North Pole Webseries Kickstarter: Final Hours!!

 

With just hours remaining, the North Pole webseries is just a couple hundred bucks away from being fully funded via its Kickstarter campaign. Last summer, I was invited to contribute a bit of illustration and graphics work to the project which got a nice write-up on KQED's website earlier this month. Shot in Oakland, California, the new seven-part comedic web series slated for release in early summer 2017 uses humor to raise awareness about the issue of global warming and gentrification.

My job was to create a poster with an example of a bioengineered oak tree the fictional GreenGos company plans to plant throughout Oakland, ostensibly as part of sophisticated clean energy program. It was a lot of fun putting my love of botanical watercolors and science fiction illustration to work in one piece. As a student at AAU, I loved being a part of collaborative film and animation production teams and seeing how these complex projects come together. Many thanks to Darren Colston for bringing me on board for the project, and best of luck to the rest of the team during these final critical hours in their Kickstarter campaign!

Photo: Chloe Veltman/KQED

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1895822190/the-north-pole-a-comedic-web-series-for-the-people

Aquatic Humanoid Character

Last Saturday's life drawing session led to a series of caricature and character design studies based on our model. It took close to 30 sketches ranging from 2-minute poses to 20-minute ones. I started the session with the usual ten small ink pen sketches, followed by four 5-minute ones. After two longer poses, I felt comfortable with playing with proportions and searching for a character design.

A key advantage to working small in my sketchbook has been the ability to take on the overall stance, proportions and other details multiple times during long poses.

This final design was completed in Adobe Photoshop using the original sketch as a foundation. Imagined her to be a muscular swimmer with plenty of insulation and buoyancy. Something about the model's profile and facial features made me think of someone proud and somewhat aloof. (That might also explain her nudity.) The name just popped into my head as I wrapped up the digital phase. Fun study.