Womat King, Part Second!

WHEW! Just a small update on the coloring of Good King Wombat. This one's taking me for a ride. Colors are probably about 50% done at this point-- more to come soon!

If You Poke Me, Do I Not Blog?

So I've spent umpteen hours over the past few weeks working on the values for my Wombat King! I really wanted to play with light and reflection in this one, and I think I've done a pretty decent job compared to my usual. I learned a lot, and thanks to some extremely helpful facebook feedback from some SCAD folks, I was able to push it even further than I'd hoped! The next step is color (or maybe putting in all the fur textures I've been dreading?) which I'm sure will be just as much of an adventure. If any of y'all have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

I've been getting a ridiculous amount of work done. On top of this I've been crocheting like a beast, reading a couple decent books and gearing up for my next film. Living alone really gives me an extra push, forcing me to fill the void of free time that would at school have been filled either with frantic nights at Montgomery Hall or frequenting greasy pancake houses with a bunch of loud friends.

Loud friends who I had the good fortune of being able to see this weekend. It was Halloween and in true SCAD fashion nobody bothered to tell anybody they were coming so it was a great surprise to pull up to my old apartment to a big old party of ex-Savannahians. I was even finally able to watch The Room which, let me tell you, was just a delight.

Anyhow, I guess I'll be posting some color on this pretty soon.

All Hail the Blog

This is just a goofy little sketch I did of the King of Wombats reflecting on the success of his empire. It was intended to be an extremely late contribution to the Sketch Frolic blog but that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. I want to use this drawing to experiment with painting different textures and light sources, and really take my time to make it look super good. I also want to use this as an opportunity to learn what all the layer and brush types in photoshop do and how I can use them to my advantage. So stay tuned, I'm probably going to post this five or six times in various stages of completion.

P.S. Did you know that wombats poop cubes? The more you know.

The Long and Winding Blog

These are a few selected pages from my flatbook. They're all drawings from the winter and spring of this past year that I used as part of a longer book to show the creative process I use when designing a character. I worked so hard on some of these images but even a few months later I'm beginning to see things that I could resolve a lot more effectively now.

That's kind of the thing about being an artist-- once you complete a piece there's only a window of a few months until you can't stand the sight of it anymore. I assume this is why I don't really know any artists who decorate their own walls with their artwork, and also why we (Or maybe that's just me) hate it when our moms hang up our old still lives in the kitchen! It's a pain sometimes but I start worrying if I don't get that feeling because it's really the only way I know I'm improving. It also gives me a big old hankering to do another flatbook!

Home, Home on the Blog

"Behold The Noble Jackalope, Friend to Creatures Great and Small"

Just another fun sketch. I think he likes his job :)

Bloggin Ain't Easy, But It's Necessary

These guys are just some sketches I did because I missed drawing on paper during the past year. Senior year was just a mess-- I had a lot of fun but it was also a lot of 12 hour days scrambling to finish my too-long senior project. There were about 30 of us at SCAD who holed up in a series of cintiq labs for a couple of months. I fared reasonably well, and actually had a lot of fun getting to know people but also developed Vulcanlike powers of emotional suppresion as I tried to avoid the nervous sleep deprived breakdowns I felt creeping up from time to time. We dealt with this by becoming loud and obnoxious and taking lots of midnight runs to Taco Bell. I mostly went for tacos, but also so that Scary Mary (google it!) could put my mortality back in perspective.

Anyhow, I guess what I'm trying to say is that Flash took over my life and now I like to draw on paper a lot.

Who is John Blog?

I'm part of this cool blog called Sketch Frolic, which is basically a bunch of my tightest homies from 3rd floor Montgomery Hall at SCAD drawing variations on a new theme every week. Or, you know, every month. Or whenever somebody feels like it. I'll link you to it using the mad HTML skills I developed from using Neopets too much when I was 12.

This is my entry to the Dickensian Street Urchins category which I think I accidentally chose for everybody, an enterprising young lad named Dickon Pope. Dickon was left in a paper sack as a newborn on the doorstep of the local pub and was adopted by the bartender in the way a bookstore might adopt a cat. He is the wiliest, purplest 8 year old Wino in the greater London area, and together with his long suffering labradoodle Wobbles picks more pockets and lives more life than any other illiterate gutter flower around.

I Think, Therefore I Blog.

Hello, world of blogspot. I hope you are well. My name (which you actually probably know already if you're reading this right now) is Katie Stoltze. I am a recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, and am trying very hard to make a living as an animator. I've come to realize that it's not always steady work and there's a lot of uncertainty involved in between jobs, but it's so worth it to be able to create art every day. I love my job!

My job right now, by the way, is an internship for an awesome animation company in Atlanta called Radical Axis. I work on such classics as Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Squidbillies, I get to hang out with some of the coolest coworkers a guy could ask for, and I've learned a whole lot. It's been great! And hopefully soon I'll get a paid job somewhere to fund my addictions to bad thrift store paintings, hamster cage accessories and 19th century fiction from countries I've never been to.

Anyway, this blog serves as a place where I can dump my sketches and drawings and whatnots and will hopefully keep me motivated to create more of them. My tenative goal is to look back at all these entries in a few months and be totally ashamed of all of them.

Can I do it?

I hope so.

Here are some tigers.