Mar
21
2012
Drawn at 111 Minna gallery and club in San Francisco at the Sketch Tuesday artist event on 3/21/12. The event allows artist to make art on the spot and place it for sale for patrons visiting the space. The art is black acrylic ink and watercolor on watercolor paper.
Mar
21
2012
Drawn at 111 Minna gallery and club in San Francisco at the Sketch Tuesday artist event on 3/21/12. The event allows artist to make art on the spot and place it for sale for patrons visiting the space. The art is black acrylic ink and watercolor on watercolor paper.
Mar
21
2012
Drawn at 111 Minna gallery and club in San Francisco at the Sketch Tuesday artist event on 3/21/12. The event allows artist to make art on the spot and place it for sale for patrons visiting the space. The art is black acrylic ink and watercolor on watercolor paper.
This one was my first one I sold.
Mar
18
2012
I really like how the color came out on this one.
Brush/Ink drawing with digital color
Mar
17
2012
Time for some new art. It’s been a while since I posted anything here on the blog and I thought it was about time. Here is a bird that I drew in ink and then colored in Photoshop.
Feb
24
2012
I am pleased as punch to finish my new comic book ‘Snonan the Brave,’ the story of a warrior snowman and a quest that will make his face his greatest fear! Featuring lose ink drawings and wordless dialog for all-ages. For years I had this idea of a story combining a Snowman + ‘Conan the Barbarian’ and thought it would be perfect for a winter themed tale. It was a lot of fun for me to create, giving me a chance to experiment with different techniques and tools.
I will be updating more infomation on my new comic later this weekend (time permitting)
I will have copies of the book for sale at the Image Comic Expo this weekend starting today Friday Feb 24 and running though Sunday Feb 26. I am at table Artist Alley 607 (see animated map below). Find out more at: Image Comic Expo
Feb
20
2012
A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation
I have been busy on some projects, but I took a break to try a new script for Adobe After Effects … RigIt. I am always looking for tools that can help an artist animate their artwork whether the artwork is from their comic/illustration or created specifically for a protect. RigIt is a script that can take a bunch of parts that build up a character and use coding to rig them together to allow you to animate it with inverse kinematic. The script is in a Beta Tdest right now so there still might be some bugs, but all-in-all it worked very well. Here is a sample I created in about 2 hours last night (including some trial and error on setting up the figure).
Download the script HERE
RigIt After Effects script test from Brian Kolm on Vimeo.
The script features a window to set the art layers and buttons to set each step of the process. For the final product the script will actually set null objects to control the limbs, but will hide the clutter with the ‘shy’ function which makes the animation space really pleasant to use.
The main hurdle I had was figuring out that you have to place a null object for any parts you don’t want to have as a segment of your figure (for me that was the finger on the hands). Another element that is a bit weird was that you only set the arm and leg on the Left side and then it flips the images and code in the ‘Build’ phase to create the right side. So if your figure has different art for limbs on both sides of the body this could be a problem, but I am guessing you can simply replace/adjust those layers with different artwork before the last step.
In the future I would love to see support for layers that use the Puppet Tool as well as being able to switch which direction the bones work in the middle of an animation.
All in all this has been the easiest character rigging script I have used so far, and it’s only in Beta so it’s not even official done yet. There is a good chance I will be using it on some future projects and I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.
Here is the official video…
Feb
11
2012
A pencil sketch with some digital color.
