Officially an Animation Mentor Student

I'm very happy and excited to announce that I am now officially an Animation Mentor Student! SCORE!!! For those of you that are unfamiliar with Animation Mentor, you gotta check them out. By far, the leading school for animation. I've been dreaming of attending since I was in college. http://www.animationmentor.com/

Their latest student Showcase.

I've been trying to attend AM for a while now, but for one reason or another, it just wasn't the right time. Then finally, the stars aligned, I had all of the resources that I needed to attend, I applied and I was accepted! Then, I found out about Advanced Placement! So I submitted my reel to be considered for advanced placement. I honestly thought they would just start me at class 2 or class 3. But when I heard back from them, they told me that the mentors felt that I was ready for Class 4! SCORE!!!

My first official Animation Mentor term starts on the 24th of this month and I'll be in Class 4, Introduction to Acting. I absolutely can't wait for class to start! I've had access to the campus for about a month now and it's been so amazing already, I've learned loads already! I've just been watching as many videos as I can, talking to as many students and teachers as I can, and just learning as much as I can.

Hopefully, this will be another giant step forward in getting to where I want to go in life. Wish me luck! Gonna do my best to rock it out!

Stephen

Johnny Cupcakes Junk Food Tour

Wassup, my peoples. This past weekend, my buddy Adnan and I went out to Santa Monica to catch Johnny Cupcakes on his Junk Food tour. He did a collabo with Junk Food, releasing limited shirts, prints, and pins while Junk Food handled the packaging design. It was an awesome pop-up shop event with awesome merch. Johnny was selling exclusives out of an ice cream truck and gave away free ice cream with purchases. As anyone that follows Johnny knows, he's a huge prankster. As I was being rung up for my purchases, I asked how many people have come to the truck actually asking for Ice Cream and sure enough, the people that were in line behind me asked for some frozen treats. Check out the pictures below snapped by my buddy Adnan. Enjoy!

Stephen 

Ginormous Sketchbook Dump

Alright, that's enough. It's been too long since a post and I have a lot of stuff piled up in my sketchbook. I've stitched together a quilt of some of the things that have been accumulating in my sketchbook. They're all different shapes, sorts, and sizes. All done with the usual materials: col-erase, tombow pencils, prismacolor markers, and copic markers. I'll leave a little description at the bottom listing all of the pieces present. Hope you can dig it. Til' here, peace. (Sorry for the quality. Too many to scan so I just took quick shots with my phone.)

 

In order from left to right:
-Doomsday
-Monster progression 01, draw monsters week at work
-Monster progression 02
-Monster progression 03
-Sushi Chef at a restaurant in the valley
-John Snow and Ghost
-Harry Potter
-Batman
-Gandalf performing a jedi mind trick (lol)
-Catwoman
-Random Guy at Priscilla's Coffee Shop, Thursday night drawing session
-Random Woman, same place
-A guy that I thought looked like a dog so I drew him as a dog using his iPhone, same place
-Random Guy, same place
-One of my dogs in the Philippines, Bronx
-Caricature of my little sister, Viel
-Lando Calrissian
-Clown from Spawn
-Pinky and the Brain


Stephen

PS

GO LAKERS

Disneyland Birthday

Hey everyone, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, all that jazz. It's been too long. I celebrated my birthday on January 22nd of this year. One of the many things I did to celebrate was go to Disneyland (as i love to do) with some of my cousins. We went to the Animation Academy and the character of the session was Donald! Check out what we came up with.

Eric's Donald

Melissa's Donald

My Donald

Reggie's Donald

Stephen

PS

GO LAKERS!!!

Art Adventures 2011

What's goin' on everybody. Accompany me on this post as I go over the past few art events that I visited: IndieCade, DesignerCon, and a Joe Ledbetter signing. Prepare for a lot of pictures! (I'm going to apologize in advance for the quality of some of the pictures. There was quite a lot goin' on at these events. Lol.)

First, IndieCade. IndieCade was held in early October this year. As a brief background, IndieCade is an independent game festival held in downtown Culver City every year. It's fairly young, this year was it's fourth year. This year was my first, and I was pleasantly surprised. At IndieCade, there's a check-in point where you get the essentials for the event: festival program, event listings, map, etc. From there, you have a number of places that you could go to. The way it works is certain stores/locations in Culver are specifically open as a gallery for game creators to showcase their games.  The whole festival isn't contained to one big location. It was spread out all over downtown Culver City. The best location, in my opinion, was the Fire Station. Check out the pictures below!

IndieCade

There were these enormous Space Invaders replicas all around Culver!

The coolest venue of the festival, the Fire Station. It was filled with great games and independent game enthusiasts of all kinds: gamers, creators, execs, producers, etc.

The best game I saw there was a game called Bridge. We got a chance to talk to the creator, Ty Taylor,  really cool people. The game has a brilliant concept and amazing mechanics. I highly recommend it. I know the picture I took sucks, but you can check the game out here http://thebridge.hypercubegames.net/.

Next, Designer Con. Designer Con was pretty damn awesome this year. It's held in Pasadena every year in November. It's a convention for Vinyl Toys, Urban Art, and Designers. I've been to a few and it gets better every time. This one was by far the best. There were rows upon rows of booths with amazing toys, artwork, and  artists. Toward the front, they were shooting webisodes interviewing some of the top designers that showed up this year. Towards the back, there was a stage for featured artists to do live painting. This year I picked up some vinyl toy Mp3 players and some prints. Very cool stuff, check out the pictures below!

Designer Con poster designed by Ragnar (sorry for the quality)

Inside the convention hall

Just a couple among thousands of incredible Vinyl Toys that were there.

Spanky Stokes monster! Looks like a cross between Mike Wazowski and Sully!

The very thing that makes time travel possible,the Flux Capacitor.

Ragnar doing a live painting at the back!

A booth with amazing lego displays!

Star Wars Mural

Star Wars chess sets

Lord of the Rings display! This is a recreation of when the Ents marched on Isengard.

Designer Con, until next year!

Lastly, the Joe Ledbetter signing. Poly Imaginative recently released a line of Chinese Zodiac toys designed by Joe Ledbetter. Joe is probably my favorite designer, so when I heard there would be a signing at Munky King LA, I was as good as there. I picked up my respective year's vinyl toy, year of the Dragon. I got that signed as well as a book that I bought of Joe's a while back. Check out the pictures below!

Well, that wraps up our adventure! Thanks for joining me on this trip. Hope to see you all again soon. Until here, Peace! Happy holidays!

Stephen