More Applejack Sketches

Exploring around the closed-off world that this talented band begins in.

Eventually they'll hit the road, starting at fun joints to make ends meet.

First spending countless hours hanging out and making loud music, mixed in with food trips.

Applejacks - Desert Stampede

(Click to ENLARGE, much better in high resolution)

Done originally as what should have lead up to a portfolio piece, but had left it alone for months. Mostly because it was really busy with many dark lines, and equal lighting. It sort of looked a little dull! Played with the color overlay to get an atmospheric vibe with the canyon walls and giving a shade in the front helped out the composition. Really glad I came back to this and finished it!

As far as the story of the Applejack's goes...they eventually leave their RC hometown in a fixed up shaggin wagon. Their poor sense of direction leads them into a misadventure, involving rounding up a herd of cattle (farm in a desert), who in turn, stampede them through desert canyons. Their make shift escape plane begins to fall apart upon take off. Mag (the machine) flings himself to hold the wing together. They redirect the stampede back home through flight!

Link! Skyward Sword

Death from above!

I've been playing Skyward Sword over the last few weeks. The game is like visual candy, there's a lot of neat textures and patterns throughout. I could walk around Faron Woods and stare at the ancient trees or the symbols on the temple walls for a long time while my heart meter drops to 0. Also, fighting like a crazed monkey seems to work out better than pretending to be a calculating samurai.

Character Exploration + The King's Speech Comp Studies

I'm taking Story Development for Animation @ Concept Design Academy right now. Our assignment this week is to explore our characters a bit further. This is a vingette character exploration of the Applejacks (a band I made up). Mag, the robotic boy of the group has a talent for rebuilding himself as well as building other robots/machines. He does this in the basement of his parent's RV home. The RV community usually requests the strangest coffeemaker combination machines from him.

These studies, taken from The King's Speech, were mostly for the lighting effects on storyboards. Also practicing foreground/middle ground/background elements. There's quiet a bit of depth of field camera work with conversations between characters, and the blurry lines look pretty cool on storyboards.

Mickey Mouse - Test Animation

At Disney Consumer Products we've been shown how to draw Mickey and his friends once each week by Jeff Shelly. Mickey's surprisingly hard to draw because of the balance between design and draftsmenship needed. Most of which is achieved through a lot of drawing time with him. I've been tinkering around with this scene, finding different ways to make Mickey snooze, yet retain his likeliness. It's summer! so having a lazy summer laid back demeanor felt appropriate.

A Mother's Day Rooster + Experimentation

So every Mother's Day I typically like to custom-make my mother's card. It would be a pretty half-folded bristol card with a beautiful rooster drawing on the front and very meaningful writing inside. Previous years have been a pastel, impressionistic rooster, a watercolor version, and comic-looking drawings with frightened dogs. This year I realized I had an extra frame and was really inspired by the graphic japanese drawings that my Mom likes too. Lo and behold, I drew this for her :)

TADA!

Explored some different ideas with thumbnails. The Japanese style sorta came as an accident when wanting to make the rooster dynamic. Getting rid of the farm and background really helped par the idea down.

60% completion : Was sorta debating on watercoloring, but still strong as black/white

This is an experimentation for a animated piece that would have been a lot of fun to complete. The idea was to have the video feel like a comic book while still having decent animation and looking sorta modern. I have permission to show this is a self-promotion and this content belongs to it's respective owner. Enjoy!

Gift to FedEx friends!

Every day during my time as a costumer service and FedEx shipment handler, the same FedEx tag team duo would show up. As it was the last stop for them with FedEx being right across the street, sometimes they liked hanging out while I had panic attacks from learning to do my job. These two were particularly dynamic has you'd have a tall muscly Gaston-like guy  followed by a tiny spunky fellow that loves to joke around. Half the time, I wasn't exactly sure where he was. I always appreciated their company and they heckled me to draw something for them before starting at DCP.

 Each of them got a FedEx Truck variation!

Star Fox Rough Animation

Star Fox Rough Animation Scenes from Jesse Soto on Vimeo.

So during my internship at Titmouse, I would occasionally have some time to rough out animation here and there to become more familiar with Flash and the techniques practiced there. Symbols, scene organization, tweening, etc. Eventually production for TV shows became more demanding so scenes were carried out at home, on my spare-time. The idea was suppose to turn out as Star Fox crash landing and being tracked down by a persistent, yet animalistic machine that burdens atmospheric entry and mechanical failures. Fox would have the sharper instincts and fight back with his calm and cool foxyness.

Happy 2011!!

Happy 2011 everyone! Year of the rabbit commences as of Feburary. It was a difficult and challenging year this one past, and although rabbits are softer, this year will probably be the most challenging as I get settled in and get my butt into gear. Hope you all enjoy this small piece :)

(Image Removed)

 

 

Hey everyone! I can't really talk about this project because of a signed NDA. I am, however, allowed to promote any artwork I've made for it. This is a sample model sheet of the characters in the graphic novel that I'm making for musician Alia Ella Henderson. The art styling is pretty close to how it may turn out, but I need to experiment a bit more. This is a collaspable model sheet, meaning the bug folks are grouped in layers behind layers with other bug groups, so I can reference them while comic-making. So it's bed bugs, ants, and termite families in the front, main characters in the center, and giant muscle bugs in the back (including Master Hand). Enjoy :P

(Update, I've removed the image at my freelance employer's request)

This get well card will get passed around the department for comments and good wishes for our beloved teacher and friend, Corny "lov'em and leav'em" Cole the 3rd. He has gone through a lot in the last year and has been resting at home for a few months now. If you've known Corny for some time or have been one of his students, send him some mail through CalARTs Character Animation.

Unfortunately, fall semester is reaching it's final week of the semester. There's so much left to learn. Man, I feel like this is the hardest I've work to really understand whatever it is I'm doing. Though, every year I work sufficiently hard, this year feels like I've really worked my mind. Animation has been super rewarding with Ted Ty, I've gotten the hang of how to do a story under the Skellies (with a solid animatic to boot), and Masha has enriched all my skill sets with getting me to make animation outside of my norms in her enrichment class. To whomever is reading this blog, please take her class if you want to be a fantastic artist, she'll break your creative shell!

I'm super pumped for next semester and my film. My current animatic is around 5 minute 14 seconds, and I think a few more seconds will be tacked on by next week. I'm really looking forward to the film workshop going on for the 3rd and 4th years, so that we can simplify our class time to animate more :) and also be shown a lot of post-production stuff along the way, which is where I struggle the most. I'll need all the time I can get. I'm aiming to improve my acting skills and vitality in my animation for this film. So study and loads of practice.

Above is a pre-test for my animation assignment on after effects. The lighting and particles are similar to what I'm looking for in my assignment.

Some fun stuff for everyone! Must draw more 0_0!

Spur of the moment drawings and paintings. I really like how some other students design their shapes and compositions, like Dylan, Kris, and Glen (Calartians will know :D). They keep things simple with few colors and stroke types, and in the end it's easy to get. I tend to throw extra colors, mess around with having extra people, and add intricate lil things with lighting. More than halfway through it: I get lost myself and forget to connect everything together, so things are not so easy to get. :/ I hope y'all enjoy!

I'm really diggin' the customizations you can do with your brushes on CS4. It's like you have 9 or so brushes in one!

It's been a while since I last posted! Umm...it's about 3 weeks into my 3rd year here at CalARTS. I'm kept busy by a lot of drawing classes and homeworks. I'm having a hard time balancing everything and still having time to work on my film >< I feel a lot of pressure this year because I'll be applying for Internships around April/May. I'm starting to play around with textures and color. I'm also starting to like Storytelling a lot :) Enjoy!

A preview of my 3rd year film.

Hello, my name is Jesse Soto.
I'll be entering my second year of art school soon at CalARTs as a character animation major and I would like to use this blog as a form of reflection and a reason for me to continue to sketch and have fun at the same time. A choice I made throughout my last two years stopped me from sketching as freely as I use to do as well as remove the shine of my eyes, in short I lost a lot of my ethusiasm and happiness as a result.




After being exposed to a lot of really talented artists within the boards of many websites and blogs. I became more aware of what happened. So, now is the time to put my best foot foward and go back onto the road of shine! Now it is a time to be as free as I can without any restrictions and this blog as a reflection and map on my course throughout the rest of this trip! Let's begin again!

Also these two sections are from my sketchbook I did around November of 2005, but since then I had been consumed by my first year animated film and made choices to explore other hobbies and eventually lost sketching for a while. I hope to put a lot more on this blog and see where this goes :D Hopefully onto another path...I dunno yet. Time to go sketch, aidos.