A start of a new life! and a new painting.

A lot has happened since the last time I posted a blog. I have to say I'm pretty lame at keeping this thing up. I have officially moved out to California! I packed up my car and headed west on Feb 10th. I stayed in Albuquerque the first night mainly to visit my friends Jodie and Matt, their daughter and their new baby boy. Matt was an animator of Sony Albuquerque on Green Lantern. I arrived in North Hollywood on Saturday, February 12th to my friend Agnes' house. Where she graciously let me crash on her couch for the next four weeks while I looked for work. I have to say I really enjoyed my time there.

Two weeks after arriving in North Hollywood I landed a freelance job as a 3D Pre-viz artist for Post Mango, thanks to my friend Mitch's referral. I didn't start the job until the following week so in the meantime I went up to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, which was quite fun and a bit exhausting as well. So much walking. I stayed with my friend Mari who currently works at EA as an animator and I got to see so many of my friends that I haven't seen since graduating Ringling 9 months previous. I also got to attend a Ringling Alumni get together which was a lot of fun! The last day I skipped out on the conference and went and toured EA, bought $150 dollars worth of video games at their store for $30 bucks! I also got to visit my friend Cat Hicks who is an animator at Pixar. She gave me a tour of the place of which I do have some pictures of... but I'm too lazy to upload right now.

The following Monday I started work at Post Mango. I had a great time and really enjoyed doing the work. The shots where a lot of fun to work on and I'm excited to see what happens with the movie Chronicle. A week after working there I moved down to Culver City for a short 3 months lease. I didn't want to be tied down to anything as I knew this job would end soon. The job ended sooner then expected, but that seems to be the nature of the game. However I got to meet a very cool story artist named Troy and an awesome 3D Generalist named Jocelyn.

After the job ended I went over and spent a few days at Rareform Pictures doing some UVing for them. It's a volunteer project but it's something I can get on my resume. Come and go as you please and spend as little or as much time as you want on the project. It will give me some more experience and really like I said, get something more on my resume. I think I will continue to go over there when I've got time. But onto what this was all leading up to.

I will be starting tomorrow at 10 am at Pixomondo as a Render Wrangler, Jr. Max Artist at their Burbank office. I'm excited about this oppertunity. You know that friend Mitch I mentioned earlier that referred me to Post Mango, well he just so happens to work at Pixomondo as well, however he works at the Santa Monica office where I had my interview. All artist hope for an artist position, however this one will not be an artist position. At first I was a little surprised as the add didn't mention that it wasn't an artist position. But I'm totally ok with that now. I will get to learn something I've never learned as they are willing to train me and it will put one more good thing on my resume! Plus help pay the rent! And in the mean time I get to network as much as possible and continue to work on my art.

Sooo onto the real motivation for this post, since this blog is not called "The History of Jasmine's Life" but instead called "The Art of Jasmine Hope". Last night I was wondering around the internets (yes I said internets) and came across this awesomely cool clothing website Too Fast Online, I of course had to check out their awesomely cool artists, which then lead me onto the art of Marcus Jones.


It so inspired me I decided I needed to start a digital portrait. It has been YEARS since I've done any painting. Literally years. The last digital paintings I worked on were my junior year of college for my Drawing for Animators class. So last night I chose a picture of a friend from high school, Nikki. I colored out the background so it would be less distracting for me.


I hooked up my live stream page and I worked on it last night for about 2 hours and got a nice basic outline going. Like I said it's about 2 hours long so you can skip around to see the progression of it. Here is the recording:

jasminehope on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

I think when I finish this painting I'm going to take the videos and speed them up put them together so you can watch the whole thing done in like 10 minutes, then youtube it! I've always wanted to do something like that but never taken the time to.

Here is the finished simple outline with no real detail.