Thursday, February 17, 2011

kaboom and friends





More of the bug designs...these were all the initial exploration drawings, before I did the final character design and turn around posted below.


Wednesday, February 16, 2011

kaboom





I named this guy Kaboom, as he's a bug whose endgame is maximum carnage in your kitchen at night. I designed this guy for Protokulture in Chicago. They made the 3D model based on my designs and are planning on animating him. www.protokulture.com

I purposely did not make him symmetrical. I don't like how a lot of 3D models are perfectly symmetrical. I doubt any living creatures are perfectly symmetrical. I tried to play it up a bit with this guy.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

agave




I drew these for Digital Kitchen, Chicago. They ended up making a 20+ foot high installation piece. It's inspired by an agave plant. It was lit up from the inside and changed colors. This was for Jose Cuervo. They took it around the country on a tour.

The drawings above I drew really big with marker. My job was to come up with the initial visual direction for this installation.

First off a I drew a bunch of thumbnail sketches, four of which are here. The art director liked the ones on the right, so that's what I based the top and front view drawings on.

I even made a little model out of wire, plastic, and wooden rods to help visualize how each petal would intersect the base. For the final design, I had the nine petals protrude from the base/core in a spiral pattern upwards. When I looked at photos of the core of a real agave, this is how they grow out, in a spiral pattern around the core. I had about two days to come up with this stuff(there were a lot more exploratory sketches involved also...the ones in this post were the selects).

Digital Kitchen had a 3D modeler make a cg model based on my designs. They took this out to tequila headquarters, along with my drawings and the little model, and Cuervo liked it. DK then went to work modeling a version that would be able to be easily put together and taken apart, have visuals projected from the inside. as well as withstand storm force winds.


This is how it finally turned out. They ended up adding a few extra petals. It's not exactly what I drew, but I really dig how it turned out. It won an award here: http://www.ifaipublications.com/iaa/articles/1401_cuervo.html