Smoked Salmon No. 2

Smoked Salmon Sketchbook Scribbles

Ladykiller: I Heart Comic Art 2015

Well, on a whim I submitted my one finished Smoked Salmon comic to Ladykiller's I Heart Comic Art benefit, and I'm now a finalist.

I don't know what this means other than I should probably do more cartoons ... like yesterday!

You can vote for me here:

www.facebook.com/ladykillerllc

Smoked Salmon

So I've been wanting to submit a regular comic strip to The Stranger (my favorite newspaper) for a long time, and I'm finally close to actually doing it. I'm calling it "Smoked Salmon."

The strip is an evolution from what I was doing way back in college, and one of the characters has even been resurrected. I have several more characters I'd like to feature, but here's where I'm starting:

I still have a bit of clean up to do on it, and now that I'm looking at the digital version, the next strip I do will hopefully look a lot cleaner.

Anyway, cartoons. I wanna do more.

Ben's Online Portfolios

Part of being unemployed means you have to time assess what you've done and see where the deficiencies lie in your portfolio.

In creating my new website, I first dumped everything I could think of on there, only to be given a soul-crushing critique by the great Horia Dociu (Art Director at Sucker Punch Productions), after which I pared it down to the bare essentials that sell me as a senior animator:

http://bhopanimation.carbonmade.com/

I've still got holes to fill there. The Life Drawing & Sketchbook section is extremely lacking, and I hope to remedy that by attending some life drawing sessions this weekend and next week.

More importantly, there are still some things I want to do to sharpen up my reel. I'm working on an extended action sequence featuring a soldier and a big robot, since it seems everyone wants to see a guy with a gun doing acrobatics.

And after doing 11 Second Club's February competition, I really would like to do another acting animation from an audio clip from the great '80s comedy, "A Fish Called Wanda."

Once I do those two things, I'm going to try to get some feedback from fellow animators and see if they can help me identify any other ways I can improve my reel. I do feel that if I do a good job on them, however, my reel will be in a good place.

For shits and giggles, I've also put my various graphic design-related projects onto a separate site:

http://www.benhopper.portfoliobox.me/

I sometimes have as much fun doing graphic design as I do animating, I just don't get as much practice as I would like. Hopefully that changes with all this free time I have now.

The latest cut of my reel includes my 11 Second Club submission, as well as some tightening up of the editing.

11 Second Club: Feb. 15 Final Submission

Pretty happy with how it turned out. Could have probably given it a bit more love in parts, but was just happy to get it in on time considering what a late start I got on it and my emotional state. :)

Feb. 2015 11 Second Club Work In Progress

Posting the blocked-out state of my submission before I start in on the polish phase ...

Signal Studios Animation Reel

Getting close to a final cut of my reel. The music is placeholder until my brother gets me another tune, and I still haven't settled on the clips included in this cut, but here you go anyway ...

Wittnerfest 2014

I made a poster for this year's Wittnerfest.

Shilshole Sunset

Belated birthday dinner in beautiful Ballard at the Staple & Fancy (really good) followed by a walk along the beach at Golden Gardens. There's no better month than August.

38 Years Old

Olympic Sculpture Park

My lovely wife. She's a great woman.

The latest evidence: She got me a Sony NEX-6 for my birthday. I've always been interested in photography, but up until now I've always done the best I could with cheap digital cameras, and the results were never impressive. Now I have one that can make an average wanna-be artist like me look like he sorta knows what he's doing.

I'm still learning how to use it. These images represent the best of my playing around since I opened the box two days ago. It's easily the nicest camera I've ever owned, and I'm excited about trying to take all kinds of pretty pictures with it.

I am still drawing however. If nothing else, I hope the camera inspires my drawing. Make art. Make art.

I did three Christmas cards this year because I enjoy torturing myself.

Really, I couldn't think of a single grand idea, so I thought I'd do three really simple line drawings concerning a different aspect of Seattle. I of course got carried away and spent way more time on them then I originally intended.

The tree on top of the Space Needle is my favorite part of all of them.

An old friend recently got engaged, so I made him a comic strip.

Lowlights From 2011

Just a couple pieces I did and some bits from my sketchbook over the past year. In my personal opinion, not a whole lot to get excited about, but at least I'm drawing regularly. The highlight is the mosiac below, which was made from paper tiles hand-painted by me when I was taking art classes at the University of Kentucky. They've been waiting for 15 years just to be in this mosiac and didn't even know it!

I also did this Christmas card. Just drew it straight-up in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet.

Quick cafe portraits. Hmm, shame, no women!

Caricatures of my brother, Nick Kondo and Nick Vigna, and a spaceman ...

Abstract weirdness done while on jury duty ...

A sneak peek at a comic strip I've been developing. The old man at the bottom right is based on my late grandfather.

More to come.

New Scanner!

My beautiful wife Amanda got me a new scanner for Christmas, so after a couple years of erratic posting, now my home art studio is complete and can now share some of the work I've been doing.

Here's an unfinished portrait of Dave ...

My First Shipped Title With Signal Studios -- 'Toy Soldiers: Cold War' (!)

Yeah, I know. I haven't updated my art blog since Christ knows when. My biggest excuse is my current lack of a scanner, so I can't scan any of the work I've been doing in my sketchbook. However, I've also been busy working at Signal Studios lately, and finally, after working for over three years at Snowblind and not shipping a game (my credit in Death Tank excluded), I'm happy to announce that after barely a year at Signal -- and, no joke, a bald eagle is cawing outside my window as I write this -- my team's game, Toy Soldiers: Cold War, will launch on Xbox Live Arcade on August 17 as part of Xbox's "Summer of Arcade" promotion.

And you know what else? The game is really good. Trust me. I've played the shit out of it. It's fun. But I don't have an Xbox 360 at home, so I can't buy it. You do have an Xbox 360 at home, and you know someone who's worked on this awesome game, so you should probably buy it.

This game marks my return to Actually animating on a project that Actually produces a playable game instead of spending all of my time processing motion capture data for a project that gets canceled or has a release date that keeps getting pushed back, and back, and back, and soon on. Incredibly, this hasn't happened for me since the Handheld Games days, when That's So Raven: Psychic On The Scene was released for the Nintendo DS (coming not-long-after Phil Of The Future for Game Boy Advance). Not that I want to take this time to revisit my time at Handheld. My former brave colleagues from that Hellhole That Still Managed To Ship Playable Games will know what I'm talking about. (And by the way, the above link is worth clicking on. The Wikipedia entry for TSR:POTS is maybe the worst Wikipedia entry ever, but somehow describes the game exactly.)

ANYWAY, Toy Soldiers: Cold War. Great game. I worked on it. My team was comprised of a group of guys who worked like crazy to make this game into what I think will be the best game on Xbox Live Arcade this year. Actually, when I think about what my job on this game actually was: Moving War Toys Around Just Like I Did With My G.I. Joe Toys As A Kid -- I had it pretty easy. The animations Nick Kondo and I created for TS:CW will likely go unnoticed by most people who play this game. Not because they're bad. I actually think they're quite good. But this game has such absorbing action that you'll be too busy blowing shit up to notice the soldier I made scratch his ass while his weapon is reloading. The programmers, designers and artists on TS:CW made awesome stuff.

I guess I'm getting a little ahead of myself here since the game hasn't even been released yet. I should probably reserve my joy for when people actually start buying it. I've just forgotten the feeling of following a game project through to its completion, and the end product actually being good. I felt that with Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile, but hardly anyone played that game. I think people are going to play this game and love the hell out of it -- August 17, 2011 (seven days after my birthday).

recent digital artwork ...

The top one was an assignment for Snowblind's internal art blog in which you listen to music and just paint whatever comes to you.

The second one is a color concept for my "Scavenger" project.

Both were done in Photoshop Elements 8.

A Short Reel Of Some Recent Work ...

Recent Life Drawing

Unfortunately, this is as good as it gets. Drawing is a problem for me right now. I need lots and lots of practice.