Geeking out about Ryan Woodward

So Ryan Woodward is pretty much one of my heroes.  He's a professor in the animation department here at BYU; chances are you've seen his conte animated video Thought of You, done in collaboration with the dance department.  Maybe it even made you cry.  I dunno, just saying, it could happen. But as a fan of both animation and dance, I fell in love with it.  I love the style, I love the music.  For some reason I tend to like sketches and stylized drawings much more than "polished" images, and Ryan's art is some of my favorite.  I think I can safely say that my whole gesture-drawing style changed after seeing his work.
And now there's another neat video for me to geek out over!  Bottom of the Ninth is an animated graphic novel coming out soon for the iPad.  I'm intrigued by the things people come up with when they combine art and new technology.  I think especially with graphic novels people are able to pull of a lot of quirky and creative things, and this is pretty great.  It's so cool to realize that you're seeing a new medium come to life and soon everybody can try to make art this way, and create within this new framework.  So I'm excited by both the style and the idea.

This one time I flew to California

I spent a while today googling illustrators and concept artists that people have told me about lately and adding their blogs to a watchlist.  This is called Putting the Plan Into Action.  The plan is to keep up with art trends and be inspired so that I can one day become a Famous Artist.  I began to realize something that would seem to make complete sense but I had never really noticed it before: I love looking at art.  Particularly really good illustration.  Why haven't I tried this before??

In other news:

Last month I skipped school for a week to go on a field trip with the illustration department to L.A.  It was incredible.  We visited Disney studios and Dreamworks and Sony Animation and a few video game studios, and several artists who do gallery shows and paintings for a living.  We also played frisbee on the beach, in mid-March, with dolphins swimming just offshore and I felt like I was in a heartwarming teen summer film.

I haven't yet organized the roughly two zillion photos I took yet, but here is a selection from my sketchbook:

The main thing that struck me about LA was the excessive variety of palm trees.

One of the artists we visited, Ken Bishop, lived three blocks from the beach.  And he had sweet boots.

Moonrise from the Santa Monica Pier.  Pen and ink doesn't do it justice.

Not from life, but hey.