Grand Opening of Etsy Shop, Mt. Marten

A week late, but Happy New Year! I'm bringing it in with the grand opening of my Etsy shop for my needle felted creations, Mt. Marten! I did a soft opening of it back in November to put up a few holiday ornaments and decorations I worked on, but now I'm working toward the creation of what will be the "main stock" of my shop, which will be character-based lines. I'm really excited to get started on this!

In the meantime, though, I still have seasonal/holiday items available, so to celebrate I'm making available a coupon for 20% off anything in the store through the end of January. Just enter GRANDOPENING14 at checkout!

So check out my store, and I'll be keeping updates on when I add new items! And just for fun, if you'd like to see pictures of in-progress work, you can follow me on Instagram/Twitter!

Illustration: "Midnight Flute Concert"

The Illustration section has been updated with an oil pastel piece I did last week!

Creature Design: Mowbie

This is the first character I did for a character line I'm working on called Echowood. (The little worm I added to the design page recently is also part of this line!)

Creature Design

I just added a little update to my Design page...these are some concept drawings I did of a little wormy guy for a project I'm working on!

Illustration Update

I reworked my Illustration page a bit so it looks more organized and also to add a few newer things! Here's what's new on the page:

Background Art

Here's a background painting I did recently, done with oil pastels. The project that this is for is still in the works, so I don't want to get into all the details quite yet...but for now, enjoy this! :)

Ampharos Animation

I did a short little animation of Ampharos (Pokemon) for practice and fun- here's the result!

Done frame-by-frame in Flash/background element done with Photoshop/composited in After Effects.

New Items in Redbubble Store!

I updated my stock in my Redbubble store today with several greeting cards and postcards- if you're interested in purchasing my work, please do check it out!

Update 06/26: I decided I wanted to offer more products for my recent uploads than just greeting cards, so I took the time to put up some higher-res images- now most of my new stock is available as various prints, posters, throw pillows, and tote bags! Check it out below!

Moon Animate, Make-Up!

Back in April I finished up my contribution for the "Moon Animate, Make-Up!" fan project, the goal of which is to re-animate an entire episode of Sailor Moon by assigning one shot to each volunteer animator.

Here's the result of the shot I was given:



The shot that I was assigned was a relatively static 10-second-long shot. I tried to think through what the most entertaining thing to do with it would be, and I decided that I could try out making puppets (not something I really have experience with!). The puppets were needle-felted onto wire armatures; nothing fancy- I only gave Sailor Moon anything extra to manipulate the puppet (the wires coming out of her arms).

I tried to figure out a way to get the faces puppeteered as well, but it just wasn't working very well. I ended up just felting a few different mouth shapes (seen stuck on their faces in the group shot) and they got composited in after the fact.



The first picture above shows the "stage" - just a couple of lightboxes set up in front of the makeshift green screen made simply by sticking some green paper onto my fridge. Victor Courtright took care of filming while Salina Trevino helped me with the puppeteering as we listened to the audio over and over to sync up the performance. We filmed Sailor Moon separately as she was in the foreground and needed two people to handle her (Salina took care of the overall body movement while I took care of the arms/details of the gestures). Malachite (Salina) and Ninjana (me) were filmed together since they interacted a bit and didn't require anything other than bopping around in front of the camera.

For the background I just did a quick watercolor copy of the original background from the show; I didn't feel like it needed anything different and I liked the look of it with the puppets.

With immense help from Victor, all of these elements were composited in After Effects to get the final shot together. And that's it! It was lots of work getting the puppets felted and it felt like I was kind of making it up as I went along...but it was tons of fun to pull this off!

Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile

The end of last year/beginning of this year for me was spent working on something pretty different than anything I've worked on before. I did some animation for a documentary called Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile, a really fascinating film about Tibetan women living in a modern world yet still trying to embrace and represent the traditions of their culture, and a controversial beauty pageant that ends up becoming a political platform for these women to speak up about Tibetan issues.

For this project I took a go at animating in a way I never have before. I used pre-existing illustrations by the hand of another artist, originally from a book titled Where Is Tibet?, and collaged and edited them to become moving illustrations; to complete everything I had to add in some completely original elements that needed to blend in with the style of the illustrations.

The small bits of animation that I did are being used as transitional elements between different sections of the film, so I'm afraid they won't seem like much without the context of the film, but here are some teaser screen shots of what I did.






To learn more about the film, please visit the website or go to the film's Facebook page and give it a "Like"!