"The Box Game" Premiere!

Back in April, there was a gallery set up in the Art Institute of Portland that displayed all the puppets, props, and sets that we used in the film, as well as photos of the film in various stages of progress. Here are a few photos of the gallery and film premiere of "The Box Game":

















Hopefully soon, I will be able to post the film on my professional website: www.artofsteele.com. The editing team just has to get together again and export a version of the film for the web.

NW Animation Festival

So, I got to work on a stop-motion short for a whole year at the Art Institute of Portland before I graduated a couple months ago. Roles I served on the project include student director, writer, animator, puppet and set fabricator, rigger, and compositor. With the help of about 30 fellow students of mine from the Art Institute of Portland, we created "The Box Game".

I've been submitting the short film to festivals for the past month, including the Northwest Animation Festival happening right here in Portland, Oregon! They accepted our film along with 77 other films from around the country and world. "The Box Game" will be showing on the third day of the festival, this Sunday. Pretty exciting!

Also, we had DVDs made specially for the cast and crew of the film. Complete with commentaries! I designed the DVD case cover and disc art using images from the film. Take a look!

Job Hunting

I found this drawing on my boyfriend's desk and decided to paint it in Photoshop. This is what it feels like to look for a job.

Hayden Bug

I have an idea for a children's book...

Blog Banner

I finally made my own banner for this blog, as you can see above. Here's the original way I designed it:



And here's what it looks like after I adjusted it to fit better up top:

Figure Drawing Improvement!

I took an advanced figure drawing class from one of my favorite teachers (Za Vue) during my last quarter of school, which ended only a few weeks ago. She is an amazing artist and taught me a lot about figure drawing. She started back at the very basics and rebuilt what we all knew about figure drawing from there. It was one of the best classes I've ever taken, mainly because I became a much better and more confident traditional artist. Here are some of the drawings I got from that class:

Drawings from my sketchbook

1 or 2 minute gestures

5 minute poses

10 minute poses

Chainsaw vs. Super Hipster Part 2

Here's the clean up drawing I did by hand:

And here it is colored in Photoshop CS5:


And here's a black and white version just because I think it looks cool:

Chainsaw vs. Super Hipster

My animation friends and I had a Superhero/Supervillain themed party a few days ago. I was given a superhero name by my buddy, Dan Koss, a couple years ago: Chainsaw. I'm guessing it's because of my loud and forceful nature....but I'm only guessing. One of my other friends,Norman, dressed as a Super Hipster. So, I drew the most likely interaction that would occur between Chainsaw and a Super Hipster:

This is also how I was feeling this morning.

I want to clean it up by hand and then color it....soon.

New Sculpt / Photography Project

So, I tricked myself into sculpting a maquette this quarter. I had to design a personal project around a topic that related to my major, Media Arts & Animation. So I decided to photograph my entire process of sculpting a maquette, from start to finish. The character is a revamp of an earlier character I made into a stop-motion puppet. Thanks to my buddy and awesome character designer, Heather Nesheim, Reggie the frog looks way better than he did last year.

Here's a bunch of the photos I took: