Artist Spotlight: Ward Jenkins

In light of a recent school project assignment, I got the idea to have artist spotlights to show off some of the talented artists I have come across over the years. There are always a handful that stand out from the crowd, so it's only fair to study their work and recognize them for their accomplishments.

Today's artist spotlight: Ward Jenkins

Stay at home illustrator and animator from Portland, Oregon, Ward Jenkins has created a style I personally am obsessed with. He runs a blog called The Ward-O-Matic. There, he writes about “art, animation, and anything aesthetically pleasing to the eye." I've been following for quite some time and can attest that everything he writes is really interesting and informative.

All around, a solid artist with a true passion and talent. His style is truly original and his characters are super catchy, which is wonderful to see among the plethora of work out there. Let's take a look at some of his work below (His self portrait is the first illustration). You can check out more of his work and contact him via his new website.

Kronk's Shoulder Angels: Kinetic Typography

Busy, busy, busy! Yep, that's definitely how I've been the past few weeks. Projects are piling up just around the same time I take more hours at work. But, busy is good, right? Absolutely!

My latest project is this kinetic typography animation you see below. Oh yeah, nothin' but type down there. I chose dialogue from one of my favorite movies of all time, The Emperor's New Groove.

Pixar Celebrates Halloween!

Yet another reason I would love to work at Pixar! These guys really know how to go all out for their parties. I would also like to say that this past Thursday I attempted to learn the Michael Jackson Thriller dance myself. It didn't go so well.

Thanks to Nate Moody and Cartoon brew for this!

3D Poses with LoMax

This semester I have been diving head first into animation. It's great and I'm learning to love the challenge. Lately, I have been animating my brains out and just blowing through tons of different assignments to make myself better at the art form. Improvements are showing, so you should see some animation in the next few posts.

For now, you can see a really helpful exercise I did to help develop a keen eye for correct balance and line of action within character poses. Pose Maniacs is a great place to find tons and tons of great poses, which you can rotate to see a 360 view. That's where I grabbed all the reference pictures you see outlined in red. This seems simple, but it's actually quite challenging to make sure all aspects of the character are correct and appear natural. Hence, the extremely tough part to accomplish in animation: the illusion of life.

Below are 5 poses I chose for this project and the respective reference image. LoMax is a free rig to use for Autodesk 3DsMax and can be downloaded here.

Emerson Theater Website Re-Design Final Comps

Whelp, I finished the 3 website designs! Overall I'm pretty happy with them. From my inspiration, I was able to veer away from traditional layouts a bit more and come up with some contemporary designs. This seems to fit for a music venue such as this one. I do think that they are a bit busy, but that seems like something we could get away with on this sort of project. I'll let you decide that one.

If you've missed what's going on, visit my last post explaining the project and displaying my pre visualization sketches.

Comments and critiques are most welcome, as always. Maybe someone affiliated with The Emerson Theater will stumble across these and make me some money... *hint hint*