Digital Painting

I'm been trying to get myself to do some digital paintings. Its often difficult to find a really good tutorial online for them. But today I found a pretty good one to make a quick and dirty planet. Here's a link to the original tutorial : http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_planet.html

And here's a sample of my attempt at it:

It was pretty easy step by step tutorial and a fun read. I hope I can find more like this. Its done by Greg Martin and he has a large gallery of other paintings he's done. Some really amazing pieces.

Wireframes

Today I got my wire frame pretty much done. A couple tweeks here and there before I render, but I'm liking it. The ambient occlusion does help to ground some of the pieces and gives it a nice feel. Here's some sample renders:

Flash Fun

During the last few days I've been toying around with Flash for my website. Its been over 10 years since I last used it and I forgot how much fun it can be. The coding has changed a lot and so I found it a little frustrating to get the links to work. But I found a great video tutorial that worked out great. Now I just need to work on the design of the site. I'm thinking of doing some sort of ancient scroll with my logo on it with the links laid out horizontally under it and the content below that. I have a long term vision of the scroll unrolling with each content switch and maybe my character holding it up, but that will take a while for me to get the coding and animation down.

I have been trying different methods for building my site. I use to build them all the time, back in the day, but my coding is rusty. HTML came screaming back to me, and I picked up CSS pretty easily. Also been using a bit of wordpress to help speed up the process. Although I have found flash to be a little easier from a designers perspective. With html and wordpress you write the code and preview the results. With flash you build the design elements and then right the code to transition the actions. Its a lot more fun that way and a bit easier. I'm looking forward to designing this website more and more each day. Just playing around in Flash is fun enough already.

Approved!!

Approved for the grad show and demo reel is complete. As always there is still more I can do with it, but I am pretty proud of what I was able to pull together. Check it out: