Oy.

So since the class finished, I haven't really needed to use this blog anymore. Odds are, I'll shut it down when I have a solid chance but if you weren't from the class, and you liked my stuff at all, let me know by emailing me at russellvandor@gmail.com so if/when I start a real website for my art, I can let you know!

Yours truly.

Well, there's my final project. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to travel back into the 1990s and figure out how the hell burning CDs works.

So far

Early sketches so far

The most difficult part of this project so far has been coming up with interesting ways to do the scenes. So far, I'm trying to have all the sketches completely done before tomorrow, have a foothold on my panel layout (although I probably won't have a definite idea of how that will work till maybe late Tuesday/ early Wednesday), and find or take a series of abstract photographs for backrounds, ref, etc. I plan on reworking the sketches through Photoshop ASAP and cleaning them up, colorizing etc. Odds are the fine detailing won't come in till Thursday, but I've started looking up which tutorials I know I am going to need for detailing already.

mech concept

Rough samples

Scene Details for Sample

SPIDER ENCOUNTER: PART II

Note: This is a rough draft of a scene. Will likely change names, dialogue, and certain details as needed.

MIN parts drawn for project: Shots 18-31

1. Focus Shot: Small bird like creature flying

2. Action Shot: Bird is suddenly stabbed through by long appendage.

3.Horizon Line distance shot: Spider creature stilting on stretched legs. One appendage is stretched upwards, indicating its involvement in bird’s death.

SFX: *7 *7 *7 *7 *7 *7

4. Group shot: GRAVES, MIA, and ROCKO huddled around computer.

ROCKO: See? No way we’ll get past that thing!
MIA: It hasn’t moved from that spot since we entered the silo. Even if it can’t get us in here, it’s not letting us leave.

GRAVES: Biggs, did you find anything that looks useful?

5. Side Shot to Biggs on his hand radio, looking up
BIGGS: There’s an old loader unit here for mounting cruise missiles. Its pretty beat up, buuut I think we might be able to use it.

6. Angle shot at Loader Mech
GRAVES (radio): What are you thinking?
BIGGS: We can mount one of these warheads to the unit’s self destruct trigger, then charge the Loader right into the side of that creature. After that, all we have to do is hit the kill switch and watch that spider burn, if we’re lucky.

ROCKO: Easier said than done. The remote sensor looks whacked. Someone would have to drive it.

7. Shot of BIGGS looking at mech.
BIGGS: Not a problem. The Loader’s still hooked up to a recovery winch. If we unlock the RPM governor, we could use it to extract the pilot.
ROCKO (radio): And break his damn spine in half! Who the hell would try that?

8. BIGGS: I will. The rear hatch panel comes right off, I can ride it all the way back to the garage.
   ROCKO (radio): You’re out of your mind!
   GRAVES (radio): We’re out of options. Getting to that convoy is our top priority.
Do what you have to Biggs.

9. Garage door shut

10. Garage door opening.
SFX: ^/ ^/ ^/ ^/ ^/ ^/

11. Front shot of Loader Mech

12. Cabin shot of BIGGS.
BIGGS: I’m moving out.

MIA (radio): Confirmed. No reaction from target.

13. Shot of treads kicking up dust

14. Rear shot of mech moving towards Spider Creature

15. Creature turns head to face Loader unit.
SFX OWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOO
MIA (radio): Target is responding.

16. Rear shot of Loader mech. Spider Creature leaps out of view of panel
SFX H:H:H:H:H:H:H:H:

MIA (radio): Shit!

17. Action Shot, Spider has leapt onto front of Loader Unit
SFX KYYYRRRRRR

18. View of Spider’s face through display monitor
SFX OWWOOOOOOOOOOO

19.  Shot of GRAVES, MIA, and ROCKO around monitor
ROCKO: Shit that thing’s fast!

20. Cabin Shot of BIGGS at controls of mech

21. Shot of Loader raising 1 arm

22. Shot of Loader’s raised arm grabbing Spider’s head, lower arms reaching back

23. Zoom of lower arm blade going into Spider’s side

SFX OWWWOOOOOOOOO

24.  Shot of GRAVES
GRAVES: IT’S LATCHED! DO IT!

25. Shot of BIGGS hitting kill switch and raising arm to release latch

26. BIGG’s hand on release latch.

27. BIGGS pulls release Latch
SFX CHNK

28. View of Rear Panel w/ steam shooting out

SFX FSSHHHH

29. BIGGS is ejected from Loader.

30. Shot of Rear Panel w/ BIGGS shooting towards viewer.

31. Explosion, w/ BIGGS still being pulled towards viewer.

END SCENE

One moar t'ing, Jackieeeee

I almost forgot here's the version of my last project I'm printing

Final Project

So for about maybe a year or so, I've been working (time allowing) on my own pet project for a comic that's been in my head for maybe 4-5 years now, but only has rough work on paper until said last year. There's been a lot of thought put into it so far, and I think that I am going to actually use this final project as an opportunity to finally get a handle on how I can pull it out of the rough draft area and actually do a page for once. To that end, I'm going to actually produce a page of this comic, doing all of the hard copy work by hand based on scripts and rough sketches, while using all of the Photoshop tricks and tutorials I've learned over the past few weeks that make me think I can actually pull this off now (honestly I felt like I was dead in the water until I saw some of the tutorials this past week). So more or less, if I'm doing this, I need the go ahead now, because my time to work on this will be limited over the weekend, I've already started, and I don't want to go to square one come Monday.

While I'm not going into detail on the plot, I'll go ahead and say its a post apocalyptic tragedy about people struggling to survive in a doomed, war ridden world, lamenting mankind's past futile attempts to control their own nature through law and technology, and a faux government's attempts to dominate others by scraping together whatever "glory" they can find from the dead empire that led their world to ruin.

(I did a lot of digging. This isn't even half of it, but most of my sketches are rather unintelligible)

Ughhhhhhh....

Cleanup Duty...
Found out I destructively added the fog filter... *long groan*

WIP update

Still working, Having a lot of trouble with fog effects >:(
Unrelated, I'm watching the BBC over the whole Iraq situation. Shitstorm be a brewin, that's all I'm saying...

Today

Cool so I finally got ahold of a photo that I think works for this. It's a little harsh right now, but that's because I'm still trying to get better at these tutorials- definitely too blue. Might also make it a little longer so I can add in evaporation on the right side, and shift the storm to the middle.

My starting point for today

Okay so starting work nnnnow from where I was yesterday. Will probably work out of class too today and get some panorama pics of this location, because I don't like this photograph in particular.
By the way, I've already searched for as many as I can, but if any of you guys watching in my class know any water/cloud/storm tutorials, or anything in that direction you think I could use.... links away people. Conceptually I'm also thinking of shrinking and stretching this a lot longer, so I can really get the sunny/storm/evaporate transition. Thoughts?

Process work so far

Hey Guys,

just showing some of the process images I have so far .

This one here is a water texture I created for streams, splashes and small bodies

 This image is sort of my playground with water based effects for the time being. I'm going to eventually apply whatever I learn from this guy to

 well, this guy down here. He's sort of the base right now for my first draft. I'm going to take more shots of this location and create a transition from calm to storm on the image from left to right.

like so

Oh, here are my clouds by the way

Project 3 base w/ rain tutorial

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-effects/rain/
WATER CYCLE
ICE ICE BABEEEEEY

Project 3. Crap It's Friday the 13th.

Throughout the course of our own lives, we always have our ups and downs; occasionally some are better or worse than others. Sometimes those low points in life end up circulating endlessly over a long period of time, and become their own separate part of your life. These range from things such as addiction, social habits, even our outlook on life itself. I consider these things to be regarded as vicious cycles. I regard my work ethic in my college courses to be one of these vicious cycles because over time, I have come to realize that I follow a consistent pattern with how I go about my projects that lies somewhere similar to procrastination, except the “work every minute like its your last” mentality tends to kick in well before the last day. This is because I have a bad habit of not always understanding the assignments I’m given (typically my fault) and this strange phenomena where my first concept is always incredibly weak, yet I always fail to recognize it as such until I’ve already put some work into it. So for this project I am going to display that through a visual cycle, of events through collage that tell a nonlinear story.

Huh, that bottom one came out weird.

Finally managed to upload my work for the last couple sessions. It's been pretty hectic so I haven't had time but heres what I wound up finishing my project with.
...Yeah not exactly what I had before isn't it?

Wait, I have a better idea.

Do you know who the coolest person in Star Wars was?

It was Boba Fett.

                                                       .....Shut up it was totally Boba Fett and you know it.

That being said, I decided to create the Fantasy Appliance I always wanted: a Jetpack. And not those really lame ones that are huge and look like the airborne equivalent of Segways. Now I know that technically jetpacks exist. But let's be honest, there probably will not be an affordable civilian model for some time. So using my photoshopped antique objects and a stock backpack image, here's my take on a civilian model jetpack (she's not the shiniest, but she'll get you where you need to go)

Undeployed:

Deployed:

Project Two Photoshopped Ideas

I have created three photoshopped objects from the antiques I photographed.

Up here we've got a crank powered fan. I'm sure they have these in real life made of cheap plastic somewhere but sometimes you just gotta have that old school "will this give me tetanus" sort of fan on the go. Odds are if you need something like this you probably don't have electricity either so might as well add a manual crank, right?

This is a Fiber Rifle. Using parts from a sewing machine and an old rifle (as well as a suspiciously familiar hand crank), this thing could be used to fire long cables or similar length-rope objects like a grappling hook. Alternatively you could make it fire sewing needles, and coming from someone who impaled their foot on one sticking out of the floor, that biz hurts. And if you stuck a bayonet on it and hooked it up to the sewing motor, you could have an oversized sewing/stabbing machine. Haha.... ehhhh.

See now this one above makes more sense than the other two. I combined a can opener and a juicer together for this one, and added some extra gears to the can opener. Now you have a portable crank operated Fruit-Veggie-Meat-Guy's-fingers-who-owes-the-mafia-money Grinder/Juicer/Example Maker!

Might get rid of that last feature.

Contact Sheet for Project 2

Update 6/5

Update 6/2/14

Decided to put a lot more focus on using Photographs instead. I have this giant stack of film photos I took last year that I occasionally use as a improv paperweight, so I got that workin for me.

I ended up spending that quarter by the way. Worst investment ever too, Fruit Stripes gum runs outta flavor in like 10 seconds. 

Throwing some film photos into the mix to switch things up