My new assistant

One of the perks of working from home is you get to know your kids a lot better. While working the other morning, my daughter and I had a long discussion about saving up money, and ways that kids can earn money. She told me that I forget what it's like being a kid and how hard it is to earn money. Then she asked for a loan to get a mermaid tail and she'd pay me back when she got the cash. I told her I only loan out money for education and real estate. Then I offered to train her to scan my sketchbooks and paid her to do mine. Took her an hour, but she earned $7.

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Style vs Technology in Feature Animation

Just wanted to note that Sleeping Beauty was released 21 years after Snow White was released.

Sleeping Beauty, 1959

Sleeping Beauty, 1959

Snow White, 1938

Snow White, 1938

Sleeping Beauty, 1959

Sleeping Beauty, 1959

Snow White, 1938

Snow White, 1938

The same amount of time had passed in between Toy Story and Finding Dory:

Finding Dory, 2016

Finding Dory, 2016

Toy Story, 1995

Toy Story, 1995

Finding Dory, 2016

Finding Dory, 2016

Toy Story, 1995

Toy Story, 1995

I’m guessing in the first 20 years of Disney animated films the artists were more concerned with advancing style than they were technology. Once they figured out the techniques of 2D animation, style and artistry became the focus.

In the first 20+ years of CG animation the focus has been technology over artistry. “Look how realistic we can make: plastic/wood, grass, fur, water, lighting, different water, wet fur, clothing, wet clothing, explosions, humans...”

In the last 5 years pretty much every CG technological mountain has been conquered. Right? When the artists no longer have limits to what they can create in CG, they can completely focus on style. Spiderverse is the perfect example:

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018

I think Spiderverse was just scratching the surface of what CG artists can do stylistically and it makes me really excited for the future of CG animation.

-Jake

I Took Over RhinoShield's Instagram Account

Part of the partnership I have with them is to sell some cases with my art on them included me promoting the collaboration online a bunch of different ways. One of the ideas we had was for me to take over their Instagram account and do a story on there.

For the story I did a look at my studio, the books I've made over the years, and a quick drawing demo. They've left it up and you can still watch it here:
My RhinoShield Instagram Story

And here's the drawing I made for them:

-Jake

Why I Make videos

After 5 months, I finally made another YouTube video.

The reason I haven’t put a ton of love into my channel this year is because I’ve been really busy with projects, and at the end of the day I don’t want to be a YouTuber who draws. I’d rather be an artist who makes YouTube videos.

As an independent artist you are always on the look out for ways to make money and support yourself with your art.

The ideal project is something that:

  1. Uses existing artwork that you’ve already created

  2. Puts something cool and/or useful into the world

So, when Rhinoshield contacted me about making phone cases with my artwork it was a no brainer for me.

  1. I get to use art that I’ve already created

  2. They make sturdy, sleek cases that legitimately protect your phone, and look cool. A useful tool for us phone wielding sapiens.

Part of the deal with them was, they would prep my artwork for the phone cases, manufacture the phone cases, run the website, process orders, and package up and ship the phone cases out to people.

In turn, all I would have to do is some social media posts about the cases. They also specifically asked for a Youtube video.

I’m trying to be as transparent as possible with my Youtube channel. I told my audience that I’d never make a video just becasue I needed to upload a video that week in order to stick to some sort of posting schedule. I don’t want to be a part of the problem of time wasting videos on YouTube.

Also, to just make a video that was all about “BUY MY PHONECASES” seemed a little disingenuous and spammy. So,for this video I did something that I rarely do on my channel: I showed step-by-step how I made the art that ended up on one of the cases Rhinoshield is selling.

I usually charge for tutorials like this, but when I’m already getting paid to do a video, I figured I would give away my knowledge for “free.”

-Jake

Click here to check out my RhinoShield Phone Cases


Posing is Half the Battle

I was talking with Aaron the other day about drawing and how it gets faster (and in some ways easier) the older you get.

One of the reasons for that is that when you’re younger and learning to master your craft you not only have to worry about the concept, the design, the structure, and also the rendering, but on top of that you have to pose your character in an appealing way. Just figuring out an appropriate pose can steal half of your drawing time on a particular character.

What happens after drawing professionally 20 hours a week for 10-20 years (especially if you do comics) is that you kind of have drawn almost every possible pose there is for a character. There’s only so many ways to show a character running, jumping, standing, punching, sitting, throwing, etc.

A more seasoned artist has drawn characters in all of these poses and from many different angles too. This means that when she sits down to draw a character the pose is almost done with muscle memory. The majority of her creative energy can then be put into the design of the character and the rendering.

The Running Quadruped

About 4 or 5 years ago I figured out a great pose for a running quadruped. It took me some time to really nail this pose based on photos of running horses. But once I had drawn it and committed it to memory it’s allowed me to lean on it for a variety of designs. You can see in the below examples where I straight up used the same pose for different characters:

By taking a large animal that’s typically portrayed as lumbering along on all fours and putting just one of those limbs in contact with the ground makes the animal look like it’s moving at a speed almost too fast for it to carry itself at.

By taking a large animal that’s typically portrayed as lumbering along on all fours and putting just one of those limbs in contact with the ground makes the animal look like it’s moving at a speed almost too fast for it to carry itself at.

Almost the exact same pose as above but with a few tweaks to make it a pinch more dynamic.

Almost the exact same pose as above but with a few tweaks to make it a pinch more dynamic.

And then some where I modified it a bit to suit the design of the character and to mix things up:

Here I just put the right front leg making contact with the ground instead of the left front.

Here I just put the right front leg making contact with the ground instead of the left front.

In this illustration I used the exact same pose as the sauropods up top, but I lifted the little paw off the ground to give this wiener dog racer a little more speed.

In this illustration I used the exact same pose as the sauropods up top, but I lifted the little paw off the ground to give this wiener dog racer a little more speed.

Lastly you can see here that once you have the pose down in your head it’s very easy to modify as needed to emphasize some aesthetic attributes you’ve given your design. In this one the longer legs wouldn’t fold up as nicely under the main part of the body, but with my understanding of the original pose I could splay the legs out easily and get a new pose the suited the design, and didn’t cost me too much extra creative energy.

pose04.jpg

Want to get good at posing? Here’s a posing regiment you could try:

1) Take poses from comics, concept art books, life drawing, photos, and animation. I have a Pinterest page devoted just to poses I like.

2) Have a pose sketchbook and just fill it with copies and studies of the poses in your reference library. Don’t add any details like armor or hair. Just draw the basic shapes of the pose.

3) Now on your own, draw these poses you like from different points of view.

After you’ve done 50 of them you should have a solid pose library that you can refer to often. Bonus side effect: by drawing these poses you create an imprint of them in you memory. A memory that can be called up the next time you need to draw a character in a pose like that.

Abe Washington Eagle

Last week it was Independence Day here in the United States. It's probably my favorite holiday. I usually spend way to much money on fireworks and put on a show for the neighborhood kids. Which would be good enough by itself to celebrate the holiday, but the city I've been living in for the past 7 years really knows how to do the 4th of July right. There's the Freedom Run first thing in the morning with thousands of participants, a hot air balloon launch, my neighborhood has a pancake breakfast in the church parking lot, there's a giant parade, and then a huge fireworks show at the stadium with an F-22 flyover.

Oh, and my neighbor has a replica revolutionary war canon that he fires off at 6 AM to wake everyone up.

In that spirit, for the last 5 years I've done a ridiculously over-the-top illustration staring Abe Washington Eagle, a character I made up that embodies the patriotic soul of my country. Here's the drawings from the last 5 years:

DhTScIsUEAEigQ0.jpg
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Hope your 4th was explosive!

-Jake