Lady Femme Learns to Fly

I updated one of my older projects with a new title card.

View Lady Femme on Vimeo

Winning the Oil Endgame: Style

Here's some parts and pieces I'm working on for my next animation project, called "Winning the Oil Endgame." It's based on a TED talk of the same name. I motif for the animation will be board games, hodge-podging elements from Risk, Monopoly, and the Game of Life.

A Life Alone Video

A Life Alone from Adam Osgood on Vimeo.

Here's my final video. Hope you like it!

A Life Alone: Sketchbook

Here is a sneak preview from my short animated film, "A Life Alone." The video needs a few tweaks, so come back in a week to see the full animation!

Barbie & Ken

I was grinning ear to ear this afternoon as I was painting Barbie & Ken as well as three children (not pictured). I'm so thrilled that this illustration style & process that I have been developing over the last couple years is so useful in this animation project. I'm also thrilled with how naturally the designs are coming together.

Also, in a testament to simultaneous contrast Barbie is a blonde and her green hair will look very yellow in the context of the scene I'm dropping her in.

Neighborhood Scene Revisited

I started playing with my puppet inside the neighborhood scene and wasn't thrilled with the energy between the two. I decided to add more detail and change some little color aspects. Here you can see a shot that will likely never be in the finished animation, but is more exciting than the actual framing with the tops of the houses cut off!

Also, if you look closely you can tell that I used a funky transparency mask on the clouds so that they look like tissue paper. I hope I can find other places to use this effect, because it looks pretty sweet.

Animation Color Keys

Making major headway on my autobiographical animation. Worked out some of the details in my storyboard and did color keys for the whole thing. I didn't actually HAVE to do this step, but I see professional animation studios doing it and it just looks fun! I feel like I could refine these little drawings and have a storybook. I also feel like this simple retro style would be perfect for the animation all by itself! But the assignment is to do a puppet-show-theater style thing with a shallow depth of field, and that's what I'm going to do!

Also, here's the first set (of the neighborhood from the childhood scene) rigged & lit in After Effects. I tried to make it look like the set it built out of different kinds of paper and painted finishes. The whole thing should end up looking somewhat handmade. If you look at this and the little boy puppet from my last post you can get a pretty good feeling for the look of the film.

Character design.

Dear blog, sorry to have neglected you. I'm in school and it's just a lot of work! I have been creating a lot, check out my little explorations on vimeo.

I'm currently working on a 1-minute animated autobiography. It's going to be Richard Scarry animal-style. This is the puppet I created of me as a little boy. And no, I don't remember being dressed like a hipster BUT that's a real shirt! I wish they made things that awesome now. Capped sleeves, diagonal arrows, great color combo. If I had a time machine I would make go back and get that shirt.

Paul Poiret

This summer I wanted to do a project in acrylic to use up some of the remaining boards I had lying around before I moved to Raleigh. I ended up with 3 paintings based on vintage illustrations from fashion house Poiret. The illustrations date from around 1910 and are done by Paul Iribe & George LePape, who were commissioned over many years to create drawings of the Poiret fashions. This is a topic I touched back in 2006 when I was working on my senior thesis for my BFA in illustration. Similarly, I created 3 illustrations based on the fashion of Poiret. This time, however, it was far more homage because I used the existing compositions & color palettes from the Iribe/LePape images. While I made quite a few changes, the similarities are uncanny. The image below shows my paintings on the right next to their inspirations.

3D

I've been playing around with ZBrush today, getting pumped up for the 3D stuff I'm undoubtedly going to have to do in the coming weeks when classes start. Here's a head I spent a couple hours "sculpting." I haven't figured out out to use more than one object yet, so I wasn't able to use spheres for his eyeballs. Next time!

Gaston

Here's a little painting I did for fun over the past week. It's what I imagine the puppy that I had last summer might look like today. I gave him back to my mother, who is a dog breeder, which hopefully doesn't sound too heartless. He really was the love of my life for the week I had him, but the idea of leaving him in a cage in my apartment during my 9-5 was too much to bear. (how boring!) He ended up going with his puppy brother to a home with two little old ladies that probably give him a whole lot of love. And plenty of cigarettes?

...Anyway I had finished the clothing part and then almost scrapped the painting because I was running out of time (more on that below) but really his face and arms wasn't so hard. I also have been wanting to spray a matte finish on something and then put a high gloss varnish in certain areas on a painting for a while, so this was a good opportunity to test it out. Although you can't see in this digital image AT ALL, I glossed the "smoke" and his eyes and nose. It's a cool effect that I'll use again.

Now the other part is that I'm moving to Raleigh tomorrow to embark on a new adventure: the graduate animation program at North Carolina State University. Wish me luck!

CS5 Play

Just got my CS5 Master Suite in the mail last night and wanted to play around with Photoshop's new features. I think the new settings with the brush are pretty cool, but really not all that life altering. I tried my best to use them in this image, but don't like the result as much as the process I've been developing with the previous versions' more limited capabilities. Basically you get some stringier looking brushes and the ability to pick up color that is already on the canvas with a new "mixer brush."

Overall, the software loads quicker and feels more responsive, but on the other end of that is too sensitive and feels a bit glitchy compared to CS4. For instance, I kept accidentally moving or closing my palettes when I was just trying to access them--something that's never happened to me in past versions even thought the interface is the exact same thing. The canvas is a little jumpy when zooming/panning as well. BLERG. (Also played around with the "content-aware fill" which is far less cool than what it was made out to be)

80 Dlist Boys: Clavicle & Reed. THE END

Here's the last two. It feels great to be finished with this project, as it's been a year and a half in the works. Some times it was like a weight on my shoulder, calling me to finish it and others it was a great way to express some creativity on the fly... I started it for a couple reasons:

1. I wanted to practice mark making and become more confident in my marks.
2. An opportunity to play with portraiture and test the limits of distortion against recognition. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but because this was a sketchbook project it was easy for me to not get hung up on the guffaws.
3. Playing with beauty... how is it that these 80 men can all be beautiful but all be so very different looking? As my friend Maggie said about the difference between faces, "it's all about the spacing."
4. A productive time waster: when I started this I had a hole in my schedule everyday that I needed to fill.

Rachel

I like Sean Young. And I don't care how crazy she is.

80 Dlist Boys: riverwestchi, trippppp, ibader, mmaraaron

The end is near...

80 Dlist Boys: glowstars, pw417, ikuku, slopehead

More more more. This is an interesting group because I've met all four of the gentlemen in question. Here are some notes:

1. Glowstars is a dear friend of mine from Milwaukee. He is also an artist/designer and has a blog.
   
2. pw417 is a cool guy from Chicago that I met several months ago and humorously bumped into recently.
3. ikuku is far more handsome and masculine in reality. Somehow the drawing got a little squirelly. He's from Poland and I had the pleasure of sharing a few drinks with him while he was in the US back in April.
4. Slopehead was possibly the first dlister that I met - he gave me free lodging (and an amazing welcome to Brooklyn with a homemade steak & asparagus dinner) a few years ago the first time I went to NYC.

Janelle Monae

Painted this little lady in the afternoon after finishing some real work. Was tons of fun to just paint something and not care too much about the result! (meanwhile, two almost-finished acrylic paintings are staring me down begging for those final all-important brushstrokes).

Also some fantastic news, my Mad Men heads made it into the 3x3 pro show. Found out a couple weeks ago.

80 Dlist Boys: awesleyc, johnny_bebop, jperkins, sloc0898

4 more. Kind of wish I could have gotten johnny_bebop & sloc0898 on adjoining pages because of their tall hair!

80 Dlist Boys: xelamonster, BenPhilBeck, OshKosh, ralowe

4 more as promised. A few comments:

1. I've been looking forward to drawing BenPhilBeck for about a year now, carrying around a little picture of him in my sketchbook and really muffed up the likeness. In his photos he's got a really fantastic Don Draper chin and an optimistic look to him. Somehow I ended up drawing him really devious. Rats!
2. The reason ralowe is upside down is because his DList photo is upside down. I actually drew him upside down, as well, for an extra challenge.

80 Dlist Boys: QueerRocket, Serpentine, thebenjamin, bikeculture

Here's my next batch of four (still have a couple up my sleeve and only 8 left to draw for the entire series). I decided to start drawing in the people from DList that I've actually met in reality. Thebenjamin is a cooky fellow from Raleigh and bikeculture is one of my favorite people up in Madison. (although I really missed the point with his portrait, he's much easier to look at that I have drawn him)

80 Dlist Boys: heartbeat_city, javad, socialwhore, dizeek

I've been lagging behind online, but not in reality. I've got 10 more dlist boys ready for action after this post. Keep looking for more.

Clavicle

Here's a painting I did, meant to be the third in the set with Handhearts & XYZach. I don't think it fits, though, so I'll do something else!

80 Dlist Boys: yeehaw83, bluelines

The latest two drawings. I wasn't ever planning on drawing myself into this project, but then I did. Doing a self portrait proved to be very difficult within the context of the rest of the drawings because I have been attempting to capture the beauty in each Dlist boy from a single photograph by carefully focusing on proportion and scale of features. For no. 53, it was hard to draw what I saw as opposed to what I know.

80 Dlist Boys: bw12343, zaceman, brahm, berkhippy

A few more in the sketchbook. I'm pleased with these 4... I think the combine the confidence and expressive mark-making that I started doing in nos. 37-40 with the exactness and refined qualities from the first quarter of the book. Berkhippy's hair was a nice challenge after drawing so many wavy wonderful haircuts.