Mike's Tatu

I have a friend starting dental School. He wanted a temporary tatoo that he could show off to his friends with. I made this design for him. I hopa he likes it.

my webshite is LIVE!

http://ericseanbenedict.com/

checkitout!

Editorial stylezzzzzzzzzz1zz

So last year I sucked really hard at illustration. Not like this year. This year I rock. well anyway, we got an assignmnt from Chris Buzellis wife, Soojin Buzelli, the AD for Plansponsor magazine. The assignment was "choosing the best." I had a good sketch, but after an all-nighter-into-the-next-dayer, and several restarts I ended up submitting a pretty god-awful, unfinished illustration. I got the impression though that she liekd the sketch and may have picked it if it looked like more than a poorly concieved water color painting. So here it is: the redo! a year later!




No dice on the getting hired thing, bee tee dubs. But I still like it, and I didn't have anything straight editorial looking for my portfolio so... BONUS!

Now i don't think this color scheme is "better" but uploading CMYK files onto blogger sure does some interesting stuff. Worth noting for the future:

Animal Designs

I did this a while back but i never posted it. It was for the Proivdence Children's Museum. It was for a potential exhibit where they would have each image on one side of a totem, and the thirds could rotate so you could interchange the body parts for all of the animals and make hundreds of combinations of creatures. I also made a flash version of the totem where you could actually use it like you would if it were built, but I can't post that on the blog. So here's the images:

The ballad of charley mops

chin puppets, green screen and after effects fun.

Now Introducing...

The Magnificent Brothers Bendoverinkov in their first wacky adventure, live on YouTube!



and here's a grainy artifact-y, primary action is good but the secondary action needs work bonus animation of a gibbon.

the master of suspense

Its been a while. Here we go:

Eastwood of the West

RGB!!!

you have to save your files in RGB mode or else they don't like to upload to blogger in any reasonable color scheme. So here 'tis, in all of it's additive glory:

here's a twofer.

I have a two animations. They look a little ugly just because they're line tests, and I haven't gotten the knack for making line tests look pretty just yet.

The assignment here was to do a walk cycle. So i did a walk cylce of a guy snorting coke. it's okay, if you can ignore the change of line quality midstep, and then constantly undulating mask from after effects that I didn't manage to reign in.



worth noting: the eye does not in fact pop out of his head. It is actually his heart. I made an attempt to TOTALLY SHAKE UP YOUR EXPECTATIONS by adding in that little visual gag. It became clear during crit that I completely missed the mark. but NEXT time I do a walk cycle o a guy having a heart attack from snorting too much coke (which may or may not be common... I didn't do my research) I will make sure the heart explodes onto the "camera lens" and slowly slides down leaving a bloody trail just to drive that point home.

This assignment was to a character doing two of the following four things: Pulling, pushing, hitting, or getting hit. I had a little preface planned that shows the bug discovering a half eaten apple before coming into this close-up shot, but I didn't have time to finish. The reason I even bother to say that is to make it clear that this craggy peak our friend is molesting is really a delicious apple chunk. Enjoy!

This one is so IN YOUR FACE!!!

First new caricature of the semester. Giving that new technique another go. Id say this is a moderate success so far. I'm somehow unsatisfied. I don't know what it's missing. if anyone has any thoughts then by all means. This is quickly turning into an uninteresting post. Oh, there it is. Here's the picture. As per usual, I expect telephone calls or text messages saying who it is, to confirm my wavering belief that I can capture a likeness.



*UPDATE*

It seems that between the desktop and the blog page the colors changed completely based on something I don't understand. I'll leave it up just to TOTALLY FREAK PEOPLE OUT! But here goes nothing:



that's more like it.

Back to my old tricks

My first assignment for Character Animation was a character of my choosing and design deep in thought then coming to a conclusion. The result is a simple blob dude just sort of flailing. I'll argue to the end that It is a character whose head you weren't supposed to penetrate, and that his inner turmoil is expressed through his inability to maintain control of his body and form, and it isn't until he decides to control himself that he concludes he can finally move, and thusly does so. However the more astute readers, in addition to the not so astute readers will see through my veiled attempt at justifying a nifty animation that doesn't just quite fulfill the assignment. C'est la Vie. I like gelatin.



Here's a link to youtube. Ill try to get it on the blog soon if I figure out how.

ME ME ME

So I was gonna try to do a piece where I worked way harder on the pencil drawing, and then painted sparingly, letting the pencils shine through. The result of that thought process was this pencil drawing:




Then I saw this website: http://bluhmdigitalpodcast.blogspot.com/
This Bluhm character shows how to make photoshop look like an oil painting, and he talks about his techniques as he does it, and well the bottom line is I decided to give his methods a shot. I'm pretty pleased with the results:

unfinished stuff

Both of these are being retooled.
This first was an assignment called Jazz. I'm turning it into a vector to sharpen the edges and to rework some of the colors, maybe try it on a white backgroud:



It wasn't until after the fact that i realized the dormant image that surfaced as my inspiration:



This one was turn a famous figure into an inanimate object. I chose the one comedian most easily mistaken for a founding father. My bad. This one is in need of some major surgery. Sorry for the garish colors:

...aaaand another

More sketches: The secret lives of celebrities

These are the sketches for my next assignment. Can you guess who it is? it's Stephen Hawking. The idea behind this assignment was to show some famous person doing something the opposite of what we would expect. Show their secret life and how it differs from their public persona. My idea is that Stephen Hawking totally loves to play in the pool. In my preliminary sketch, he was jumping out of his special wheelchair onto the diving board. Maybe in that case the whole wheelchair thing was a put-on. It was agreed in class that this is funnier:



It was followed by the suggestion of making stephe-o a lifeguard. Capitalizing on the fact that he's actually to stupid to realize he'd be completely inept at saving lives. I had a brief idea that i may have done this illustration in 3-d, it seemed feasible in 5 days:



This third sketch is the one I'll probably do, and i'll probably do it in photoshop like the dubya one. Fred liked it. He liked seeing the people in the ocean who would absolutely not be saved if any of them should drown.



Finishes on tuesday!

my vewy fuhst cawicatuah

So the first illustration for my caricature class was... well, if you can figure it out then I did a good job. I started doing an acrylic painting that looked something like this:



But it looked like ass so I changed a bunch of stuff. I scanned it in and started to do a digital painting over the acrylics. The biggest compositional difference was that I got rid of those flying pages across the middle of the image. They kept getting in the way of the desk and the suitcases and It was bugging me. I also had to fix the light source because the curtains were just backward and it looked like the figure had been toasted.



I also threw in the presidential seal in the corner to drive home that we are, in fact, in the oval office and not some waiting room in purgatory with an excellent view of the fires of hell... though I guess that is still one possible interpretation. I consider myself too apolitical to actually feel strongly about the opinions presented in this piece, but I'm sure somebody out there believes it.