Crash Power

Howdy! Gettin' caught up

Hope this finds you well. Man it has been a crazy few weeks and the activity is keeping me from being creative as has been the story as of late. But I do my best to squeeze something out of small opportunities that present themselves. Here are a few samples of what I've done in class recently. 

A student asked for a mustache man design demo so I did this and took it to the profile rotation pose.

This little munchkin is based upon a design that another student was working on. I modified the concept and showed him how to draw a 5 pose full body rotation.  

From tonight a student suggested I come up with a hipster gecko type character and this is the initial sketch. Simple and effective plus he learned from it. 

It's always fun to come up with characters and I do enjoy doodling. Added my school's logo since that's the context by which they came to be. I'd like to mention that I've initiated Distance Learning at my school. It's working out great. I have a few students from around the US who are taking the Character Design class I teach. If you're interested let me know. Thanks for coming to my blog and good luck to you!.

Marker Board Notes etc

Sometimes creative productivity comes in different ways. When there's not enough time to do art I can fall back on some of the lectures I give at my school. In this case I shot photos of some of my marker board notes from the other night in the Character Design class. The images on the board transform as I progress through the lecture. This is what I wound up with at the end. The images at the bottom corners of the first one come from students who like to have fun. I respect the drawings they do and worked around their sketches.

Here's a couple of extra sketches I was able to bang out. The first is from helping a student with their concept development work. The image at the lower right is his initial drawing. The others are what I did to give him some direction as to where he could go with the idea. The last drawing is from Visual Development while sketching with the class.

Crash Bandicoot on Facebook

The Crash fans who visit here might be interested to know about a relatively new Facebook site administered by Matt Wallace that focuses on some of the aspects of the history of Crash. In particular the story... or rather the untold story ... of my buddy David Siller who was the original producer of the very first Crash Bandicoot game. David never got the real credit he justly deserved as far as his contributions to the creation of Crash and they were significant. Joe Pearson the genius behind the creation of Crash from the Willy the Wombat days also participates on the site. 

I know what David did for the project back in the day when it was being developed. I was there and witnessed it for myself. So head on over to Crash Bandicoot The Untold Story on Facebook and interact with David and Joe and Matt and the rest of the Crash fans who hang out there. You'll learn new things plus it's a great Bandicoot based community to be involved with!

20 Years of Crash

2016 - Year of the Bandicoot

Starting off 2016

Happy New Year !! Hope you're doing well and had a good time. Things revved up over here this past week and my school got back in gear. So it's given me a chance to do some drawing again. 

This is from last year when I was working up the Alien Girlfriend theme in class. I was in the process of coloring it but couldn't keep the momentum going when time became a factor. Anyway here's the drawing...

The following are demos from time spent with new students. Simple lessons to start Character Design 1. The last one I mocked up as a little promo for my school.

Thanks for checking in and wishing you a great year ahead!

Burbank California on Christmas Day 2015

Hey everyone I'm checking in to say hello and wish you a belated Merry Christmas and a not belated Happy New Year! Thank you for continuing to frequent my blog even though I haven't posted anything lately. Been very busy and sometimes I get caught up in some crazy stuff that leads me away from creativity. Temporarily that is.

Anyway I hope everything is going great in your life. I'd like to share this video with you. It's from Christmas Day. I went to the roof of the building I operate from to record what Burbank looked like on Christmas Day in the afternoon. The audio is from a local radio station that plays classical music (KUSC.org). The tune is what was playing at the time on the airwaves. So both the audio and the visuals were a moment that's been captured for all to experience.

Wishing you the very very best that life has to offer in the coming New Year and beyond! 

Charles Zembillas

Another Alien Girl

Having fun drawing as a student in class at my own school. This is the continuation of the assignment I was working on from the theme established at the previous session. On the left is the initial red line concept sketch and on the right the same image but with black line and some shading.

Alien Girls

Still on a breather from authoring my character design book. Meantime the staff of instructors at my school are doing so well I thought I might take a class with them. Here's what I did in session this week for the assignment we were given based upon the evening's lecture. First sketching I've done in a while.