The Art Institute is a year-round school so we end up not having to take as many years to graduate. Unfortunately this means I'm back in class again. I'm extremely happy with all my scheduled courses so far (in fact I SHOULD be paying more attention to the Maya Animation lecture right now, durrr). Here's my class schedule for those who want to know...

Tuesday

Noon: Pre-Production Team (Flanagan) rm 810.

Night: 3D Animation (Thor) rm 707.

Thursday

Noon: Special Topics- SFX Prosthetic Makeup (Todd) rm 804.

Night: Compositing (Bozikov) rm 611.

Pre-Production class I forsee being the HARDEST class ever because it's taught by Tom Flanagan. If you know the guy you'll understand. But I'm also really really looking forward to working with that class because it's all about preparing your animation idea for production and I'll be focusing on my final project for my graduate demo reel: Theod, my "Space Raptor" character. You're gonna see A LOT of artwork dealing with him around here eventually. The school got a brand-new 3D scanner (holy crap!) so I'll try sculpting this guy out of clay and scanning him into the computer to aid me in the modeling process.

The school also got a brand new green screen/motion capture laser lighting studio setup that will be SO helpful for future projects and I hope to use it for some compositing stuff, or costume stuff. Idk. But I'm so excited to play around in there! It's about time we got a proper screen screen room.

3D Animation is also going to be a ton of fun because I get to work with some pre-rig characters... do some walk cycles and lip syncing. It will be uploaded here and YouTube probably. But the one class that I've especially been looking forward to is Todd Debreceni's Special Topics class! He wrote a fantastic book I picked up a signed copy of last October called "Special Makeup Effects for Stage and Screen: Making and Applying Prosthetics" and it will be the foundation for this class.

And best of all? I get to take the class with *Starmuttani! It'll probably be our last class together from here on out, so hopefully we won't get tooooo distracted.

Status: Commissions Open! [link]

With visiting home and then busy with vacation and work and school back in session, I didn't get the chance to work on any of my commissions. >:C So I'll try to make up a few a week maybe... I have no idea how busy school will keep me this time around but I feel that it's going to a bigger problem than I'd like it to be.

I was thinking about temporarily close my slots when I hit number 50 or something... and then open them back up again when I'm all caught up. But then I realized that wouldn't help and it's better to keep them open for people to grab slots in advanced to be put on the waiting list. Also remember that you don't have to pay right away, I just need the payment sometime before I begin working on it.

Ugh, life is annoyingly busy again. Sorry guys, but there is absolutely no way I have the time to start on the Slate costume for awhile... I can only say that it will be done before next year's Rocky Mountain Fur Con. So this also means that my video tutorial explaining how to make a fursuit is also postponed since Slate is the subject for the tutorial. I was planning to take the summer off of school, giving me free time to work on her... but that's obviously not the case now. Maybe around Halloween I'll get started on the tutorial so people can get some help with their costumes before the holiday (that's also the busiest time for my YouTube Channel).

I do not have a Ustream broadcast set up for quite some time. Maybe I'll do some spur-of-the-moment drawing sessions... I'm also making quite a few small costume items daily for the remainder of this month for sale at RMFC. Would anyone be interested in me streaming during my worktime on tails and ears the next few weeks?

I'm developing a very exciting interactive flash program for you guys! It's going to be a Quote Calculator/Order Form for CanineHybird Creations. This means that you will have a visual representation of your custom order as well as an on-the-spot quote estimation so it makes it easier for both of us to handle commissions. This means that you can interactively build your custom costume, specifying all the add-ons and details to give me the most in-depth idea of what you are looking for. I'm sure that I will continue to develop the program continuously over the years, but I'm simply developing the bare bones of the actionscript and php scripts required to make it work. It's TOUGH and frustrating, but I'll slowly grind through it and as soon as I have a working version, I'll upload it to DA. As far as I know, no other artist has done something like this for their commission forms, so I'm really looking forward to having this for my business and I hope you will too.