Kitten CaDoodle

Wow its been a while!

So yeah, anyways, I'm going to take a moment to fawn over my two cats. Here goes!

I've got these two cats, Squash and Stretch. I love those little guys, even though at times they can be huge obnoxious turds. For instance, today, upon returning to my apartment I discover Stretch has blasted his way though my velcro cabinet defenses to pilfer the huge bag of cat food hidden within. *shakes head*

If these cats were filmmakers Squash would be Ron Howard, sweet, sentimental (Cinderella Man) and at times stupid(The Grinch Who Stole Christmas), and Stretch would be Michael Bay(Armageddon). Squash wanders around making this adorable chirping noise looking for love and food. He gets into trouble by accident and he never understands. Stretch on the other hand is actually in search of badness. Everything on the counter must be knocked on the floor, and if its on the floor it must be ripped to pieces. Upon yelling at him he will immediately tear off around the apartment making this frustrated gurgle noise looking for something else to rip up and destroy.

Anyways that's probably enough cat talk. The real point of this post is this drawing I did of the two cats. I've been trying to caricature them for a while now, and this one felt pretty good. Squash is the cute orange one and Stretch is the long-faced gray one.

Ok until next time!

Pitter Pitter Patter, Here's a Lion and a Rat

Hey folks. Well the new year has begun. I have a lot of goals this year, and one of them is to do more artwork and hopefully update this blog more often. Woo!

SOoooooo it happened. I'm obsessed with Lost. My roommates and I have been watching the first season for a week now and I am just totally "lost" in Lost. (Do you see what I did right there? Blows your mind doesn't it?) Michael Giacchino's music is pretty sweet too. I'm going to order the soundtrack methinks.

So yeah I drew this random picture. I started with the lion and then he was looking at a rat, and then I thought, "Man, rats are pretty cool!", and I drew a rat.

Jen of the Caribbean!

Hello everyone! I'm back from my winter cruise adventure! It was a pretty good time, but its nice to be back on dry land. Being on a cruise ship almost feels like being in a huge human zoo. You sit in your little cabin most of the day waiting for food, and they have a little water pool and places to layout and sun yourself, but mostly your day is spent waiting around for food. And man the food. You can eat 24 hours a day if you want, so you end up spending a lot of time just trying to be hungry for the next meal.

Anyways yeah, the boat was boring, but the nature was flipping sweet. The water! The cloudforms! The beaches! Ahh! Amazing! You'd think with all this inspiration I would have drawn something right? Wrong. I have drawn nothing. My sister even drew more then I did! (I'll have you know *I* wrote Merry Christmas.)

Also I'm reading the History of Brittain for Dummies. I'm up to like King Henry III, around the 1200s I think. History is pretty much a huge mess, but its been fascinating me a lot recently. My goal is to read more nations' historys until I'm the smartest dummy around. My sister even gave me her anthropology book! Yeah!

Ok I have to go do exciting things now like buy milk at the grocery store. Seeya!

German Shepherds!

In celebration of Thanksgiving I give you German Shepherds!! Well sort of I guess. The two just kind of coincided! I was going to update last night, but I broke the backspace key on my keyboard and spent a whole hour trying to fix it. Its really due to a kitten's ass that I got into the mess in the first place, but it was my own foolishness that broke the key. Now backspace is kind of just hanging there, dangling from one side and when I press it, it sort of sticks to my fingers, pulls up and doesn't register. *shakes head* It is the burden I must bear I suppose.

Anyways I drew these at work after being inspired by miss Heidi Jo Gilbert. They were pretty fun! My favorite part was trying to design the fur patterns and make it feel German Shepherdy. I think the one on the right has the right idea. I like the neck the most. The face is a little weird though. But yeah anyways...here it is!

Also Fried Green Tomatoes is one of the saddest movies I can remember seeing. Not that it even ends sad! It just has these sad parts that....wow....they just make me cry. I cried during the movie and then afterwards when I started thinking about it again! Yeah...ok....now I guess you all know how much of a soggy-faced girl I really am.

OK.....German Shepherds! Thanksgiving! Food.....prep...eration......

Old Story Idea

This was an old story idea I had my third year at school. I originally had huge epic plans to do a fourth year film in cg with these characters, but then griffins and other such things filled my thoughts. (Not to mention CG films are a lot of work!!) So it fell by the wayside. I think about it a lot though and I'd really like to make the film someday. Its kind of this bittersweet thing with this hermit alien guy and this little firefly that becomes his friend. I guess it sounds like boring cheese when I put it that way, but there's more to it then that! I'll probably be doing a bunch of art for it cause I'm thinking about trying to board it. Its going to be a glacially slow project, cause I don't have much free time, but I will try!

Anyways, here's a picture. I colored it on the Cintiq. I'm not sure about the background. It was a lot of playing around. Ok so here it is! I have a few more sketches but I haven't colored them yet! More to come!



Oh and speaking of bittersweet things! This film Kiwi is adorable!! I just find it so charming and sweet. You should watch it!

Rhinos....One with lips.

I'm back again! I have more doodles for the ol' blog. This time it's some rhino scribbles. If you look really carefully one of them has lips. It's kind of gross....a rhino with lips. Ew, what was I thinking?


Also you guys should check out Patches the horse!! What's even more curious then a horse riding in a car is a horse named Patches with no visible patches. hmm...

Haha anyways, yeah you watch it.

Elephant!

Hey guys!

I've been doodling a bunch inbetween animation renders. I'm actually working on shots for a real movie now guys!! I'm totally excited!! Hopefully I can learn fast and work hard so I can stay on the show. I really hope they like what I'm doing.

Anyways! I'm hoping to post more doodles, and not worry so much about making clean finished drawings.(not that you can tell I was worrying about that with my other scribbly posts to this blog! :P!) I couldn't help scribbling in a little tone in Photoshop on this one. So yep! Here's an elephant!

Cats!

About a month ago my roommates and I acquired two crazy babies....KITTENS! And being the animation nerds we are, we named them Squash and Stretch.

This is Squash:


And this is Stretch:


The picture is ripe for some kind of "cat out of the bag" play on words. I'm not going to do it though.


I will do this though: Looks like a "CATastrophe!"


This occurance was so cute it may have cured all cancer with in a 2 mile radius. The picture doesn't do it enough justice, but wow.....it was adorable.


Squash the leg climber:


Just general cuteness:


And finally here's a few cat scribbles!

There will be no new blog entry tonight.

My drawings are simply too crappy.

A Concerned Jellyfish

Dinosaurs!

I drew these last night while watching "Last Call with Carson Daly". I don't normally stay up past Conan O'Brien, who is one of my personal heros, and its for good reason. First of all I'd be really really tired for work in the morning, and more importantly "Last Call with Carson Daly" is one of the worst programs I've ever seen, but there's nothing else but infomercials on that late on basic cable. It's physically painful to watch. Nothing is funny and everyone is trying so hard and failing entirely. Also apparently they have to pay the audience 7 dollars an hour to sit through it. *shakes head*

Anyways...I hadn't drawn dinosaurs in a while, so I did. Dinosaurs are so cool. I watercolored it in front of the lodge at Calarts today. It was really peaceful. There's nothing more calming then doing watercolors in a nice place. I've got to make a habit out of it.

Goats!

There were a few days this summer where I went to this local park/ranch/farm thing down the street to draw the goats. I'm trying to do research for my Billy Goat's Gruff project, which hasn't gotten much attention as of late. I've been animating like crazy, and staying late every day at work. Gah! I'm learning a lot though, so that good. Anyways I really enjoyed watching the goats and drawing them. It was pretty peaceful and I'm sure I'll go back for more. Not to mention animals are just awesome, and goats have really strange heads. They need studying!

Santa Clarita! So glad to meetcha!

Wow, well sorry for abandoning this blog for so long. I've been working hard on my animation tests at work, and at the end of the day it leaves me with little will to do anything else, much less anything on the computer. The blog is taking the hit big time. I have some artwork, but I'm too lazy to get out the scanner. Maybe tomorrow.

Anyways...yeah....here's the lamest update of all time...

Every evening I drive 45 minutes through a bunch of annoying traffic to get back to Santa Clarita, and I hate it every day, but right at the end of my journey I come around this bend and there's always the most beautiful mountainous vista sunset waiting for me. The last 5 minutes of my drive is usually pretty beautiful! So anyways, I took a few pictures last week. Heeeere ya go!

Arrrrrt and Also Arrrrrrrrgggghhhh......

Hey everybody!! Well I saw Pirate's of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest!

Yep! That pretty much sums it up!

And also I've got some art. I drew these two baby griffin pictures a couple months ago and I thought they were cute, so I scanned them and colored them on the Cintiq. I think the first one worked out better. Then the third picture is just a griffin sketch from a month back. My roommate Nick left his red colerase sitting out and I was playing with it. It made me feel like I was drawing real professional animation drawings. Oooooo! (Mostly just cause it was a color other then gray.) This is the last of my old artwork too. Now I have to draw new stuff! I'll try not to draw so many griffins. I need to expand! Hopefully I can find some time and motivation. I've got some ideas for some goat characters I'm working on. I think they'll be fun to design, but ....yeah... no time right now!

ARRRR!

Well Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest comes out in two days. I really hope its good. I'm so tired of being disappointed. I go back and forth between complete confidence of its awesomeness and a cautious worry that "Hollywood" has screwed up yet another really REALLY fun film series. *sigh* I will just have to wait and see. Regardless of how it turns out though, I'm still excited right now! I have random pictures for you people!

First of all I hate Superman Returns. A lot. Bryan Singer left X3 to rot for this piece of garbage?! Pffft! I'm really looking forward to watching Pirates II blow it out of the water this weekend at the box office. Yeah! I made this image to express my emotions:


I wanted to do picture of Superman actually being blasted out of the sky by the Black Pearl, but such a picture was not to be found, so I had to settle for this instead. Maybe this is more..... tasteful? Eh?

And also, (and this is less stupid) last summer I went down to San Diego with some of the other Dreamworks story trainees and on the way down we spotted this on the 5 freeway:


Upon closer inspection it seemed to be some kind of morbid movie prop. Here's a high-res photo for you:


One year later I see the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and what do I see?! The same morbid movie prop!!! So awesome!!! It's totally the same thing, check it out!




Every once in a while its pretty awesome to live in L.A. (And by "in", I mean "near", because I don't actually live there. I'm Jennifer Hager and I don't endorse lying.)

Ok this was a completely geeky post. I'll have some art in the next one!

Baby?

Here're some baby griffins I drew a few months back. I have a griffin addiction! I can't stop drawing them. It is probably my most common doodle, so sorry if you're bored by my endless stream of griffins. Anyways, I spent a while trying to get really cute scratching poses. (Ah...the goals we set for ourselves!) The biggest challenge was trying to get all the limbs into good positions silhouette-wise. I started trying to color them with my wacom at home, but it was too lame, so I stayed late at work to color them on the Cintiq. Yeah! I have a few more drawings I didn't get around to coloring. So yes, fear not! More cuteness is on the way!

Also nerdy fun fact for today:

I realized early this morn that Pirates of the Caribbean II will be released exactly one year before J.K. Rowling puts out the 7th and final Harry Potter book on 7/7/07. Ruminate on that my fellow nerds!

And also... I don't remember who was debating this with me, but the definition of ruminate is:

1. To turn a matter over and over in the mind.
2. To chew cud.

So you can do either of those things to my fun fact.

And now... GRIFFINS!

Grrrrraaaaagggghhhhh!

Well sorry this hasn't been updated in a while. I've been pretty busy, and it's kind of nice to be busy for a change! Animation is going pretty well. I'm starting to figure this CG stuff out. We're doing a dialog test and its pretty challenging, but I'm slowly making progress.
I've got some art I want to put up, but its taking me forever to color it. I've only got maybe an hour a day or so to work on it. Hopefully I'll get it up later in the week, but until then I have THIS:


Adrian Molina did this drawing for me last year. I found it stuffed in one of my sketchbooks the other day. Haha, it makes me laugh just looking at it! I don't remember what spawned it. For some reason Hermoine is getting sucked up into Hagrid's gross tangled beard just like San got sucked up into that boar's gross wormy warts in Princess Mononoke. He even has eye boogers!! *shrug* Thank you Adrian!!

Ok that's it for now. I'll try to post more!

And also ...... know that its taken me over an hour to type this. You know why? I've been watching Pirate's of the Caribbean. I forgot how awesome this movie is. I can't taken my eyes off the screen whenever Jack Sparrow is on.

Road Tripping Again

So the art is kind of on hold here for a bit while I'm learning animation. They gave us real animation rigs in class yesterday and its pretty intimidating. My assignment was to do a walk cycle with two steps and I couldn't do it in time! I tried though. The teacher understands. It's cool. I'll learn this pretty slowly, but I will learn it and then it will be really fun! I really do love animation. It's just so awesome bringing things to life!

Ok so I did another road trip with Heidi last weekend. It was pretty fun, and also a completely new drive for me. We went from Salt Lake City to San Francisco. The coolest thing we saw was the Utah salt flats. Man such an alien looking place! Anyways, here are some pictures:

Here's The Great Salt Blue Line


Soon after we passed The Great Salt Lake we passed this big pile of white stuff. Here was our conversation:

Heidi: I wonder what that is.
Jen: Yeah, I don't know.

*pause*

Jen and Heidi: Oh.


Mrs. Incredible says "Heck YES!" to the salt flats!


Here I set the timer on my camera to take a picture of Heidi and I in front of the salt flats, but as I was running into place I lost my shoe, and I didn't want to go back for it cause it would waste too much time, so I kept going, pathetically hopping along, but it was too much for me, so finally I yelled "I GIVE UP!" and started to throw the frisbee down in a white hot rage, and then the camera went off.

Behold the magical glistening salt flats!


Frisbee on the salt flats! So. Awesome.


Yeah, and THIS is how we decided what CDs to play on our road trip. I'm not going to explain it. Just know that anything involving two 20 sided dice is two nerdy for explanation.


Yep. There is is.


And finally, we put this Cars image up in our window just to be dorks. We realized it was upside-down after about two hours.

More Trolls!

Hey everyone! Well these have been a long time in coming, but I've had lots of training this week, so I haven't had much time to just sit around coloring. Training is going well, and I'm pretty excited about animating! Next week we're going to do a bouncing ball and a walk cycle test. It's going to be awesome! I'm a little worried about how long my learning curve is going to be with the CG software though. Doing CG at calarts was pretty frustrating for me. Oh well, I'll have to work hard, but I'm sure it will click eventually. Anyways! Here are some more trolls! I'm planning to do some goat designs next and then start messing around with some Billy Goat's Gruff vignettes. It'll be fun! I got kind of gross with this trio. They ARE goat eating trolls, though. They're bound to get a little gory now and then!

Trolls not Trollz!

Hey Guys! Well I decided my next post should probably be artwork, and not me geeking out about something. There needs to be a fine balance of art and geek on this blog. So I took the time this morning to scan and color this drawing I did two weeks ago. I've been thinking about that Billy Goat's Gruff fairy tale a lot lately for some reason. I think partially inspired by Bert Yoon's film, "I Love you Kitty," which was totally awesome! I decided trying to design some trolls a few weeks back and this is what I came up with. I colored them on the Cintiq. I really wish I had a Cintiq all my very own. It's so awesome! It's like coloring with watercolor or marker or something, but with all the "ctrl z" power of the computer. Ok, so here it is! I'm going to post another sheet of these guys tomorrow if the coloring works out.