dream job

Wow. I've been so inside my own head for the past year that I didn't notice the perfect cartoon was being made in my own back yard. Had I known that LOSE was so awesome, I'd have applied long ago.

The team is great, the IP rules, the style is fun, it's the perfect challenge. Feels like a video game I get paid to play.

Time trial mode starts soon, level one is always a walk in the park.

big day tomorrow

Signed with a tv studio to animate super villains in a kids TV show.

This is some IP I think I can really sink my teeth into. Always loved good super villain cartoons. Used to watch a ton of spider man and anything else with a cool super villain in it as a kid

The heroes were always so bland and predictable, at least the super villains had some personality.

Hope I can sleep tonight, I have a bad habit of tossing on turning the night before big steps like this.

oh yea, saw how to train your dragon today. Amazing flick, ate up the visuals. Dragon designs and animation was easily the best ever done. Hands down. Dreamworks; Thank you for making family films awesome! Animation doesn't have to be about lame buddy buddy fart jokes. Ok, the story was formulaic and some of the voice acting was a bit off, but dragons have never looked this amazing before and I dig it. Animating on a movie like that is on my bucket list, so clearly now I have to build a time machine to go back and work on the movie that just came out

now to troll conspiracy theory filled forums at random looking to buy "time crystals"

.....


or bed

03-23-2010

more value study. Tough to keep proportions solid with this new medium. More practice needed

value

short pose session with charcoal. Trying to knock back negative space to carve out the figure. Different way of thinking, Fun challenge

03-20-2010

Some more practice with value

starting to get more confident

Things are heating up

gotta catch up on posting stuff!

a tattoo design for Pablo


several sessions of life drawing






Been practicing speed painting lately. Here's some space stuff, about an hour each

03-09-2010

trying to get more solid form using value

03-07-2010

Wow I forgot how much harder it is to draw a male model! Girls tend to have softer, more general shapes that are easier to fake your way through, male anatomy is blockier, but can also be a lot more complex. Instead of smooth flowing curves there's complicated lumpy muscles.

Stuck wtih quick studies, trying to pay more attention to negative space to help with accuracy

Boom. Done.

Took about a week longer to finish than I'd hoped, but the result was worth it.

full size here

the final countdown!

It's been a rollercoaster since I left Highschool. Thought I had it all figgured out with a master plan for awhile, looking like I was fooling myself in retrospect.

Two months from now I'm going to have to settle for whatever work I can find, until then I'm devoting all my time to improving my art so I can get into a good studio.


Progress is being logged on several forums in a hunt for critiques, the most recent one is here.

03-04-2010

Changed seats for a better view of a sitting pose, after it was done the guy right next to me asked to move back because all my motion was distracting. I tend to move like I'm conducting when I get really into drawing. Occasionally it involves some slight flailing.

03-03-2010

lifedrawing 03-02-2010

groovy chick

Kinda choked up on the hair. Was going for the afro samurai look, go overwhelmed, moved on to something fresh

my 2009 office

you'll need to have a special plugin to view this properly, but it's worth getting as photosynth is fucking rad

pushing pixels in photoshop, working over vast distances, carving motion with maya, infinite research at my fingertips, sitting in a cockpit on the edge of a tower in a forest of crystal columns

it's the future I read about as a little kid from all my science fiction books

working though the night into the sunrise was a beautiful thing

Olympics: week one

Wow

Never seen anything like this. Mobs that cover half the downtown core with families, sports fans, party people in flag capes and all manner of street performer the city can muster.

The vibrant energy saturates the streets. Ziplines over robson square squeal every few minutes drawing cheers from the mob, cops in bright yellow vests punctuate the view as they scan for trouble makers.

Opening night protest featured tons of native dance and a hockey game complete with goals and a scoreboard in the middle of the crowd. The next morning a few dozen anarchists made asses of themselves breaking windows before being pummeled to the pavement by pissed off cops as the crowd shouted shame, since then spirits of protest quieted down around the heavily patrolled party areas

elsewhere the voices of dissent are more audible. On Hastings a small tent city has congealed in an empty lot, colorful banners and tribal drums resonating distress signals of our cities forgotten peoples, swept under the rug by the multinational corporate pavilions that have occupied every other open space downtown with gleaming white tents glimmering with projected images drawing the people in with promise of shiny things



The skytrain system is running at max capacity attempting to hasten the bottlenecked crowds that regularly flood the system. The people are herded with sheep gates and bullhorns through corridors lined with homogenous advertisements telling them what to buy next as they clutch their flags and overpriced souveneirs.

It's an ideal city for a young artist, as the downtown population temporarily doubles and pours into the streets a myriad of potential drawing subjects mills about just waiting to be drawn. There's just not enough hours in the day and not enough energy in my body to keep up with it.

Tonight I remained in to work on a fresh painting after spending the afternoon listening to homeless rant their life tales at me as I sketched their tent city. Made some cash over the past week doing portraits for a few coins each, usually a 5er from a dad for drawing two or three of his kids. I'm surprised I haven't seen any other sketchers, I would have guessed that the local artists would have hopped on this opportunity but perhaps they're too crowd-weary to deal with the masses. Not that I blame them, I can only take an hour or so of the mob before retreating to some peace.

This has been fantastic practice though, I'm starting to get the hang of eye flipping and using memory skills to continue a face after the subject has moved. Need to start adding in more torso next, too many floating heads in these sketches, but I've needed practice on faces for awhile.

next up

When I was a kid I used to have these fever induced hallucinations that are really tough to describe with words. I can vividly remember these images from when I was a young kid, so once all the Olympic insanity dies down I think it's time to try to paint these images

....

stay tuned

New demo reel!

trying for shading and straight line

three hours well spent

Lifedrawing, January 2010

Pills smoke and crows tattoo design

commissioned by Bucky

the pill bottle will be around the elbow, and the whole shape will wrap around his arm, the top right bird lining up with the shoulder blade

hopefully it inks well, I'll post pics of the final tat when it's done

GALAXY WARS for the sake of the universe!

Play this game!!

GALAXY WARS has been chipped away on by myself and my roommates for the better part of a year, worked on it whenever we had spare time. The process was very organic and I think the result is pretty tight. I learned a lot about the process of game design working on this title, and am really looking forward to expanding on what we got started here.

boxed in

I was quite inspired by the "cube series" photos I found on Deviantart. I've been wanting to practice pushing perspective, so this shot was an excellent study.

Tattoo design

A few weeks ago I decided to try doing some custom tattoo designs on commission. My good friend Erin is my first customer, she asked for "flowing feminine notes" which I took as a challenge for some abstract design.





I used a photo of a model friend to reference some feminine curves, and abstracted the shape into a flowing double helix that wrapped around her body. I then turned the ribbons into bars and drew the notes to "Fur Elise" running along them.

I'm quite happy with the results









The fact that someone would be willing to pay me to be my canvas is really cool, and I can't wait to see how the ink turns out.

Another friend has already commissioned another custom tattoo, and I'm fleshing out the idea for it now.

Robits!

I've spent the past month going robot crazy. Here is the result

3D Animation Demo Reel!

contact at paulzeke@gmail.com

updates coming

I've been keeping busy working from home for the past few weeks. I'm very stoked that Clint has started holding Vanarts Alumni Lifedrawing sessions, the second one is tomorrow. He gets major points for that cuz nothing beats a live model to really get in the zone for some practice.

I'll upload a few drawings before Christmas

Also, as soon as I get a copy of quicktime pro working I'll be able to upload both my demo reels. They haven't been a top priority seeing as I'm not looking for employment.

ohgawd

I have three weeks to finish my reel ....

Here's my first show-off-worthy animation

first post!

Hello world


here's a big batch of uploads just for you

First some 60 second gestures




















here's a 5 minute dynamic form study


























some street sketches




























more street sketches























and here's a car I modeled lit and rendered in Softimage XSI














I'll do more writing when I've got some time, till then
Cheers!