Risk: Metal Gear Solid

It's here!

Yoji Shinkawa artwork featured only on the limited edition!

I consider myself somewhat of a board game geek though I don't play very often and have not played some of the most popular board games out there like Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, Agricola, etc. There's just something about the tactile feel of moving pieces around, taking my time to strategize and kinda letting my imagination run wild that's just so much fun. I'm also a huge fan of the Metal Gear Solid series so when I heard from gaming blogs like Kotaku that they were making an MGS version of Risk, I just had to jump at the chance. Now I just need to find people who are willing to get together to actually play a game of Risk which probably takes longer to play than watching all the Metal Gear Solid 4 cut scenes back to back. Maybe the special rules for this version will result in a shorter play time similar to the Star Wars version of Risk I played a few months back. Won't know until I read the instructions but I think I'll keep it all wrapped up until I find some buddies willing to play.

Favorite commercial

I couldn't get enough of this commercial when it first came out. It still kills me to watch it. The reaction of the kid is so priceless, especially what he does with his eyes. 

Life Drawing

Starbucks

Kinda reminds me of Jason Momoa. Most jacked up barista ever.

It's fun to try and draw legs from this angle.

Antique Sketchbook

Just found my old sketchbook that I actually bought at the antique market at the Royal Winter Fair back in 2007.  It's got perforations on every 2nd page as well as some greenish mid-toned paper. I really wish I could find a sketchbook/scrapbook like it again.

Think I bought this for like 10-15 dollars! Old book smell included.

2nd page of the book describing its intended purpose.

Goats from The Royal c. 2008 on one of the perforated pages.

Another goat c. 2008

The Royal Winter Fair

The Royal Winter Fair here in Toronto is something my girlfriend and I usually visit every year to get our fix of farm animal drawing not to mention fresh, sticky, cinnamon buns as well as some good mennonite sausage. Got all my drawing supplies in order before heading out only to forget them all as I head out the door. This ALWAYS happens to me. The more I focus on something, the more I'll forget it at the final, most crucial moment. Really, really bad habit. Luckily I still had my sketchbook and a blue ballpoint pen but I was still looking forward to busting out some Copic Marker tones, ink washes, watercolour paper and even pencil which I don't use enough. I even forgot my somewhat new Lumix LX5 digital camera which I was hoping to take some sweet 1080p reference footage with :( I guess forgetting all these toys makes you just focus on just drawing.

Nice, well behaved Alpaca. Some stupid little girl threw hay in it's face after it wouldn't eat from her hand. How rude!

My feet got pretty sore from standing around and drawing sheep all day so I sat in the stands and watched people take pictures of this girl who had won a competition where they and their sheep would dress up. Most sheep just had some nice scarves though I spotted some with glitter in their wool and one with a striped touque on!

A girl and her winning sheep.

No drawings of horses from me this year. As soon as I enter the horse stables and arena, my throat swells up, my nose flows like Niagara Falls and I literally find it quite difficult to breathe. My meager little allergy pill is no match for the potent animal hair flying about which means I can stick around to watch/draw the horses for a maximum of 20 minutes before I have to get some fresh air and spend the rest of my day trying to breathe normally again.

Business Cards

When I first tried to get into the animation industry, it was all about getting your VHS demo reel, resume and possibly portfolio together and mailing them around or going to studios directly to drop them off. What a hassle (even though I didn't even do this cause I wasn't really ready to apply as a professional animator in my mind/heart). 

My instructors in college told me that no one would ever look a demo reel on a DVD. We shouldn't expect studios to have DVD players or DVD drives on their computers because they posed a risk of acquiring a virus. What a bunch of non-sense. Then the time came when it was all about DVDs and no one was checking VHS tapes anymore cause the tech was old. But at that time, no one wanted to go to your website cause streaming or downloading your reel would take too long and also run them the risk of getting some virus on their computer. So the same process continued with mass producing DVDs inside DVD cases and then sending them out to studios by foot or by mail (thankfully the first place I went to hired me and employed me for almost the next 5 years). Some industries here would hold recruiting events to collect these types of materials when they needed them but this was pretty rare. A lot of wasted gas and materials if you ask me. 

When I went to CTN-X a couple of years ago, I rmade like 50 DVD demo reels to hand out and I don't think I handed out a single one cause they wanted to just go to my website to watch it. Who wants to carry around armfuls of DVDs anyways? So that was a waste of time and those DVD now occupy a nice place under my bed.

So these days it's all about the website. After all this struggling with various forms of media just to make something presentable, the internet has saved the day (though making a website is still one helluva task though blogspot and the like really help). But now it's a matter of how to get people to go to your website? 

American Psycho was all I could think about when looking at other business cards and designing my own.

I figure handing out business cards to people you meet face to face is probably one of the best ways to get them to look at your reel asides from contacting them at their studio. After taking a look at some business card websites and all their pre-made templates and feeling the paper of generic business cards, I began to have second thoughts about that process. If I myself wouldn't even want to keep them why would anyone else? I imagined seeing my business cards all over the floor of an event from people looking at them and just tossing them after I left. Something I had seen happen to others in the past. 
So yeah, making cool stationary has kinda been a desire for my girlfriend and I as well so I decided to make my own. That said, I wanted my business card to be something special and speak a little bit about myself. I decided to use a character of mine (I hope to make a short about him one day) in pixel form and keep the layout clean and readable. There were a lot of fancy if not gimmicky ideas I/we had but in the end, time and money restrictions (letterpresses are expensive!!!) resulted in something simple and single-sided. I got myself some nice quality watercolour paper and did a bit of designing in Photoshop and here's the end result with a little help from a corner rounder (I love this thing). I had to cut these cards with an Olfa knife and ruler so they took me a bit of time to cut out all straight and nice. 

Using heavy watercolour paper meant my business card holder was too thin so I used a minty fresh Altoids case them held them PERFECTLY! Keeps my cards smelling nice too! Don't steal my idea! LOL

Sony had an IGDA (International Game Developers Association) Toronto event at Ubisoft Toronto last night that I figured would be a good opportunity to hand these out. It ended up being a 3 hour sit down event promoting Sony (and some wicked local games like DYAD by Shawn McGrath and Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack by Drinkbox Studios for Vita).  Afterwards there was some schmoozing and boozing but I really suck at that so I just ended up going zen and melting my brain with DYAD and watching some dudes play Uncharted for PS Vita. All-in-all pretty cool event in a really nice space but sadly not one business card was handed out. Maybe next time. 

Free food and drinks were advertised for the event which ended up being a bottles-worth of Heineken and some really small yet tasty finger food. Thankfully Korea Town was a short walk away. 12am dinner ftw! Hot soup on a cold night. Can't be beat.

Demo Reel

Finally finished my demo reel! Well for now at least considering these things should be a constant work in progress.  I'm definitely going to make more animations now to add to it and replace older work. Now that I've got everything set up and working properly on my Mac, I feel like I actually have an environment/system ready to easily edit and modify my animation and art. I'm pretty happy with my dialogue lines. The one with the priest was intended to be submitted to the 11 Second Club July (yeah that is a while ago) contest but I decided to put more polish and rendering on it. I think the next time I do a piece of animation, it's gonna be way faster so here's hoping. 

I also went back and revisited my "Ruckus" 2 person dialogue cause there was just stuff in there that was so wrong and unfinished and I couldn't just leave it that way. It may have been better to just have made a new piece, but hey film is forever right? I really liked the way the line worked out originally so I figured just some necessary fixes would make it all the better. 

Anyways, check out the video (you can also find it permanently on the DEMO REEL tab above). Enjoy!

Bookworm

What to write...? What to draw? Mua ha ha.

 Doing some cafe drawing with a good friend at Starbucks. It's nice to just always have a moleskin and a ballpoint pen on hand.

Old Cafe Drawing

Steampunk Challenge

 

Make a steampunk version of a comic book character. Creative me choose Mr. Freeze yet again. Maybe it's because he's a more dignified Sub-Zero (who used to be my favorite Mortal Kombat character) or something.

Swords and Shields

A concept I had really early on during development of Warriors: Legends of Troy for an art style. It's a basic soldier character and the words I had in my mind while making this were "barrel" and "muscle". I really dig the art style of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass as well as Capcom's Okami. The proportions specifically and how badass characters with weapons interesting contrasted those proportions. The approach I proposed was a simple silhouette with nice textures and lighting. I love working in tones and giving character form with the airbrush-like tool in Photoshop. I tried to duplicate the magic I had in this to some of the main characters but they didn't quite live up to the feeling I had with this guy. It would have been so fun to animate this type of character. Maybe one day.

Warriors: Legends of Troy

So I've spent the past few years working on a PS3/XBOX360 title called Warriors: Legends of Troy. I had a great time on it going from doing character concept art to animation and learned a lot along the way. This is a concept piece for the character Paris which is an unlockable image in the game's gallery. I was inspired to approach my drawings differently after looking at the art my co-workers were creating.

Pokemon Black and White

Did this drawing a while back for another drawing challenge. I got to pick this time and my challenge was "What if Pokemon were real?" Figured I should post it now to tie in with the new release of Pokemon Black and White today. It's supposed to be Ash (looks more like Woody from Toy Story at this point with a peg leg but whatever) coming across a Venusaur in the middle of a jungle. It's not done but I'm done with it :P And looking at it now, it's neither black or white... Where's my Pokemon Gray?!

Octavius Freeze

An amalgam character I made that's a cross between DC's Mr. Freeze and Marvel's Doctor Octopus for a challenge at work. Stay frosty.