



So here is Thibodeaux (ti-buh-doe) the lizard. He is based off of the goofy archtype and he is from a Cajun Louisianian background. He is friendly, usually cheerful, but a bit slow sometimes when it comes to thinking.I must say, designing my lizard character was really challenging for me. Not only did it have to be simple, it had to be designed to where it could have good poses,silhouettes,look like a lizard, simple and be animatable so i could draw it 200 times. Special thanks to my traditional animation teacher, Gordon, Adam and Stevie for giving me a lot of character designing tips.

RCAD Spring01 week 8

Here are some gestures 1-7 min. Also my head turn animation assignment for TA1. I can't believe it,only 1 week left till spring break! Animation has been quite challenging but enjoyable at the same time. To a regular person working for 20 hours to produce a 3 second clip sounds insane, but to an animator it is fun.

Emo Head Turn from klu on Vimeo.

RCAD Spring 01 week 7

Its been a while. Here are some paintings from my color class and an animation from my Communication design class.

In color class we don't focus on artsy strokes, we put down color swatches and treat the painting like a drawing. We try to communicate a color as clear as possible. It was very challenging. Communication design on the other hand is a pretty loose/concept based class. We were assigned an installation piece about nature. Tyler, Christine and I teamed up to create an animation about a plant growing out of the earth. I animated the tree, tyler shaded/rendered the animation, and christine animated the insect.

Nature and insects from klu on Vimeo.

Balls and Sacks

Here are my balls and sack. They are not perfect but please enjoy.
First is my flour sack jump 2 exercise. It involves acting as well as jumping. Second is a composite of all my ball bounces (perspective collision, heavy tail, and light hard). Though they appear to be simple animations they were challenging to animate. For some reason when i composited all of my ball bounces it gave me a black border.

Klu Flour sack jump 2 from Kevin Lu on Vimeo.

balls from Kevin Lu on Vimeo.