Valentines , and if "Marxist" meant Glasses and 'Staches

Valentine's shoppin' at our local grocery store :)

A proposal my wife and I witnessed at the Wilk food court on Monday. It made us smile

Our romantic Valentine's dinner :}  Cyrano De Bergerac (hence the Groucho Marx noses), candy, and completos. I love you Emily <3<3

Kids are the best

Some quick gestures taken having dinner at our cousins' the other night. Kids are the best! They are always exploring and having adventures, and they don't care whether anybody is watching or what anybody thinks- they just be. Which I think is what makes them so fun to draw :)

A goofy drawing from Adult Session of Stake Conference yesterday.  Because I'm an adult :}

Costume

I've always struggled with costume, largely because of a lack of knowledge/ visual library to pull from.  However, this semester I'm taking a history of costume class at BYU, and it's helping a ton. It's amazing how, while technique is important, so much of art and creativity is just about having something in your imagination to pull from. I'm a big advocate of not only educating your hands and technical skills, but educating your imagination. Study outside fields and dabble constantly in new visual material, so that you always have fresh ideas.

These characters are intended to be Nephites from the Book of Mormon.  As we don't know exactly where they lived or what their clothes looked like, I've based their clothes on a combination of Greek, Middle-Eastern, and Argentinian ideas. Not that these cultures would have had a particular influence on the Nephites, it just felt like a believable look.

President Uchtdorf Sketch

A digital sketch of tonight's CES fireside :) President Dieter F. Uchtdorf (modern apostle) spoke, and it was the fun :) Watch the full video @: http://www.lds.org/broadcasts/watch/ces-devotionals/2013/01?lang=eng

(I wanted to noodle it more, but my wife said to "Stop it". She was right ;) )

*Note— my apologies, the codec washed out the image pretty bad up until about 50 seconds :/

Twu Wuv

I can't think of a better way to do a 100th post . . . :)

On the 27th of December my sweetheart and I were married, sealed for eternity in the Manti, Utah LDS Temple! I feel so blessed to know I will be spending this life and the next with my very best friend.  It's been a blast so far— meeting each others' families, creating our new home, Power Rangers and Avatar marathons, sugar, sugar, sugar, and it turns out she has more Strongbad memorized than I do :)  I love you Emily <3

PWNED: Gamer Bully

More sketches for the aforementioned geek bully for BYU's upcoming animated short

PWNED: Kid

Some concept sketches for the upcoming BYU animated short, PWNED :)

Dino sketch (Ceratosaurus nasicornis)

Sometimes I leak dinosaurs . . .

Some things to work on (Monster of the Week)

I was watching a video about fundamentals by Feng Zhu tonight and was inspired to "brush up" lol.  It's amazing how no matter how long you draw, how long you paint, or how many miles your pencil odometer reads, the basics can always improve.  Lighting, perspective, gesture, color— as much as they seem like elementary principles, they are infinitely deep.

This was a quick sketch from last night that ended up looking not unlike a "Venusaur" from Pokemon lol, though that was not the conscious intent.  I learned a couple of things while working on it, simple concepts, but to me that's what makes them important.  The first thought (echoing advice given me by Justin Kunz recently) was that I need to focus on stroke control.  The second thought had to do with light.  I didn't use a spheretest on this one, and as a result wrangled for a while with my values.  They still have issues.  The thought occurred to me though, that the value patterns on a given isolated object are the sum of their lambert shading (spheretest-based lighting) and occlusion. Basically, in most situations everything lights as simply as a sphere, plus extra dark spots for the crevices.

And that was boring.  Here's an awesome:

Electric Eel Powers Christmas Tree