Porfolio

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DPI Studios CCEE 2011 Promo Video

I created this promo video for the DPI Studios booth at the 2011 Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo. It was a spare time project over 5 months to help attract more visitors to our booth at the show but to also re-familiarize myself with After Effects since it had been some time since I had used it.

One of the benefits of the way I do some of my paintings in Photoshop is that their lighting and special effects are contained on separate layers. This allowed me to easily animate different lighting conditions and effects on the characters in After Effects. This was the first time I had done any animation in Vue. I use Vue to create a lot of the static backgrounds for our pictures, but animating and flying through some of those backgrounds was a new experience for me.

Another aspect of the video that I hadn't played with in a while was the score. I used Video Copilots excellent Pro Scores product that comes with a large variety of music and effects perfect for creating movie trailer scores. Since I had created a lot of the animation previous to working with the score I was able to use Pro Scores layered sound tracks and effects to time the music to the animation.

It was the perfect project to reintroduce myself to working with After Effects and I'm quite proud of the results. I'd recommend watching the video full screen in 720p HD to really see the details.

DPI Studios

                       

DPI Studios is the studio I formed along with my long time friend and artistic partner Aaron Norell (aka Embrio).

DPI Studios' focus has been to create the kind of artwork we grew up admiring. Working on projects for the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game and White-Wolf's Exalted RPG were totally rewarding experiences, but it is our personal creations and vision that have captured our fans attentions the most. Our personal creations have been published in multiple entries of Ballistic Publishings Exotique series of artbooks

Jaysin.ca

I finally updated my portfolio site in 2010. A client had made a joke about my portfolio site being like an electrician who never has the time to change the burnt out light bulb in his own home. Well, I have finally made the time to change that burnt out old web site.

My philosophy in regards to my portfolio site is that it should be a simple design that keeps the focus on the individual projects and not distract you with every gimmick from my bag of tricks.

Once again I am building on the ModX CMS to make updates to the site a little easier on myself. I also designed the site to take advantage of the latest css 3 features like rounded corners, text and box shadows to keep the site as lightweight and streamlined as possible. The downside to this approach is that the site will not look as pretty for the small amount of users with older browsers that don't support these features. To me it's an acceptable trade off since the site stays perfectly usable despite the missing flair.

Demon Bust

The Demon Bust was created for DPI Studios entry into the 2012 Emerald City ComicCon charity artbook. At first I just wanted to create a model for lighting reference but the further I got into sculpting the more I wanted to use the model as a base for the actual painting and so I continued to add more detail. Since the model was only required to be seen from a straight on point of view I did not have time to add detail to the sides and back of the bust.

The sculpture was created entirely in Zbrush 4R2 using the dynamesh feature to create the base form. The design was based on the initial drawing provided by Embrio. Once the artbook has been published I will update the site with the finished painting created with the model.

Interactive Train Mural

This project was for Holfman Wolk Orthodontics. Studio Y Creations was hired to create an interactive sculpted mural that worked as a metaphor for the stages of appointments that a patient would go through on their journey to getting braces. Studio Y came to me to create the software that would allow the dental assistants to load an avatar for the child and their appropriate location on the train in relation to their progress with their appointments. Other than the initial character line art and the background mural art everything else from the programming and animation was created by myself.

The first challenge was to figure out how to have one seamless experience across 4 separate monitors with a combined total resolution of 5440x768. Two issues forced me to build the application as two separate programs that would talk to each other. The first issue was that Flash's maximum document length was 2880 and the second was that with the Nvidia drivers you can only span a single desktop across two monitors. The next sticky issue was how do you ensure that when the computer boots and loads the two programs that each one goes to the appropriate spanned desktop? Thankfully I was able to find a program called UltraMon that would allow you to specify what monitor a application was started on.

With the logistic issues out of the way I built the application in Flash CS4 with Actionscript 3 using a Model, View, Controller design pattern. The characters were animated using Flash's bone animation system and the rest of the animation was scripted with the help of the excellent animation tweening engine TweenLite. The application is controlled rather simply with a small wireless keyboard. A single key press to load a male or female and different ethnic avatar and then a second key press to place them in the appropriate train car. When the user is ready another key press will start the character walking to the next train car.

Corvette Photo Manipulation

This project was for Kelly Mulner of Mulner Photography. Kelly was approached to photograph a classic Corvette for a magazine. He needed to shoot the car on location and didn't have access to the full set of studio lights he would normally use to get that perfect shot. That's why Kelly approached me to help him create that killer image.

What Kelly did to compensate for not having that perfect studio lighting was to fix the camera on a tripod. Then he moved a single spotlight around the car and shot multiple images of the car with lighting from multiple angles. Here are a few of those base images I had to work with.

Then it was my job to assemble over 20 of those images, taking the best lighting and highlights to create one final image. I have made a flash presentation you can view to step through some of the stages it took to create that final image.

World of Warcraft TCG

               

These are some of paintings I did for Upper Decks's World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. The line art was created by my partner Embrio at DPI Studios. They were done mostly in Painter when I was forcing myself to learn it better.

Pure Heroine

       

Pure Heroine is a collection of amazing pin-up illustrations by Laurie B. These are a some of the ones I've been lucky enough to color.

White Wolf: Exalted

             

These are some of the interior black and white illustrations I shaded for White Wolf Publishing's RPG Exalted. The line art was created by my partner Embrio at DPI Studios. It was a fun exercise to be forced to only work in black and white.

Actor Comics Presents

One of the high points of my comic coloring career was getting to work on Actor Comics Presents Vol.1. A benefit book that raised money for the Actor fund to help struggling senior comic creators. Here are a few pages from the Spider-Man story I colored. Pencils by Dan Jurgens and inks by Al Vey.