Big Book Give Away!

The Appy Ladies are giving away five copies of my animated children’s e-book The Pick-up Princess. Be sure to share this with your friends and try to get a free copy yourself! http://theappyladies.com/the-pickup-princess

familiar sci-fi faces

Dr. Who and Star Trek characters. 

Nice Teeth Contest Victory

My character Crab Tree placed 2nd in the Nice Teeth comic contest recently. Good job Crab! http://ashleylange.deviantart.com/art/DYOI-RESULTS-403501891

I made a comic to celebrate.

The other two in the comic are the 1st and 3rd winners. 

bear and boat and thing and what?

just something weird as a break from my senior film work.

Danny Doodles

It was a Danny Phantom kind of night.

Danny: "Um, Sam? Don't you think that maybe I should handle this one?" 

Tucker: "Dude! Don't be messing with her mojo! I want to live!" 

I can't believe this actually happened...

Other than some minor tweaks I'll have to work on while animating, my rigging is done! HUZZAH! I'm currently reworking my animatic and it's truly nice to be away from the highly technical stuff...for now. I can't believe that a couple weeks ago I was stressed about loosing my rigger and having to end my summer vacation early so that I could go down to SCAD and hopefully put something together before school started! I went from having half a facial rig and no body rig to a fully rigged character capable of the Loony Tunes style animation I'll be going for in just 2 weeks! Pardon the pat on the back, but I think I deserve this one. *pat* *pat* 

Demon New Test Poses

I  got far enough with my skin weighting yesterday that I was able to do some test poses. Here are a couple for you to enjoy. And if you're wondering who this little guy is, he's a part of my senior film. You can watch the animatic (a sort of pre-film) here . 

everything (c) me

body rig (c) AbAutoRig 

more rigging doodle breaks

The skin weighting continues.

Rigging Doodles 4

Today's break doodles 

Toad Patrol character (c) it's owner which is not me

Rigging Doodles3

More doodling during my rigging breaks. 

Rigging Break Doodles 2

Yesterday's break doodles. Just a bunch of nonsense.

Rigging Doodle Breaks

I've been working on some rigging in Maya for my 3D senior animation film and to keep myself sane, I took a couple of doodle breaks. Here are the results. 

Space Kids Sketches

edit: you can look at the sketches a bit closer on my deviantart page 

I've been working on a lot of different story ideas this summer and this is one of my newer ones that has quickly gained a lot of favor with me. I love sci-fi and I've always wanted to do my own sci-fi series that focuses more on the children of a starship than the adults. That's kind of what I have going here. The main character is a young alien girl who is new to the corporate starship. The starship belongs to a very large energy corporation that requires some of it's industrial processes to be done in deep space (partially to expel the waste product into deep space away from inhabited planets and partially because the refinement process needs to be done in zero gravity). On top of it's industrial production, the ship also takes on other company contracts (so they might pick up something for another corporation if they are on the right side of space). 

The main story doesn't focus on the ship. It focuses on a few of the children on the ship and their every day lives as a part of this moving lab. The new alien girl eventually befriends the human girl that I have also sketched here. While the alien girl is trying to be a bit more conformist and safe, the human girl is a wild child who wants to stand out. The main conflict with the alien girl lies in the fact that she is a part of a race that has been recently known to commit acts of terrorism. So her mom wants her to fit in with the other children and be seen as unthreatening, while some of the other children are a bit frightened or angry at her for what a few of her people have done. 

It's all very much a work in process, I haven't quite nailed things down yet, but I'm really excited about some of the ideas I've been coming up with. Hopefully there is a future for these characters, so far they've been a blast to work with. 

all characters (c) Debbie Scheller 2013

The Trio

These are three characters from a story I'm currently developing. It's sort of Wizard of Oz-esk. The toad was actually a prince that was turned into a toad by a witch at a particularly boring party. He's trying to find the witch to be turned back into a prince, or at least a frog (which is way more kiss worthy than a toad). Following him are his two companions: a fish that wants her memory restored and a large cat who wants thumbs so that he can at last fulfill his dream of playing the violin.   

Just like Dad

I'm allowed to post this now that Father's Day is over. It's an illustration I did for a client who has an adorable little boy who wants to be just like his dad!

Happy Mother's Day 2013!

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there, but especially my own. My mom is one of my best friends and I can't wait to be road tripping home with her this summer. This year she requested a cat picture, so I did a color sketch of a line drawing I did while observing some of the Savannah cats. Happy Mother's Day mom!

Also, be sure to pick up a copy of my new animated e-book "The Pick-up Princess" available now! animatedchildren.biz

Backgrounds Before Swine

These are the backgrounds for the short pig themed film I'm creating in my 2D production class. I like to play with the flatness of things and experiment with hard shapes that maybe aren't so literal. I'm pretty happy with how these turned out. Backgrounds aren't my speciality, but I really want to get better at them. They just define so much of a film's tone.

The Pick Up Princess! Coming Soon!

Yesterday I was given the second beta test of the upcoming animated children's e-book "The Pick-up Princess"! So far there is still no release date, but here is what Frank Ayars of Ayars Animation sent me:

 "I will try to make the bug fixes soon. At some point we willl have a viable release candidate and we will release it to Apple. It will take about two weeks for Apple to approve the binary - assuming no rejections." 

So it's going to be a little later than expected, but we're definitely close to the finish line! I'll keep you upated as things progress. Stay tuned! 

Baby Tooth

A sketch of Baby Tooth from Rise of the Guardians. She was one of my favorite designs in that film!

Princess Update

8 scenes down and 6 to go! The team is really starting to cruise through coloring. On top of working on the book, I did some experimenting with Toon Boom puppets. It's certainly different from Flash, but not in a bad way. Working with the new software was a lot easier and more intuitive than I expected. I'm definitely going to have to play around with it a bit more to see what I can accomplish with it.