Happy New Year and Best of 2015!

Wow! How quickly a year can fly by. Happy New Year to everyone! Here’s to another year of adventure, learning, creating and enjoying life.

I was hoping to be able to keep up with this blog more this year, but a busy work year and great family and social calendar left very little time to blog about work that isn’t allowed to be published.

Here are a few of the highlights…
Work

  • Presented at an internal technical conference
  • Selected to participate in an internal judged project showcase
  • Submitted work for a patent review (currently underway)
  • Finally got a PROMOTION!!!

Family/Social

  • Held monthly dinners with our friends
  • Weekend trip to Catalina with Dylan
  • Trips to LEGOLAND
  • Celebrated 10 years of marriage with my lovely wife Cheri
  • Brought in the New Year with our kids and some of our closest friends in Mammoth

I’m looking forward to what this new year has in store for me and my family. Hopefully I can be more proactive here and share some of my personal work. Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to show what I’ve been working on during my day job.
Cheers!

 

Happy New Year! (2015)

Ok yea, so it’s almost February… I know I’m a little late with this post. Either way I wanted to get at least one post in for the month of January.

At the beginning of last year I wanted to get back into doing more personal art work, be more active on social media and get more visitors/views on this website. For the most part I was successful on all of those goals.

I didn’t get to do as much networking in person this past year. Being busy at work prevented that. Spent most of my year working on a really awesome project, that is continuing into this year. Wish I could share some of the that work… maybe someday.

One major milestone that I hit this past year back in January was hitting the 10 year mark at Boeing.It has been a pretty amazing ride thus far. I’ve held a few different positions. All of which have allowed me to be involved in 3d visualization. When I first graduated college I thought I would work in film, TV, commercials, video games maybe even architectural visualization. The aerospace industry wasn’t even on my radar. But when you are right out of college and a major company says they’d like to hire you to do 3d modeling, animation, graphics and video editing, you don’t say no. I never would have thought, that 10 years down the road I would still be doing visualization for Boeing.

I have learned more about engineering and manufacturing over the last 10 years, than I ever thought I would as an animation major at LMU. What is really neat to think about is, that all of the cool sci-fi stuff that people dream about being a part of in the entertainment industry, I get to be a part of the real deal. When I see other artist looking at reference for their project ideas, a lot of it is based upon current aerospace technology.

So here is another year ahead of me with many opportunities to learn and grow. This year I would like to continue work on more personal projects, learn ZBrush and bring more people to this site. Excluding this past month, one of my goals is to post here once a week. I was given a “One Sketch a Day” sketchbook as a gift, so I’ll be working on that too. Looking forward to what this next year has in store.

So I’ll wrap up with a quick sculpt that I did on my iPad using Autodesk 123D Scupt+
Fun program, easy to use and a lot of cool features for a mobile sculpting app.
Enjoy!!!

123DSculpt_AlienHead

Painting & Vino

Gallery

This gallery contains 9 photos.

Last week my wife and I enjoyed a nice date night out and went to a “painting and vino” session. The painting for the evening was “Japanese Maple” and the instructor walked the class through a few basics of painting … Continue reading

Happy New Year!!! (2014)

As the year the new year gets underway I wanted to reflect a little about this past year and where I see this next one taking me…

Life was pretty awesome this past year. Did a lot of learning and networking. Was able to go to some awesome workshops and conferences. I met a lot of really cool people and have been inspired by seeing so much amazing work that it is time to release some of that creative energy.  I didn’t do as much art or personal projects as I would have liked, but that is one of the things I’m going to do better with during this new year. Work has kept me busy during the day with a variety of different jobs. Still renders, animation, interactive/game engines, trying to learn how to code, R&D, some CAD basics, teaching, mentoring and sharing ideas and techniques with co-workers. Overall I’ve seen my skill level increase. Of course there is always room for improvement, but my base set of skills has expanded and my core skills have continued to improve.
During this past year I have finally been active with this website. It has taken me a long time to get something up on these pages thanks to laziness and procrastination. My goal is to continue to “blog” and share my work and experiences as well as other things that I find entertaining and inspiring. I’m hoping that I can get at least 1000 views to this site over the next year (hopefully most of them won’t be me checking in on things and making sure they are working correctly).  I plan on using as much of this social media stuff as I can figure out to bring people here, help me connect with them and maintain a digital friendship with those that I can’t always interact with in person.

So here is to more art making, movie watching, book reading and video game playing.

Speaking of video games, my son and I work together and play “Clash of Clans” on our iPad. You know, some good old father son bonding in the 21st digital century… We recently saw the commercial for the game and it is pretty awesome. Have a look, enjoy, and Happy New Year!

Pageant of the Masters – 2013

Pageant_of-the_Masters_2013
My wife and I were given tickets to The Pageant of the Masters for our anniversary. Our tickets were for July 29th (yes, I know this post is a little late). In all my years growing up in Southern California I have never seen the show. I must say that it was absolutely fantastic. The orchestra and the “live person” recreation of famous works of art was a sight to be seen and heard. When I saw the first piece (a sculpture), my initial thought was “wow, they did a great job remaking that”… That was until, the lights went off around it and you saw the dark shadow of the sculpture move and for lack of a better phrase, walk away. Our seats were next to a few other sculpture recreations, and the attention to detail in the costumes was amazing. Its not everyday that you get to see a “sculpture” blink.

I really enjoyed the break down and explanation of the recreation process with the live actors. The use of fore, middle and background elements along with the placement of the actors into the scene was interesting. The forced and distorted perspective to make the images work at a large scale and yet still appear like the original paintings on stage was an effective optical trick for the audience.

If you’ve never seen the show before, I recommend going. It really is an inspirational experience that must be seen in person.  I know am already looking forward to attending The Pageant of the Masters again next year to witness another feat of creativity.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Very thankful for my family and friends. Good health (especially after overcoming the stomach flu), good job, and a place to call home. Even when things are hard and things don’t seem to be going exactly as planned, my life has been blessed with an abundance of good things.

Happy Thanksgiving, 2012!!!