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.

I'm moving to LA

A big change is coming for me soon. This past Tuesday I made the decision to move out to LA and hunt for work with an LA address. After speaking to friends who are also in the same field as me (and graduated college with me) and out in LA working, it was determined that this really is the best course of action for me. I need to take that leap of faith and just go. So in a few weeks I will be heading out there and couch hopping if I can locate some people who are willing to let me do so. So in the mean time my mother bought me a GPS system for a month early birthday present. We're praying it gets here before I actually leave. I know I don't ever talk about God on this blog and just try to keep this art/work related. However, I really feel like He's behind this sudden change, and I'm super excited about it, and a bit nervous. It's going to be a big adventure!

In the mean time as preperation I'm going to be scrambling to finish modeling, UVing, and texturing my car so that I can get it on my demo reel. I've been putting it off since the last time I posted on here, but now I really have to kick it into gear.

I've business cards I need to get printed and I've a bunch of leave behind portfolios I need to print and a bunch of demo reels I need to burn.

Anyway the real reason I am posting today is to let you know that I have officially updated the galleries on my website! They are much better and totally different then what I had on there before. I had no idea that you could make galleries using Adobe Bridge. When I discovered that I was super excited. It was so easy. I just need to code in some back buttons to get to the main gallery page. However, that right now is kind of on a back burner.

Here is the link to my galleries page: http://jasmine-hope.com/gallerymenu.html

There are four different galleries on there: 3D art, digital, traditional, and my photography. Leave me some feedback and tell me what you think!

3D Modeling of my Chevy Aveo

I've come to realize, it has once again been too long since my last post. While I have set things aside for previous posts, they never managed to happen. So this post I will dedicated to my current 3D modeling project. Which I have actually been working on and off now for about 8 months (amongst many other projects), much more steadily recently however because I want to get this project done and on my demo reel

Today I also plan to update the galleries on my website as they desperately need to be updated. I am not a webmaster and I don't know all the coding that goes behind decent websites so I built my website using a Dreamweaver trial version. While I got it all done in time... I am unable to update it because the trial is now over. And while many other people would just pirate the software and do what they need, I have a strong aversion to using pirated software. All of the programs I have on my computer are bought and paid for.... yes the CS5 Production Premium that I have on my computer, I paid an arm and a leg for, but it's legally mine! And the Autodesk Maya and Renderman I have a year license, bought and paid for. Unfortunately Dreamweaver was not included in that package... and after spending $1600 on the CS5 Production package I just didn't have another $400 to spend.

Anyway the point is that today instead of working on my 3D Aveo model, I am going to attempt to stumble my way through updating my website via the coding! This shall be a fun attempt.

Ok so on to the reason I'm actually making this post, to show my current modeling progress on my Chevy Aveo. I chose my car because I love it for one, and it's right outside my window for me to pear out at while working. Here are some pictures of my little car that I love so much! This is actually the second one I've owned, my first one got destroyed in a tornado that hit my home in 2008.



I'm a long way from done but here is the progress so far.


These two images aren't the same, one is smoothed and one is not, click on them and you'll see the difference.






And as you can see the back is so not even close to finished... it's not even started!


And so that's all I have to show you for now. I want to have this done, UVed, textured and up on my demo reel within the next couple of weeks... that is the hope anyway.

In flight and on paper

So I put my blogspot up on Google Analytics and I've come to notice that my bounce rate for this site is 89.5% at 22 seconds a view... which is really bad. So I figured perhaps I should put up a new post... something that might be interesting to viewers. But then again I'm not sure that the same thing that is interesting to me is also interesting to the average web surfer. And since this blog is really dedicated to my art I guess that leaves me to post some of my art. Now whether it's interesting or not is still up in the air.

Now my problem is that I don't really have any new art to post. I have small little sketch that I drew in my sketch book last week. I wanted to ink her and color her in before I posted her, but perhaps I should do the before and after.


I want to ink the outline... then the colored pencils I'm using are water colored pencils. Which I am quite excited about using - because I really haven't had much opportunity to thus far. So once it's done I'll post the finished product.

As far as 3D goes I've been working on a 3D hummingbird. I haven't gotten as far on it as I wanted to by now, but oh well. Here are some screen grabs and the original turnaround sketch I'm going from. I want to finish modeling it, UV it then texture it realistically. The bird is being modeled in action so that it looks like it's flying. This bird will not be rigged and is specifically for demo reel purposes.




As you can see there isn't much there yet. I have barely touched his wings; right now they are simple extruded faces with a little bit of smoothing. I'm still debating if extruding the faces and modeling from there is what I want to do. Or if I want to model each feather and stick them in there for his wing instead. They are so thin I'm going to need to put a transparency map in there for the light to come through to show just how thin the wings are. I was planning to do it on the tail - so I might just go ahead and do it on the wings to match.

The particular hummingbird that I am modeling from is a Broad Billed Hummingbird and they are just beautiful little creatures.


I think I am going to have a great time working on the texture for my hummingbird. It should be a lot of fun. It's going to be a while before I am able to finish it as I seem to have a pretty full schedule of late. It's amazing how busy one can be even if they're not working.

On a completely separate note I have been helping some friends out with their haunted walk in the woods. It's like a haunted house/haunted corn maze, that type of thing but this is in the woods on their property. So I've been working on making different props and such for them. If I am able to get up there today I will take some picture of the process work and post them up here.

Some of my jewelry

Today I received an e-mail from Jewelry Making Supplies letting me know that my blog was being featured on their website! So I figured it's probably be a good idea if I posted some of my jewelry on here so that new and old visitors can see (and buy) some of my jewelry!

Thank you Jewelry Making Supplies for featuring me.

I have a shop on etsy.com that I post all of my new jewelry and other things that I make.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/raincrow

I wont post everything but I will post some of my favorites for you to check out. I will link them to my etsy shop if you want to look farther or purchase anything.

Autumn Diamond Lace Necklace

http://www.etsy.com/listing/51572786/autumn-diamond-lace-necklace



Black and Red on the Rocks Necklace

http://www.etsy.com/listing/49576951/black-and-red-on-the-rocks-necklace



Cobalt Blue and Pearl Mosaic Ring

http://www.etsy.com/listing/51854642/cobalt-blue-and-pearl-mosaic-ring



Forest and Pearled Diamond Earrings

http://www.etsy.com/listing/51078462/forest-and-pearled-diamond-earrings



Blue Coral Lace

http://www.etsy.com/listing/49049186/blue-coral-lace



Funky Town Bag Necklace

http://www.etsy.com/listing/49376387/funky-town-bag-necklace

Well that is a few of the things I have posted on my shop for your viewing pleasure. If you want to check out more please visit: http://www.etsy.com/shop/raincrow

Monkey see monkey tattoo

This one is a quick post. So my friend Michelle asked me to draw out a tattoo for her of some monkeys. The description goes as follows:

2 to 3 inches tall, one monkey that is white with a cream face and the other monkey that is light brown with a cream face. The white monkey sitting on a branch with the tail hanging down. The body profile and looking forward. The light brown monkey swinging below slightly forward while also facing forward. Lots off leaves and branches and such surrounding them.

After much procrastination I finally got a decent sketch ready for her. I wanted to take the image into Corel or Photoshop and clean it up and then perhaps do a colorful leafy background or whatever. However, since I haven't had a wacom pen (that's really the reason I procrastinated so long on it) I wasn't able to do that. So I hand inked the image so the tattoo artist would have something to work with and then s/he could take it from there and I turned it over to Michelle. I'm going to post what I gave to Michelle and then later (once my new wacom intous4 arrives) I will post the digital painting I do with this image. It'll be too late to get the final image tattooed on Michelle as I'm sure she's already gone to her tattoo artist for the final design. However it'll be a fun little project to do in my spare time.

My Red Panda model

I'm working on a project that originally got started while I was still at Ringling. It was my final project there; a small little project that could be whatever we wanted it to be. The intent was to pad our demo reels more. I chose to model a character that I designed my junior year as a possible thesis character. The story that she was designed for never passed, however I always loved her character design and just thought she was the cutest little thing. She is a red panda girl scout.

Here is a picture of the original character turn around. Click on it to enlarge. There is also a copy of the turnaround on my website http://jasmine-hope.com without the watermark all over it.



Even though school was finished and the project got turned in, there was still a ton of things I wanted to do with her model before I put it on my demo reel. So I started working on her yesterday. She still needs all of the patches on her vest and I am going to UV her. Once I get her UVed I will put her into Mudbox and have a run at her. I'm quite excited about this because I've never really had an opportunity to play with Mudbox.



I've been putting off doing anything in Mudbox and anything with texture because I haven't had a wacom pen since the end of school. Mine was stolen during senior render week. I rented one from the college, however that had to get turned back in at the end of school. So since then I've had a wacom tablet and no pen. The tablet mouse just doesn't cut it because there is no pressure sensitivity.



However, I am super excited to report that last night we purchased a Wacom4 wireless tablet package. It shipped today and I'm hoping beyond hope that it arrives this week - which probably means Saturday (crossing fingers). Once again I can do a whole bunch of different things digitally that I was not able to do without the pen. I can do digital paintings again! I am super happy about this.



So in the meantime I want to get her all setup and ready for Mudbox. I'll post an update once I have a chance to play with her in Mudbox!