Commercial Holidaze Comic

Just a fun comic I quickly did today during class based on the observation of how the commercial industry treats certain holidays this time of year.

Chesire Cat

Back to Uploading

So it's been almost 3-4 months since I last posted. Sorry for the serious lack of uploads. I kind of fell out of habit of using the computer during the summer and so fell out of habit of uploading. But I'm back to uploading-I have tons of stuff to upload, I just need to find a scanner to do a proper job of scanning b/c my scanner is in the process of dying (oh joy :/ ).

But for now, here's some photoshop doodles I did this weekend while watching Recess on youtube. Nothing too serious, but they were all fun to draw. Enjoy!

Weekly Assignment #6

I realize pretty much no one else from my school is doing this anymore, but I think it's good practice and it's helped me add some great life drawing pieces to my portfolio, so I'm just going to keep trucking along with the weekly assignments. This week was to draw 3 landscapes. I took over my sister's nannying job for the week which gave me lots of time and new places to draw. So here it goes:

At one of the kid's baseball games. I need to learn how to draw straight lines.

At Cascade Bay, a community pool. Fun but challenging to draw. Could have attempted drawing the water better than I did, but otherwise, this is my favorite of the 3.

Weekly Assignment #5

Another weekly assignment-draw 10 people. The first two are from the nursing home my grandma is at. My mom and I went to visit her and my grandpa and they had this happy hour event-a good time to draw lots of old people (who are incredibly fun to draw....even more so than morbidly obese people!). The third set is from Dunn Bros. and the last one is of a rabbit at Petco (first time drawing a real rabbit!). I'm happy with how this turned out, I didn't have the stiffness problem like I did with the last set up of the people I drew.

My grandparents enjoying Happy Hour.

~Lauren

Summer Sketchbook

Here are a few of my favorite pages from my sketchbook this summer.

This was too big for my scanner to scan, so I had to just take a picture of it. I created the body of the squirrel(just the gray parts put together) fall freshman year and I just came across it when I was cleaning my room this summer, so I decided to finish up the squirrel and make a background for him as week.
Materials-Paper, Glue

I wanted to draw the fashion from the two decades in time that I'd love to visit if time travel was possible-the 1900's and the 1930's. So I decided to draw Katie and The Flying Aardvark as if they lived in each respective decade.
Materials-Col-Erase Pencil, Copic Markers, Micron Pens

I drew this picture for a good friend of mine after her corgi, Duchess(the dog on the right) suddenly and unexpectedly died. I wasn't planning on drawing my friend a picture, but after seeing this picture of her two dogs, I just had to draw it. I hope her family likes this drawing a lot, it was a pleasure to create.
Materials-Col-Erase Pencil, Copic and Prismacolor Markers, Prismacolor Colored Pencils, Micron Pens

"Spirited Away" always wants me to draw dragons after watching it! I first drew the eyes and thought they looked cat-like, so I made a tiger dragon.
Materials: Col-Erase Pencil, Micron Pens, Copic Markers

~Lauren

Weekly Assignment #4

Ek, sorry this is in late. My internet was out last night and I've been out all day today....but anyways, here's my assignment for the week. We had to watch a good animated movie and also a bad one and then make 5 comments about it. The good animated movie I watched was "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and the bad animated movie I'm going to comment on but truthfully I didn't watch within the past week is "All Dogs Go to Heaven".

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"

• First off, brilliant editing between live-action and animation. It wasn't like that was entirely new concept (it actually started in the 1919 with Koko the Clown) but somehow, they managed to reinvent that idea and improve upon in and made it convincing. Very hard to do I'm sure.
• Love the use of camera angles and camera, especially when heavily animated(like in the beginning Roger Rabbit cartoon). It's not something that's usually done quite to the extent it was in this movie so it made it even more entertaining and inspiring to watch.
• The idea and story behind this film was genius. It was very clever and I love the fact that it was set during the Golden Age of Animation. And it's pretty awesome that SO many of the studios gave the right to use their characters in this movie. It's great because they are all such iconic characters, but even more entertaining if you know a bit about animation history. ;)
• Animation and character acting was dead on, especially since it all had to be animated on one's (ouch).
  
• Lastly, I'm going to comment on the script. It was a very well written script, something that many generations could enjoy watching. It was well-paced, it knew when to throw the right humor into the story and how to build up suspense. Beautifully put together story. Bravo.

All I can say is if you haven't watched "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", you have to-it's such a classic that definitely helped bring about the Animation Renaissance of the 1990's. You are missing out if you haven't seen this movie.

"All Dogs Go To Heaven"

Although I do enjoy most Don Bluth films, this one I just didn't like which was too bad because it had animals in it....and that's such a sure-fire way to pull me into a movie. I honestly wish I liked this movie, it has so much potential, but the main reason I didn't like this movie was because of the story. I enjoyed the character designs and color schemes for the most part....but ugh, NONE of that matters if your story is weak! Here's a few things that made the story weak, as well as other reasons why this movie was kind of a flop to me:

• The main character was incredibly unlikeable and didn't change too much. When Charlie died at the end, it felt forced and insincere and I didn't buy it. It was like he changed because he had to and not because he truly was a changed dog.
• Most of the songs were pointless and didn't help push the story along at all. Most just seemed forced and broke the viewer away from the story.
• The story ended really suddenly, I feel like Charlie's time in heaven again could have been give just a little bit more screen time....maybe a bit more dialouge (I think part of this is why I feel like he never really changed whole-heartedly)
• Just some odd scenes that didn't neccesarily have to be in the movie in the first place (ie. alligator scene), made the movie at times feel choppy
  
• Character acting was medioacre. Not good or bad....just okay, especially compared to other Bluth films, not their best animation-wise. A lot of times it felt lifeless.

I'd still say this movie is worth seeing at least once, it is such a cult classic for some people (which is why I think in part why I was just so disappointed with this movie). And it's always good to see something different than just Disney or another majorily popular style of animation. Though if you're going to watch a Bluth film soon, I'd recommend you'd watch another one of his films made in the 1980's over this one.

So that's all. I plan on writing a post about Disney's first 5 films sometime soon. There's something increbily rich about them everytime I watch them that is just absent in other Disney movies, but I have to watch the other Disney movies so I can somewhat figure out what is it exactly that makes those movies so different from other Disney movies. I do so enjoy writing about animation. :)

There shall be some sketchbook art in my next post.

~Lauren

Weekly Assignment #2

2nd weekly assignment. Draw 10 people/animals. I'm just going to somewhat comment/critique all of these since I'm not very happy with any of these.

Drew this page at the Lake Calhoun "sunning spot". I wasn't in the mood to draw when I did these and it shows. People look stiff, there's not very good dimension and I rushed. :/ Good place to draw though!

Minus the cat, all of these folks were drawn from the Edina Art Fair. I was bummed the weather was so crappy this past weekend because I couldn't draw the people (and there was such a good crowd too *sigh*). I'm somewhat happy with these, but still....I can do better, especially with capturing more personality. Oh and I wish there was a pause option in life....people move too fast sometimes, especially the interesting ones!

Haha, oh my last two are memory sketches (basically you stare at whatever you're looking at and then draw it from memory....usually ends up with a bit more exaggeration because you're drawing from the impression you had of them). So first the lady....I'm okay with how it turned out, it's just that arm is totally fake and stiff. It could use a bit more shading too. And the dog, I like the sense of motion I kind of captured and my mom said that my leash I drew kind of looked like a cape, so I somewhat turned it into a cape.

Anyways, I need more practice....and more practice than just 10 people a week. I just need to get off my lazy butt and get drawing, which should be a bit easier seeing the weather is getting a bit nicer. Oh, and I'm going to start going to a life drawing co-op in Minneapolis which should help lots.

~Lauren

Rain Rain Go Away-Comic

Just a quick comic I made inspired by an event that happened on Saturday. It had been raining all day and it looked like things were clearing up, so I decided to be nice and take my dog for a long walk since he had been cooped inside all day. Of course, Murphy's Law, it started to down pour half-way into the walk. I was not too pleased but at least my dog enjoyed the walk, despite the rain.

More artwork soon on the way!

~Lauren

Up

I saw Up when it came on midnight Friday. It was fabulous, go see it.
And I have a lot to learn about using Crayola crayons. They're harder to use than one may think.

Hello, I'm Back and Look People!

I'm back from my hiatus of updating this blog. After getting out of school, I needed a small break to rejuvenate and get my focus back on working on my artwork b/c that's been lacking for a few months, but it's totally back now. For the past week I've just been working on some fun artwork for myself that I won't post on this blog since there aren't anything very serious.
Anyways, over the summer, a few people from the Digital Media Arts programs at NWC(my school) are doing weekly assignments to keep us from slacking over summer break. This week we had to draw 10 figures from life. Most of the people I drew are from TV. I was watching the National Spelling Bee and thought it would be a fun challenge to try drawing people from TV b/c they move a whole lot faster than people in real life, especially with changes of camera.

Figure and Motion Drawing Final

Whew.....I'm done! I was really worried I wouldn't finish these in time but I finished with 4.5 hours to spare. I don't necessarily think that these drawings look much like me but I like how they turned out and it was great to use a different medium for each drawing.

Crappy photo, but this is a digital painting printed first on textured paper and then photo paper(for the dog). Gah, total horror story with this one. I had to restart my computer b/c from the power outage yesterday, my computer was acting weird. When my computer comes back on I try to open this file and somehow the file got corrupted and I can no longer even open it up. THANK GOD I decided to do some test prints just because I was curious to see what it would look like on the different type of paper I had otherwise I would have had to start completely over with this. Too bad the file is lost though, I really liked how this turned out. :(

Chalk Pastels, Pencil, and Charcoal on Posterboard. 22 in. x 11.5 in.
My least favorite of the three, but it was great to use chalk and charcoal, it really fit the mood.

Sharpie, Prismacolor marker, FaberCastle Brush Pen, Golden Acyrlic. 18.75 in x 25.5 in.

And with this sophomore year is finished. Crazy, I'm halfway done.

~Lauren

Birthday Party Blues- Animation Final

Birthday Party Blues

There's the link to my animation final for Basic Animation Techniques. Yay! Now I just have to make through two more finals, then I will be on summer vacation! :)

Finals.....dunnn dunnnn duuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh!

Animation Final Preview #2

Did the cut-out animation portion for my final tonight. Oof, my legs are quite sore from standing for so many hours, but I think it was well worth it. Things went rather smoothly during shooting....I just hate the lights in the shooting room, they add this nasty yellow hue and it's a pain to do color correction and have it match nicely throughout your film. But I'll make it work.
Gah this is due officially in a week! Yikes!

Animation Final Preview #1

I'm almost done with the pre-production stage of my final for Basic Animation Techniques. I'm using traditional cut-out animation mixed with hand-drawn animation, so I've been hard at work creating backgrounds, puppets, getting voices, ect. I can't believe this has to be done in less than two weeks but everything is coming together so much better than I could have imagined, so I'm excited to see how this turns out in the end...hopefully it won't disappoint but with how it's going, I can't imagine it going sour. Anyways, since this is definitely going to be consuming my life until it's over, I'll be posting some preview images occasionally for the next two weeks.

First preview: The 6 kid puppets. All created on Photoshop then they will be printed off on card stock and then sewn together, but in this image I assembled them as they should look.

Sleepy Woody Life Drawings

Woody was sleeping in the dogbed and he was just so cute, I had to draw him. :)

Sound Synch Animation

For Basic Animation Techniques, we had to do a sound syncing animation with simple shapes. Here's the link to mine:

Sing, Sing, Sing Sound Synch

Overall I'm pretty happy with how mine turned out. Although I totally got sick of listening to music, I actually really enjoyed sound-syncing. I usually go by feel when animating but this time I had to be bound by the rules of my music which was an challenging but interesting change of pace. Plus it was pretty cool to see the finish product with the animation fitting to the music (for the most part). Hopefully I learned some from this project, as I'm moving past simple shapes and sound-syncing a dance animation for another animation class I'm sitting in on. Hopefully it will be done by the end of the school year, but here's a "preview" (a single frame!). And if you're curious, the song I chose to do my dance animation is "Send Me On My Way" by Rusted Root. If you haven't heard it before, check it out, it's a fun song.

Science Museum Dinosaurs

I went on a Honors field trip earlier today to the Science Museum. It was overall pretty good, I met a few new people, had to try and explain what art was, and drew lots of dinosaur skeletons. A good start to my day.

Sidewalk Chalk Artin'

With the advent of nice spring weather means the start of sidewalk chalk drawing for the year. Yesterday the weather was just so gorgeous out (80 degrees!) and my very good friend Steph Binner was over at my house (since I am currently pet-sitting/house sitting), so we collabed and did a huge chalk drawing together (6 feet wide by 5 feet high). It took us 2 days to make and I think we spent between 4-5 hrs making it. We drew everyone's characters from our Intro to Animation class and it was lots of fun!

Unfortunately though there is no digital camera at my house right now, so I had to use a laptop webcam to take these photos and also took a few with my old film camera. There was already a half used roll of film and I haven't used it since I was 15 or 16, so I can't wait to see the photos whenever I get around to finishing this roll of film!

It's backwards and kind of blurry....but you can get the point.

And here's a good picture of Steph and me after finishing our sidewalk art creation. Fun times!

Purse Lioness

"Dad, which one is the Mama lion?"
"The one with a purse."

The things people say at zoos never cease to amuse me.

Feathering Models

At the gallery opening on Monday, someone asked me why I spend all the extra time and money just to feather my models. I really wish I could have just pulled out this picture because there's really no need for explanation.

100 Picture Challenge

I haven't really been creating anything new lately since I have been very busy setting up for the DMA gallery on Monday, so I decided to upload some things from my sketchbook. I started working on the 100 picture challenge in this sketchbook, limiting myself to self-portraits or personal characters. Here's a few of my best ones so far:

52. Deep In Thought-November 2008

42. Standing Still-December 2008

28. Sorrow-December 2008

65. Horror-Feburary 2009

46. Family (Heritage)-Jan.-Feb. 2009
(You win if you can guess all of them!)

~Lauren

Unicorn Character Design

This was my submission for the character design competition at my school. I didn't want to take an ugly unicorn. I wasn't expecting much to come from this idea but he actually turned out to quite a fun character to draw and develop. I'll find out on Monday if he placed or not in the competition!

Somewhat April Fools

Madame Récamier by David

Madame Récamier by René Magritte

Can it just be said the Rene Magritte has some of the best humor ever when it comes to art?
Happy April Fools everyone-hope you all pull some good pranks today!

~Lauren

Honors Western Civ. Doodle

Sand Animation

This week for Basic Animation Techniques class, we learned about sand animation. If you have never seen sand animation before, I suggest you look at Caroline Leaf (she's the animator who invented sand animation in the 70's):

The Owl Who Married A Goose

So for our assignment this weekend, we had to create a 10+sec sand animation of our own with 3 objects, 2 morphs. This was my first time ever doing sand animation and I must say, I absolutely love doing this technique. There's something really freeing about sand animation for me, like I just get to play as an animator and just have fun and experiment. Plus it's just gorgeous, the way the light and dark interact with sand is interesting to animate with, there's really no other technique like it that I've done before.

I choose to go a very different route for my animation this week and do something a bit more abstract because I've been dying to create a more abstract piece of animation and I felt that sand would lend itself to abstract animation very well. My only idea behind doing this was to listen to whatever music I was going to have in my final animation while I was animating and let the music influence my choice of imagery to create and the timing. This piece I chose to animate to was Scheherazade Movement 1. I'm glad I really enjoy this song because I listened to it on repeat for a good 5 hrs by now and I'm still not sick of it. X )

Anyways, here's the link to my first ever sand animation:

Sand Animation Experiment

And here's some of the frames from my animation that I rather like. Sand animation is just so simply beautiful!

Excuse Me?

Finally got this picture done. I've had the sketch of it done for about a week but didn't have time to color it in until tonight. Anyways, this pictures was inspired by Introduction to Animation. My class was sanding our character models, but I had to leave to go to Figure and Motion Drawing. While I was gone, my friend Casey Anderson made a lovely hat for my character Rae and when I returned I found this:

Picture taken by Casey Anderson

Haha, least to say, Rae would never ever wear a hat like this. So I was inspired to create a picture about this, expect I used Casey's character for our animation class, Mr. Grumbles. Rae is not amused whatsoever.

Rae (c) Lauren Krieger
Mr. Grumbles (c) Casey Anderson
Please do not use without permission!