Traditional Media

Canis Latrans

One of my favorites things to draw is stuffed animals.

They don't move, won't steal my picnic food and are usually posed well, like this gorgeous guy from the University of Michigan Natural History Museum.

[coyote] :: Last Update: Aug. 2, 2006

The Doghouse Poetry Series

My friend and poet Robert Fanning asked me to create an illustration for his 2007 spring poetry workshop, The Doghouse Poetry Series.

I suppose there are many different dogs to choose from, but the bulldog seemed the obvious choice as rough-and-tough albeit slightly cliché. I added the glasses to soften and humanise it a bit.

With a limited time frame I whipped out a few sketches (coming soon to the roughs section) and ended up keeping one of them for the final. I could've cleaned it up in Illustrator, but I felt it worked as is. There was a little touch-up work done with Photoshop's brushes, but it was completed through a series of iterations.

Alligator

From the NYC Natural History Museum.

Tiger

From the NYC Natural History Museum.

Trillium

This trillium was done with pastels for a business card design for the Trillium String Trio.

Happy Birthday to Ewe!

I know, I know. It's a bad pun. But I still like the mice on the inside, they're so happy!

Kamakura Dragon

The Japanese exhibit at the Ann Arbor (UMMA) is always a pleasure to draw in. Hopefully I'll get more time there now that I'm moving.

Sandpiper

A quiet little bird with lightning fast feet. I saw a ton of them on Montauk beach.

Rhinoceros

From the NYC Natural History Museum in the Africa exhibit. It's definitely one of my favorite museums.

Digital Illustration

Spring equinox

These illustrations were done as part of a promotional card series.

During the spring, there is a time period where the daylight equal the darkness (see my seasons animation and the myth is that you're supposed to be able to stand a raw egg on its end.

Well, running with this idea I made a series of cards illustrating all of the amazing things the company could do for its clients. On the verso of each was a translation.

View the series

JASON Illustrations

The JASON academy is a an educational program for middle school students, focused on science, geography, and environmental education.

Over the course of three years I did over 300 illustrations for their program, most of them diagrams used to help the students performs various experiements. Unlike the World Watcher illustrations, these were meant to be used online, so most of them are in color.

View selected illustrations

Click through for example one and example two of my illustrations being used live.

World Watcher textbook illustrations

Digital illustrations used by the GEODE initative in printed matter distributed to students. The intent was to make them for a black-and-white printer.

The content is varied; some drawing illustrae specific biomes, others are figures demonstrating a student science experiment. For more illustrations like these, see the JASON digital illustrations.

View the Worldwatcher drawings.

Cement Truck

Drawn in illustrator from a polaroid.

Sketches / Roughs

Snake Charmer Sketches

Some studies for the Marshal Ranger "snake charmer" flash animation.

How does your garden grow?

I studied a number of old etchings to arrive at this drawing. I wanted to partially emulate the style of the Alice in Wonderland illustrations.

Animation

City Breaths Promo

Created using Final Cut Studio 2, this animation was created as a teaser for the 2008 Citywide Poets anthology, City Breaths.

Fresh Ink!

The Citywide Poets have released two anthologies in the last two years - I've been fortunate enough to be able to design the books.

This year I created a little animation to promote the book, which was hidden behind a little frontt page DHTML "prank" - the main page for InsideOut was randomly splattered with .gif ink drops, creating links to the Flash animation.

The drops are generated at random internals (via setTimeout) to create the feel of erratic dripping. Drop images are randomly chosen, and after a set number of drops, the final "???" drop appears (so that inquiring minds will click)

LivingText Scientific Animations

Some are linear animation, while others rely heavily on object-oriented actionscript to acheive a different visual each time.

Actionscripted animations

Ice Process
This animation illustrates the formation of ice. The H20 molecules float freely in space until the user indicates to cool off the temperature, then they slowly bind to form the hexagonal lattice and creates solid ice.

The molecules were rendered in 3D. Each molecule is a disparate object that moves according to its own rules until the temperature is lowered. At that point each molecule slowly moves to a point on an invisible grid. This grid is made up of movie clip objects as is scalable by changing a property of the grid object.

I had to code some wayfinding algorithms in order for a molecule to know where to go. Each molecule searches for the closest available node when the temperature drops, so each freeze animation is unique.

Orbital variations
shows all of the various orbital variations of the Earth: eccentricity, precession, and obliquity. The advantage to this presenation is that all three animations are continuous and in sync. The user can simultaneous see all three happening in tandem or eliminate others to see one more clearly. The timeline could also be paused and adjusted to see things out of sync.

I created a "zooming script" that could be attached to any movie clip allowing it to zoom in and out between two points that I used in other animations.

The Seasons
shows the progression of the sun during the various seasons. There are five earths in position: four for the seasons and one for the current month, showing approximately where the sun falls. Clicking on the planets will enlarge them to show detail of the daylight for that period.

Moisture Graph
The tricky part of having this graph be accurate was correctly transmitting information between the many objects on stage. Careful application of listeners kept the calculations to minimum so that the interface was fluid and not bogged down.

Linear Animations

Wave Motion
shows the movement of water molecules underneath the surface. No actionscripting, but careful keyframing used.

Waterspout
shows the formation of a water spout in the ocean.

The Marshal Ranger Process

This was a self-promotional piece done for the now-defunct Marshal Ranger marketing company. It was on the website and sent to clients via e-mail (604Kb).

Digital Worlds

Self-promotional 3D animation [4.7MB].

A 2-dimensional logo was created for the fictional music label, "Digital Worlds Music" that was used on a U of M compilation CD "Digital Sounds Synthesis." It was later just shortened to "Digital Worlds" to encompass more than just music.

The animation entailed a work in Photoshop, 3DSM, ProTools, and Adobe After Effects. I don't specialize in 3D work but I do enjoy it. One of my favorite sites is Tokyo Plastic.

Columbia Construction Animations

Snake Charmer was the first of two animations created as a promotional animation for Columbia Construction. The client wanted to emphasize the effortless workflow that the company provided to all of its clients.

Gone Fishin' is the second animation created as part of the series.

Puff City

Puff City was a large scale animation project produced by the Center for Health Communications Research (formerly the "HealthMedia Research Lab [hmrl]).

It involved creating animations that would produce "A Tailored Asthma Education Program for Urban Teens". It was complete with professionally produced voiceovers. I was hired to do the animation in Flash. Many permutations of the v.o. were done to tailor the animations to different reponses by the test subjects.

All the keyframes and storyboards were done by the lab, they were handed to me and I gave them life.

My major aims with the animations were to inject some cartoon humor into the movements and whenever possible make them scripted so that they weren't exactly the same each time. Not all animations were appropriate for that.

Use Your Inhaler!

All About the Benjamins
The bills are actually a complex actionscript routine that makes use of a "global wind current" that pushes each of the objects around. Each object has its own properties, however, so they are all affected differently.

Don't share!

Wash your hands!
The germs are dynamically generated clips that have their own movement properties. They scoot around and look where they're going. When the "barrier" appears, they react via collision detection, fade away and die. The second half of the animation is linear.

Zero Gravity Teaser