My fall semester finals

With the fall semester finally over, it is time for me to put up my final projects!

First, my digital painting class final. The requirement was to design a book cover. Since I'm currently really in the Wheel of Time series, I knew I wanted to do a fantasy book cover. I researched a bunch of fantasy book covers and started drawing very tiny thumbnails of any idea I had, which weren't that many. I wanted a high value contrast, practically pure black and pure white against each other, which works very well for attracting attention. I really liked the bottom left thumbnail the most so I thought, yes, I'll do a big phoenix! Cool!

But when I started painting it, I realized... what the heck did I get myself in? I was still new to digital painting, I don't have any kind of painting background at all and I picked one of the hardest thing to do, fire. How was I supposed to show form? Bad enough fire is not a tangible object, the whole thing was a big light source! I was completely stuck. I had no clue at all on how to do this. I calmed myself down, tried to break it down to the most basic shapes and take it one at a time. It's a bird, it has wings, a body and a head. Okay. Next... I'll just create my own shadow pattern. I wanted it to be scary and mystical... that gave me the idea of having the "light source" coming from below instead from the usual above. Hey, it made an eye-leading, focal point straight to the bottom, happy accident! I put a sorceress on top of a mountain right at the whitest part of the phoenix. The illustration was evolving. My teacher then showed me how to use corel painter for doing the flames. I experimented, kept working on it till I ended up with this. I'm really happy with how it came out.

Secondly, the animatic of my 2D animation short film! With the feedback and suggestions of my classmates, friends and teachers, I've worked on the story and the character design on this the whole semester. It has  evolved quite a bit from my original thumbnails. I want to get it perfect since I do plan to having this finished to put on my demo reel. It's a bit longer than what I should aim for but I don't really want to cut anything out of it anymore. Good luck on me finishing this.

My short film animatic - 4th pass from Karen Chan on Vimeo.

Lastly, my character design class. Our final was to do a maquette. I wanted to do the little girl in my animatic but my teacher told me that he'd want me to show her personality and character clearly in one maquette. He told me to make it clear if she was a good or bad character. I ended up going with bad because i thought it would be cuter. So her character has been redesigned. A good friend of mine helped me with making the armature and lent me his tools for sculpting since the only sculpting I ever did was in my life was a year ago. He even suggested that I should do effects since she's casting a spell, have stars spiral out of her wand. I thought it was a cool idea. It was fun sculpting and it turned out pretty cute. Too bad I forgot to sandpaper it before I sprayed primer on it but oh well. I want to color the stars and put golden glitter glue on the wires for color. I'll probably work on it after the holidays and post it up again.

haha she has a tiny back and a cute booty

Work in progress - cute evil witch maquette

First time I'm making a maquette, and it happens to be the final for my character design class. Got lots of help from a friend, especially on making the armature. Friend also suggested for me to do effects, since she is holding a wand and is about to zap. I thought it would be cool to see stars and glitter spiral out of it, that's the reason for the extra wires. It's coming along pretty well. I can't wait to see what it will look like finished. Got to keep working hard for my finals!

Egg of.... Power!

Egg Magical Transformation from Karen on Vimeo.

This was my final to intro to 2D effects animation class, where we had to combine at least 2 of the basic effects that we've learned. I combined at least water and smoke effects and put my twist into it.

Doing 2D effects is really a field on it's own. Once you learn the basic foundation for it, you can design and stylize it to make it your own. It's really tough and just pure work since there's no pauses (though if you're smart, you can find a way to loop it) It was good learning experience though and plus, I think it helped make my blocking speed go much faster

My animation demo reel 2010 v2

My animation demo reel 2010 from Karen Chan on Vimeo.

I'm reposting this video since I just realized that some countries can't view youtube videos. I'm giving vimeo a try since I've seen quite a bit of people using it. It's slower compared to youtube but it's better in terms of license for artists.


Like I mentioned in one of my previous post, I'm currently working on a 2D animation short. It will be interesting to see how much it will differ compared to my old ones so I can't wait to finish it and add it to my reel

Color pencil stuffs and first digital painting

Here are some color pencil work that I did last summer for my intro to animal drawing class. Actually it's one of the rare times I worked in color. I'm not very comfortable with color yet, though I've been wanting to learn. I just need to practice more to get there.

haha of course, I had to do an owl. (If it's not obvious by now, I love owls :P) I was really frustrated with it at first but it came out really nice, I'm really proud of it.

Corgi! This one took a long time since I was really following the fur growth direction with every stroke.

This is the earliest work out of all of them. I guess I over-rendered the anatomy of the horse but I still like it.

My first digital painting! I was super frustrated with it for a long time but as i kept working at it, and with the a bit of advisement from my teacher, it turned out pretty okay. It's simple but a good learning process. I would have to keep on practicing on digital painting to get better.