Back in January last month, I visited the Armed Forces Military Museum in Largo, FL (just north of St. Petersburg on the West Coast) with my friends Jason Pichon, his brother Josh McLaughlin, and Elaine Cruz for a day of researching military equipment through history and drawing.
I got only a couple drawings but took lots of photos for reference. Hopefully I'll look at the photos and make more drawings later on. These were done with the Pentel Tradio and Pocket Brush pens on Moleskine.
I felt like I was a kid again drawing my G.I. Joes! I highly recommend this place if you have to research any type of historical military equipment!
http://armedforcesmuseum.com/directions.html
Armed Forces History Museum
2050 34th Way North
Largo, FL 33771
Back in the mid 2000's, a few animation studios were forming here in Orlando after the closing of Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida. One of these studios, Cecropia, set up shop to make a video game with quality 2D animation; not unlike the Don Bluth games of the 80's, "Dragon's Lair" & "Space Ace", except theirs wouldn't be an action game. They ended up hiring a lot of the very talented animation artists in town (many of them my friends) and ended up with "The Act", a hand-drawn animated romantic comedy game. Luckily, I was hired to do some clean-up animation (I worked on Edgar, Sylvia, Wally, and one of the doctors) and animate the game's instructions and comic special effects in Flash ( I also ended up teaching Flash at the studio). Check out some of the original art for it here: http://theactgame.com/Creation/
I'm really glad to finally see this game out in the open and hopefully enjoyed by people. The game was originally being sold to the arcade market but it is now being released to the iPad & iPhone. Check it out and download it in the iTunes app store: http://itun.es/is44qY
Gotta mention that my good friend Tom Buzbee and I got a mention on the talented Tom Thorspecken's Analog Artist Digital World blog! It's a great art and local Orlando event blog, highly recommended! Thorspecken is an Orlando event reporter except instead of taking pictures, he sketches the event (or part of it) in watercolor. A different perspective! He was a clean-up artist at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida and now teaches in the 2D Animation class at Full Sail University's Computer Animation department. I worked at Disney Florida on "Brother Bear" and although we never worked together, I hold Thor in the highest respect for working at the studio. Personally, it's great to see artists from the animation studio make art around Orlando.
Check out Thor's post and sketch here and follow him: http://www.analogartistdigitalworld.com/2012/06/first-thursdays.html
Fellow students, staff, and faculty (including myself) of Full Sail will be exhibiting artwork at the Orlando Museum of Art's 1st thursdays event this coming Thursday May 3rd. My Amelie & Bugs Bunny paintings and Audrey figure drawing got in. Come on down and say hi, $10 gets you in the door!
