Ezra Comes to Life

This year, we are going to be going through the books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther on Sunday mornings in our Student Bible classes. I came up with the idea to create some short videos to lead some, if not all, of the lessons. I thought I could use some small sets and do a little stop motion animation as well as live action with props and figures. Since the first lesson starts in a couple weeks (in fact I had to push it back), I am in full speed mode creating the props, sets and figures. I will be using a GoPro for most of the shooting. After I do the first two or three videos, I am going to be inviting the help of some students and adults to help complete the project.

A side goal of working on this for HP, will be that I will make the curriculum available for purchase for other churches. We are looking at about a 26 week curriculum package with lessons, resources and videos.

Here are some pictures of the process so far...

Concept sketches

 

 

Sculpting process...

I used aluminum foil balled up around the end of a nail. The nail will make it so I can turn the figure's head.

Ezra is beginning to take shape.

Esther will be used later on, but here head and figure are almost complete.

I use a heavy steel wire for the armature. The heads can be removed from the bodies so that I can use them for other characters.

 

Ezra's House:

 



Brinkley BW and Color Illustrations

Here's a couple illustrations I made with my new Graphics Tablet. These are a caricature of our little Yorkie Puppy, Brinkley. I did a BW one and a color one.

--------------------------------------
Artist Notes - I used a Wacom Bamboo Create Graphics Tablet and drew on my PC in Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro. Then I exported them as PNG files.

Caricature for Newsletter - Doug Lucas

As we send out monthly newsletters, we include a note from the president of Team Expansion, Doug Lucas.  He shares from a big picture perspective about missions as a whole within our organization.  Since I had just reformated our entire newsletter design, I thought it only fitting that I "reformat" the image that I used for Doug's note.  See the original pic and the new stylized caricature to fit in with the rest of our newsletter design.

You can see the whole newsletter design and read it too if you want at http://bit.ly/crossersnews201007.  We hope you enjoy it!

Cartoon School

So, I have been wanting to get involved in the informal online cartooning school that John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy. I finally took the dive and did my first lesson. I won't post the lessons here, since I created a separate blog just for them. However, I will post a link when I have done a new lesson. Feel free to leave comments on either blog.

http://cartoonclass101.blogspot.com/