Shisas and Dragons, Oh My!

My senior thesis animation, My Pet Shisa, is really going to get underway for "production" soon.  The "villain" finally has a design and once I settle on one for the human character, I can storyboard and then get going on the actual animation!  It sounds like a long journey, but at the rate I storyboard I can probably get it done in a week or so... Then I'd like to have all the animation done by December, if all goes well!  This is mostly going to be AfterEffects animation, like my Procrastination piece, but with some Flash (and Photoshop-painted-over) bits for when it needs to be more fluid!  

Anyway, the reason for this post was first, to share the image at the top of the post because it's the first really fleshed out promotional piece I've done!  The second is to share some of the design process.  As I mentioned, my dragon "bad guy" recently had his design polished!  So without further ado, some of the journey:

 

The dragon is an evil spirit that manifests from feelings of stress and being overworked, particularly from school work in my story.  Its mane and other "adornments" are made up of the papers and its body is made to look like ink because it first emerges from a desk of books and paper.  Only little Ryukyu, the baby Shisa, can stop it!

I'll certainly be posting more about this story's development and production as it comes!  I'm greatly looking forward to working on this more and I hope that people will find it an enjoyable 'lil animation!

Summer!

Long time no post, yet again!  The past semester was really busy but I also neglected updating here since it's not as active, well, not active at all, but I enjoy the blogging anyway because the tools here are nice haha.  Anyway, it was quite a successful semester I would say!  Three whole animations!  I would specifically like to post about my "Procrastination" project, which, contrary to the name, was the piece I worked the hardest on haha

You can view it above.  It was done mostly with AfterEffects by importing many, many layers of drawings from Photoshop.  A lot of fun and I actually found that this is the way I wanna do my Senior Thesis animation!  But of course, with even more movement and oomph!

 

Anyway, besides that I also did a PSA about my beloved honey bees (along with some classmates, which was a great experience), and a music video for my most favorite musician (it was unofficial of course, but still so cool to work with her music in that way!).  I've also been updating my webcomic Ritzkrieg, had a table at Appleseed Comic Con, and have been developing many other projects for the future!  Not to mention all the doodles along the way!  I can't upload everything I've missed of course, but here are a few of the pieces I've done:

So there's just a brief view of the last few months, and now, onwards to the future! :D  If you want to see my art updates as they happen, check out my Twitter or Tumblr!