Ringing in the new year with an updated demo reel

Karen Chan's Demo Reel 2012 from Karen Chan on Vimeo.

Merry Christmas!

Pirate owl wants some candy

Hoot! Gimme your candies or else!

Happy Halloween!

Cooks and masked men

And here is the last batch of drawings from my drawing class this summer. It's been a great summer and definitely it helped inspire me to draw more and be bolder in trying things I've never done before. I don't feel like such an animator lately but at least I'm still developing as an artist overall.

Hehehe I was feeling quite caricature-y that day. I just wanted to let loose and have fun, it gets boring just drawing what you see in front of you after awhile. I think I inspired all my classmates to just let their imaginations go too coz after they saw my super cartoony first drawing, everyone started doing it too and we had a pretty fun class that day, everyone's drawings that day were very different from the rest of the semester.

This one turned out pretty good. Bushy eyebrows, no eyes look :p

I'm not sure if the model brought/made her own costume but it was pretty cool. We had a space theme going on that day :)

When I saw the helmet, I couldn't help but remember this little old movie I loved when I was a kid so I just had to put that in :p I turned her into... the Rocketeer! *cue in music*

Playing with colors

So after being encouraged and inspired by my teacher, I decided and bought myself a box of new soft pastels to play with a few weeks ago. I was frustrated with it at first, mine was just looking horrible compared to my classmates. It was so spotty and muddy. It was a bit of a challenge to me because I've always been more line art and I draw a million lines in my drawings but I started getting the hang of it after awhile. Using a harder pencil definitely helped in keeping my drawings less muddy.

My first somewhat successful drawing. Think it was a fluke :p

Watching the parade! The model's so cute

 

I really like how this one turned out even if it's unfinished. This was  squeezed in the last 20 mins of the class 

 

attempting the "lost and found" style

Oh! I finally used the watercolor set that I bought for myself more than a year ago (>v<). I've been meaning to get into watercolor but I kept chickening out and putting it off. Finally, I got myself to sit down and use it and actually it's a lot of fun. It's tricky but definitely I'm learning how it works the more I use it. I find it amazing how I'm able to use and apply something that my foundation art classes taught me, which is value. Feels like as long as I understand values, I can work with anything, even my weakness, color. Definitely want to keep working on getting better at it. I'm just using thin regular drawing paper which isn't good for watercolor but it's alright, I'm not making masterpieces.

My first watercolor. It was a mess as I thought I put it too heavy a value for a first coat but I did my best to make it work.

I love how this one turned out. It actually turned out pretty close to how I envisioned it. I just wanted it to feel  cheerful and summer-y

First post of 2011!

Sorry, I've been really busy lately. Anyway, finally got some time to take pictures and upload some of my drawings this year. More to come soon!

So these are my better drawings from my Clothed figure drawing 2 class. These are drawn from a live model, some are 5min poses, mostly are 20min poses.

This turned out really nice. It's one of my favorites

This turned out quite well too, especially since drawing guys is a weakness of mine and this was drawn from a female model.

This drawing of mine was heavily edited by my instructor, Bill Sanchez. He liked my drawing so much that he couldn't resist playing with it. It turned out really cool though.

So these are homework drawings. I did these with a ballpoint pen.

Loved how this one turned out.

This turned out really nice too. I wanted to draw a jump shot but I found so many jump shots that I liked that I decided to just draw several of them and compose them in one drawing.

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