Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Dickens 200th Birthday Ornament

Philadelphia's Clark Park is home to the only statue of Charles Dickens in existence (an unauthorized statue, but oh well!) and they host a birthday celebration for Mr. Dickens every year. 2012 will be his 200th birthday, so they came to our graphic design class to create some keepsakes/logos for next year's event. I designed a commemorative Christmas ornament for the occasion, and it was very well-received at the committee meeting, but they opted to go for memorabilia that was less season-specific. Fair enough. It meant I had slightly less work to do, so I didn't mind!

Monday, December 19, 2011

Web Design - Mouseover



This is what happens when Claire tries to teach herself web design. It's like a Skittles explosion.

I love interactive website navigation, but I don't run into it much on the internet. Functionality and legibility is key for most websites. So I wanted to experiment with creating a fun experience, vs. pure functionality. Like an interactive playground. It's been a crash course in javascript and jquery and I loved all of it. I've learned a ton.

And every serious web designer out there cringes...

Monday, December 5, 2011

Chimaera (Extended Version!)

For my final project this semester I added about 20 more (very creepy) seconds onto Chimaera. I'll be adding more as time goes on. Hopefully after Christmas break this will be my next festival-worthy piece!

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

'Happiness' Calligraphy

Our most recent graphic design project was to create something inspired by happiness. I got super stuck on all the cliché things, like flowers and rainbows and motivational quotes, so my professor suggested I try lettering and calligraphy, something he thought I'd be good at— he thought all my drawings and doodles were very gestural. I think this was a success!

All of these words/phrases are things that make me happy in some way.

Names of towns near where I live in Virginia.


Some orange juice ingredients.


 Ingredients in bruschetta.


The alphabet (for practice!)


 The brand/type of glasses I wear.


 And some sound advice I once received.

 

Monday, November 21, 2011

Fontbook Pages

Our Typography class put together a book of fonts typefaces for our final project last semester. We each got assigned a few pages for different fonts typefaces. Here are a few of mine...




 

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Senior Thesis Animation 3 - Audubon

Here comes number three!

The assignment this time was to 'work really quickly based on impulse.' Not knowing what to do, I just started drawing, and birds came out. So I went with birds. Lots and lots of color-changing birds. And admittedly, a lot of headaches, too...

Frame-by-frame in Flash, colored in Flash, RECOLORED in Photoshop to make it more 'painterly' at the request of my teachers.
32 seconds.
Two weeks.
28 cups of coffee.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Chicken Time

We just made a fat paper chicken in 3D design class.
My tuition money has now officially been well spent.






Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Project 3 Sketches

Oh god... This one's gonna be a doozy.

So whenever I don't know what to draw or animate, or if I want to get better at animating one particular thing... apparently I draw birds. All sorts of birds. Like the swan animation I did, and the blue jay... I don't know why. Some people draw wolves, some draw cats. I draw birds. And bunnies. But for the sake of artsy-fartsy-ness, we'll keep it to birds.

I had no idea what I wanted to do on this next animation, so true to form, I started out animating birds. And they were just birds. Good job, Claire, you can animate birds. Whoop de doo. We all knew this already.

And then I went a little crazy.


SEE WHAT I DID THERE??? Ohohoho. Poor Claire's gonna lose a lot of sleep over this next animation. According to my teachers, it must be awesome.

*cracks knuckles* LET'S DO THIS THING

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Chimaera already made print?!

Chimaera was already featured on a Flash animation site? WHAT. WHAT. This is awesome!
I think I'll be working in this program a bit more!

Click the pic below!

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Senior Thesis Animation 2 - Chimaera

Senior Thesis Project #2 is complete! And just in time for Halloween. :) This was a way of forcing myself to get more familiar with anatomy and moving volumes around in space. Adding the sound changed it from beautiful to gross in no time flat. Ew...

27 seconds, 10 days.
Frame-by-frame in Flash.

Blue Jay Lipsync

First lipsync, back in 2010.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Platypus

When I get stressed out, I make really hardcore protest art.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Postcard

The UPenn art department sometimes distributes postcards advertising certain classes/concentrations. This year's animation postcard features some familiar faces!

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Thesis Anatomy Sketches 1

Next thesis project is going to be a forced attempt to get better at anatomy. Will I succeed?? ...Who knows, but here, have some skeletons. This is gonna be a very Halloween-y project.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Selective Echo Blog - Utah Arts Festival

How the Coyote got his Cunning was featured at this year's Utah Arts Festival in Salt Lake City, and a visitor outlined some of the entries of the show on his blog. Nine different showings, based on the Nine Muses, were the basis of the festival, and Coyote was put in the Comedy section, which was entirely kid friendly — the selections of which were determined by the curator's own kids!

"COMEDY

This provided the ideal opportunity for Horman to give the Art Yard its first kids’ version of Fear No Film. A half-hour screening of seven clever, cute, and whimsical pieces will screen every hour while the venue is open. All the films are suitable for children ages three and older. Horman screened the selections with his children, who gave their rousing endorsements.

All of the selections are as charming as one can imagine ... [including] ‘How the Coyote Got His Cunning,’ a definitive example of soundly executed old-school animation from Pennsylvania."

Click the pic below!

Interview with Michael Ryan - YoungCuts Film Festival

YoungCuts is a Canadian film festival for filmmakers and animators 25 and under, held in Montreal in late September. How the Coyote got his Cunning was chosen as one of their top 100 films, and they did a blog feature on it back in July.

Being mentioned in the same sentence as Co Hoedeman was very VERY awesome.

Click the pic below!

Interview #2 with 34th Street Magazine

34th Street did a second interview with me after I won first prize at the College Houses Film Festival.

Click the pic below!

Interview #1 with 34th Street Magazine

My university's weekly arts and culture magazine does artist features from time to time. They asked me for an interview back in January, after I had gone to my very first festival.

Click the pic below!

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Obligatory ReBoot Fanart Post

I want to keep this blog from being too fanart-y, but these paintings are so important to me that I have to post them. It's what most people know me for. Some of my best illustration/painting work is fan art, and the majority of the work I do outside of animation, schoolwork, and personal character designs is based on my favorite cartoon of all time. ReBoot. I've never been able to get tired of it; it's a bit of a guilty pleasure!

The first four were featured in ReBoot Forever, the second ReBoot artbook from Beach Studios. A call went out for anyone - fans, old crew members, established comic book artists - to submit art for the book's fan gallery. I originally thought only professionals were allowed to submit, until the editor messaged me asking to feature a few of these pictures! It was an honor to be featured and I'm so proud of being printed alongside some industry giants. It blows my mind.

Much love (and many apologies) to Alphonse Mucha. :)






Year of the Rabbit

Featuring more bunnies! And my pitched-up voice.

Swan - Rough Animation

Did this outside of class to experiment with camera movements. Someone once commented that it looks like the swan is sneezing. ...They were totally right.

Black Samurai

Computer animation class assignment: create a short animation based on the name of an alcoholic or non alcoholic drink (Fuzzy Navel, Gatorade, etc.) A 'Black Samurai' is a mix of sake and soy sauce. Gross!

My Home, My Burrow

Also for Paul Fierlinger's class. Make an animation about your sense of home.

My home involves rabbits.

Duke Ellington

My hand-drawn computer animation class was taught by Paul Fierlinger, master animator behind My Dog Tulip and Sesame Street's Teeny Little Super Guy. Our final assignment was to take a passage from Jules Feiffer's autobiography (we were all given the same passage) and turn it into an animation that involved both images and words...

Brahms Animation

Color class final project.
Spring 2011

Typography - Calendar

Calendar page from Typography class.

Leaf Study

An old project from color class, just for fun.
Leaves glued on black posterboard.

BUNNIES

A bunch of bunnies!

Blast from the Past: How the Coyote got his Cunning

This was my first full-length animation. And it's still my most successful one. My baby :)



Coyote was done for my final project in my Mixed Media Animation class, Spring 2010. The first animation course I had ever taken. I first submitted it to the OIAF, where it was rejected, but I couldn't have predicted how far it would've gone beyond that. It's been in six festivals around the US and Canada, and will probably be shown at a festival in San Francisco next spring. I still need to send in a DVD!

I had visited Canada for the first time the summer before. It was a SUPER brief trip (only 2 days and extremely last-minute) but it left a huge impression on me. So when we were given an 'open' project for our final... I was stumped. Then I suddenly thought of the Pacific Northwest art style. And that was that.

This is all digital; I did a test in cut paper, an actual stop motion, but with only 2 weeks to animate it, it would've taken far too long. So this is 100% Photoshop.

Graphic Design - Train Schedule

For graphic design class we had to take an everyday thing and break it down, then make it into something brand new.

I took an Amtrak train schedule and totally destroyed it.


I started out associating different colors with different parts of the schedule... times, locations, whether the station has wheelchair access, etc. So it no longer looked like a schedule, but just a colorful painting.


I took those colors and distorted them even more, added some text, and made it... nuts. :)

Senior Thesis Animation 1 - Remedy

The Remedios illustrations led to this. I simplified the story and took out some major characters, just to streamline the process and make it less of a literal interpretation. And the art style became a little messier and more gestural than in my original illustrations.

I wasn't sure how it would be received in critique. It's bright, colorful, and bouncy... everything the book isn't. Would it be 'artsy' enough? I mean, animating a naked lady should give me some artsy points, right?

They liked it a lot more than I thought they would. :)

51 seconds, 5 days.
Animated in Flash, each frame painted in Photoshop.
Lute music from freesound.org.

Remedy - Illustrations and Sketches

Our first project for senior thesis was inspired by Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. We read it during the summer and had to incorporate some sort of theme/character/scene from the book into our first project.

It's such a dark and unhappy book... so I used happy and bright colors for my illustrations. Makes sense to me!


I decided to focus on the story of one character, Remedios the Beauty. She's the most beautiful woman in her town, probably in the whole world, and just being in her presence makes men go nuts. She's incredibly naïve, though, and doesn't realize the power she has. She doesn't care about social conventions — she runs around naked because she hates clothing, she cuts her hair so she doesn't have to comb it every day, and she uses her excrement to paint little animals on the wall in her house. She's a bit of a wild child, and that makes her even more tantalizing to the opposite sex.




One day, without any warning, she is lifted up into the sky along with the laundry, never to be seen again. Maybe heaven wanted her back?


I first thought I wouldn't have enough time to do an animation based on this art style. I had just come back from the Ottawa International Animation Festival and had less than two weeks to animate something. I was going to keep it to just a series of illustrations, and that would be fine.

...Couldn't resist. I did an animation in five days!

BEHOLD MY EMPTY BLOG

WHAT IS UP, INTERNET!

So it's my senior year of college and I've (finally) opened up a sketchblog/projectblog/rantingblog to post all my random sketchings and musings. And my student animations will go here too. I'll be doing a full short animation every few weeks for my senior seminar class, so those will pop up every now and then, along with process work and sketches. Also planning on revamping my original website, so this will be where things go in the meantime. A mini-portfolio, I guess?

I'm also, to a lesser extent, a graphic designer, so some slightly-less-animated things might show up too. I'll try and keep things organized between the two concentrations.

I've never blogged consistently before, so maybe it's time, eh?

Hello!

CKN