Caricatures of Maggie Smith and John Hurt

I took Pierre Benjamin's Zbrush workshop 18 months ago and loved it. If you are looking to learn the techniques he uses in his great work, I highly recommend taking his course. Here are a couple of pieces I created during the course, based on an illustration by the amazing Wael Safwat. The second portrait is based on a 2D drawing by the fabulous Sebastian Krueger. You can check out their work at the following links. Their work will blow you away!

https://www.artstation.com/waelsafwat.

http://www.sebastiankruger.org/

I modelled this character mascot a while ago for the people at Matter and Form who make this cool light weight 3D scanner.

Sculpting the Animation Character Bust 

New Dates: Oct 12- Dec 14, 2016

for details follow the link:

http://www.claypixelstudios.com/store/p2/Course_101%3A_Sculpting_An_Animation_Character_Bust________.html

Revisiting the Schnitzel Family

I recently added a new character to the Schnitzel family... meet Mitzy older sister to brother Bean.

Two of my latest clay sculpts. Still in progress. Character designs by Francesca Natale and Jonathan Paine

Latest Project with Francesca Natale, Keyshot and Zbrush

I've known Francesca Natale for 8 years now and I've always wanted to work with her on some of her designs. This is our first collaborative effort together. I love her character design work and chose this as my first pass at one of her characters. This characters shapes were so much fun to work with. I modeled him in Zbrush and Maya, and lit and rendered him in multiple passes with Keyshot 5 and final composite was done in Photoshop. I used this as an exercise to get familiar with Keyshot. Original was rendered at 32 bit colour depth which produced very rich colours. Unfortunately, due to file size I had to compress it to 16bit for posting online and it did loose the richness of 64bit original size.

Nickelodeon

It's been a few months since my last posting, but I haven't been idle. I've been busy creating artwork for a few of our ongoing projects. Our latest effort has been for this years Nickelodeon Animated Shorts Contest. This is the title character I developed with Mike and John Erskine-Kellie, the writers, for our short film entry "Gogozilla vs. The Airplane". You may recall an earlier version I posted here quite sometime ago. This particular contest is for a much younger demographic of 2-5 year olds. So I modified the original design to make it more suitable for a younger audience.

Voices In My Head

I've always enjoyed producing characters, whether as a puppetteer, animator or sculptor. One day 3 years ago,I had some free time to record some pig voices. My recording space was highly reflective, but I was able to record my spluttering pigs as best I could. Here's a belated birthday greeting to my friend Audrey. I'll post more soon.

Big City Pig

     I've been keeping very quite for the past several months, but that doesn't mean I've been idle. For the past 3 years I've been working on personal work, starting with shorts. I performed a number of different roles, from initial story, voice over, concept design, to art direction, and directing.

     Along the way, the focus shifted. I got in touch with Mike Erskine-Kellie, who I'd worked with many years ago whilst I still lived in Toronto. Mike's an amazing writer with a tremendous sense of humour, who last I knew at the time, had been doing live theatre performances. I was thrilled to hear back from him, but was more than happy to hear that he had been writing professionally for a number of years. Not just any writing though, he was writing animation scripts and had worked for a lot of companies I'd known of for years. Studios local to Vancouver such as Studio B, Nerd Corps, and Bardel, and international studios like PBS and Disney. Needless to say his body of work was impressive and it was just what I was looking for.
   
     So after a few skype sessions Mike and I started working together to flesh out the work I'd been doing. We retooled the last short I'd been working on called "A Night at the Slop" and ultimately decided it needed a complete re write and whilst we were at it a complete over haul of what we were going to do together moving forward. So our partnership started. We now have a lineup of several IP's (Intellectual Properties), in various levels of development. I'm very pleased to announce that one of those properties has now been optioned by Thunderbird Films. I'm referring to our adult TV series "Big City Pig", which I have been posting concepts of for several months now. I will be providing more details as we move forward with this exciting project. Here again is our protagonist Arnold Schnitzel..........

 

I've been quite busy lately and haven't posted anything in a while. Moving can take it's toll on my creativity. I finally had some time today to do a sketch in Zbrush. I've always liked characters with horns. I'll be adding more in the next few days.

Posting on CGMeetup.net

I woke up this morning and looked at my email inbox as per usual. I wasn't expecting all the likes on my vimeo posting. My inbox was swamped with likes. I found out later in the afternoon, through my friend Alex Liki, that my reel had been posted on CGMeetUp.net. Almost 3,500 views in one day. A big thank you to the people at CGMeetup! Here's the link:

http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/jonathan-paine-pixar-demo-reel/

Another Maquette

This is still a work in progress , but I got this sculpture close enough that I could do a paint over. I'm more or less happy with how my second ever photoshop painting turned out. Looking forward to doing the same treatment on the other characters.

Concept Art

It's been over a month since my last update and things have been crazy busy for me. I started a new job last month as I needed to pay some bills to keep the project afloat. It's been good to get back into a film production again, but it means time on my short is very limited now. Here's some of the latest concept art I've done for the pigs. These are my first photoshop paintings and unfortunately I ran out of time before I could finish the skin tones to my liking. I'll just have to revisit them at a later date.

Another Animation Maquette....

Here are a couple of photos of my next pig maquette.

Ready for Moulding and Casting

Here's the finished bust of Louie from my animated 3D short. I'll be making a mould and casting him in resin soon. In the meantime I'm working on a second pig and a new website. I had so much fun sculpting this guy and wish there were more hours in the day to do more. Maybe I'll do a series.....

I snapped my "G" string tonight.... No not that kind. I haven't played guitar since I was in grade 6, but I still need a "G" string. I use it as a tool for sculpting the finishing details, and unfortunately none of the music stores are open this late at night. Looks like I'll just have to finish the sculpture tomorrow.

Animation Maquette Almost Complete

Just a few more little things to be done before I consider him finished.

This is a clay sculpt, but will ultimately be cast in resin for the Kickstarter campaign.

Louie Animation Maquette for Kickstarter Campaign

I've had a few days away from the sculpt, so I thought I should put some time into it today. Still very much a work in progress. I'm not completely happy with his expression yet.

Animation Maquette

I am putting together a Kickstarter campaign for my animated short and will be offering this character bust as one of the incentives. This is Louie who I started sculpting today. I will post again when he's nearing completion. He's sculpted with Chavant NSP medium and I'll be casting him in resin.

ZBrush 4R6: ZRemesher

I just got my upgrade to Zbrush 4R6 and was anxious to try the new ZRemesher plug in. WOW! It really is a game changer. I used the default settings on the latest character and within 2 minutes it had done a pretty impressive job. It needs some refinements as it's not 100 percent spot on, but it's really close. My original sculpt had 1.8 million polygons. It's now down to 18,000. With a little tweaking, this could be a fully animatable mesh! Kudos to Pixologic for an awesome fabulous update!