Switching to Tumblr

Hello to anyone who is still listening,

I haven't been posting here in a while.  I started to think of this place a little too formally, and I have moved to putting up sketches and nonsense over here...



I'm trying to remember to have fun with my work, and time will tell how long I can keep that going.  Anyway if you are interested in following along then i'll be over on tumblr.  Thanks for hanging out.

stay in touch,

-volkertron

OBJECT art show


finally able to sort through the photos of some of the work from the show and share it with you. Joe Bluhm and I were really pleased with the way it came out, neither of us had really done an undertaking like this before, and it was a growing period for sure.




Here is a selection of some of the work that I showed at the show.  All in all there were 19 pieces I completed.










 
I'm trying to find a way to put the work that didn't sell online.  If you are interested in purchasing any of the work, feel free to email me at volkertron@gmail.com

thanks for dropping by
9-30-13

hey everybody,

I've been working on the aforementioned art show coming up over the past few weekends.  We have locked in a date, so if you are in the Shreveport area on November 8th, 2013 swing on by to Artspace and say hello!  The painting has been going variations of well....mostly good.  It's a new challenge for me painting traditionally on a large scale.  It took me a few weekends to just get the technical stuff out of the way like how much paint to premix, or what the actual drying speed of acrylic is (Varnish for oils eats through styrofoam!  Whuddya know)  All the same artistic whiny crap remains.  "None of what I'm drawing is good, why am I even painting, none of these are the images I REALLY want to make"  I've made almost 15 paintings!

I think that I will do this again.  Once I've gone through it once I'll be better prepared.



I'm also sketching, and of course there is work work....which is exciting but none of which I can show.







thanks for dropping by, I'll be posting some teases of the paintings as the show gets closer on twitter (@avolkertron)

till then!

8-7-13

I have signed up to do a joint art show with the talented Jobloom in Shreveport in November.  That means I have 15-20 traditional paintings I need to do in the span of about 15 weeks.  I'll post more updates as the show gets closer, but I'm really excited to crank out a new body of work.  I finally get to use that $300 easel I purchased last year. :)

Here are also some sketches from the book, some of it is process work for the show, some of it is style exploration.










-Tamte

Ringling Storyboarding workshop

6-17-13

This has been a long time coming, but I've been meaning to collect my thoughts, and the things I learned into a post here, when a month ago (months maybe?) I visited Ringling College of Art and Design todo a workshop about storyboarding.

Now, Moonbot is a new company, and we have by no means locked in a process to the incredibly complicated art of boarding, but we've got some steps.  Here is how the workshop broke down.

I started by going here...



I pulled down scripts from 6 movies, trying to cover a range of different types of stories.  I selected scenes from the movies which I felt had good character, interesting settings, or fun stuff to draw.  I changed the names of the places/characters to discourage people from seeing the movies in their heads when they were coming up with shots (which turned out to be a total failure on my part).  AND THEN I labeled them according to their subject matter, and let the students pick...



to my surprise, nobody went for  "Chivalry In The Middle Ages"(AKA "The Three Musketeers")...but maybe it was because Tyler and I were pontificating how difficult it was to draw horses...also, "Conman poker game" was not very popular.

After the students chose their scripts, we showed some examples of storyboards we had done at Moonbot (from cancelled or long past projects) and talked through examples pulled from the internet, and some boarding pdfs floating around the studio.

We got groups together based on the scripts, to go over what the "beats" were for each story.  This is the part that is the most exciting for me, and I feel is the skeletal structure of what your story is going to be.  Beats are supposed to be the major moments or turning points of your story.  If you had only one image to tell your story, it might look like a magazine cover, if you had 24 images per second over 90 minutes to tell your story, it would be an animated film.  Beat drawings, to me are supposed to be the simplest way to get all the things onto paper that structurally make up your sequence.

Most of the stories ended up with around 20 drawings/beats, and we numbered and discussed them as a group.  Everybody who was pulling from the same script had to decide "what information was key, and what order it was given out in"  as a storyteller you have a stockpile of info, and there is an art to dolling it out at an engaging pace.....the group discussion boards looked something like this.



We asked the students "what do you feel the tone of the scene is?".  This was supposed to seep into the camera choices they made as well as the shot length, the lenses, the acting poses all of it should be pointing back to what the core of the scene is about.


Tyler and I took a half assed stab at the "Chivalry In The Middle Ages" script, and came out with what I thought were some fun shots.







these weren't all of the beats, but once we had drawn our first pass and picked our cameras, we were able to review what we had made very easily and see if it was reading or not.  Check our pacing out etc.

Then we had a pitch session.  Where we practiced our fake accents, and voices reading the dialogue for all the characters.  Pitching is also a great teacher, it lets you know if your moments are falling flat, or if your poses are fitting the dialogue you have.  Sometimes if were lucky we can get real actors to record the dialogue and then board to it...but lots of time at Moonbot, we have to rough it in ourselves.

We use a piece of software that we are also sharing on the internet for free here...


"Storytime" is a piece of software you can drag a sequence of images into, then tab through them as your timing gets recorded.  It's super intuitive for "sketching" videos of your boards.  It will also record audio, and lots of other cool doodads.  It's being updated all the time, so if you happen to find it useful, and would like more features added please let us know and we will do our best to get them into the next update! :)

The students did a great job of pulling what they did together after only three classes.  It usually takes us weeks to do what they accomplished in a short time.  I have some of their examples, but blogger is being a bitch about uploading the files. 

..I have to figure out how to use the internet.

all in all the workshop was a great success, and I'd definitely do it again.  Hopefully, if you read all the way to the bottom then you found something useful here too.

later,

-Tamte




sketch searching

some more stuff coming out of the sketchbook..











I'm finding that as I do more long form personal work, like a short comic or something.  My sketchbook veers in a much more practical direction.  Iterating on design and leaving drawings unfinished....These are all the crappy drawings that happen while I'm finding the design.

thanks for looking :)
-Tamte
4-14-2013

Moonbot is in flux, we are at the part of the year where we are figuring out how we are going to accomplish the next few large projects.  It's fun and stressful, and organizational.

GDC 2013 was incredible.  Indies are normal, microconsoles are hitting the scene, and maybe...just maybe expectations are shifting.  It would make me happy if people started looking to games for a wider range of experiences.

I'll be in florida at RCAD next week recruiting for Moonbot, and teaching a workshop on storyboarding.  I'll post workshop stuff here when that's wrapped.

sketches from the book...







Im also on twitter now..




thanks for dropping by,
-Tamte

personal comic - STARFALL

3-6-13

Hey interwebs,

Here is a personal comic I did a handful of months ago.  Looking back I think that beginning could have been a little more thorough.  I learned a lot putting this 12 pager together.  Thanks for checking it out...







 





:)
-Tamte