Anime USA Mascot for 2008 - Unpublished

I’ve only mentioned it my profile that I am an “aspiring artist” but I just realized that I haven’t actually posted any of my art on my blog.  To the left is an unpublished piece I proposed for Anime USA 2008, a Japanese Animation convention held near Washington, DC.

The theme for that year’s convention was “kami”, the spirits or gods of Japanese Mythology.  My piece was not selected (and thus unpublished), but in all fairness, it could not hold a candle to some of the amazing digital painters who did the art for the convention.

I’ve long tried to do digital painting, but I can only do cell-shaded artwork.  The reason for this is that I am color-blind and so when it comes to the subtle shades of painting, I cannot see them.  But cell-shading is very high-contrast colors and I can use the assistance of the eye-dropper tool to pick out colors I know to be correct.

The piece was sketched, inked and colored in less than 8 hours because it was a rush concept piece I did for the convention.  The inking and coloring was actually done in Adobe Flash CS3.

I realize that I can do all the art as well as programming for any Flash game I would develop, but I’ve found that I can make very little headway if I start working that way.  When I start programming, it is hard for me to disengage from the code, and start drawing the assets I need.  The reverse is also true.  When I am drawing I just want to draw without the time pressure of getting back to programming.

Thus, I am reteaming with the artist of Space ROX, Jonathan Stuart, to see how much further we can get on the project and attempt to release our final product by the end of summer.

As much as my ego wants to do everything for the project, my experience as a programmer as well as my sense of the project scope dictates to me that the work needs to be divided.  Specialization of labor will allow us to produce 4x-8x more than if I continued as a one-man team.