Monday, August 12, 2013

Doodle: Erwin Schrodinger's 126th Birthday



Erwin Schrodinger was a physicist, most people know him by his theory called "Schrodinger's Cat".  I am one of those people, and having never taken a physics class, I knew absolutely nothing beyond that!   Not wanting to run the risk of writing math/physics gobbledy gook, I consulted someone at Google who knew physics (about 99% of the company), who explained to me the meaning behind Shrodinger's cat.  My first pass at a reference sheet looked like this:

My attempts to explain quantum physics failed spectacularly.

Not a lot of understandable material for me to work with, but a start!  After some more back and forth between the physics consultant and the doodle team, I came up with a solution that was fun, creative, and informed by actual knowledge without alienating people who knew physics and people who didn't.  This is the sketch:

It looks like the cat is farting, so I knew I had to move it around a lot...

The next challenge was, how do I stylize this?  What's the artistic and stylistic inspiration behind the visuals?  I don't like making uninformed design decisions, so I did some more research.  Since "Schrodinger's Cat" is a term used to explain something very complicated theory in quantum physics, it made me think of how very complicated things are explained in children's science books.  I looked up some graphics from some old science books and really liked the graphic treatment and fun illustrations and decided to use that as a starting point.  If you look carefully, you can probably see how I selectively stole from my reference to create the final image:


Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Motivarti Fall 2013

Hey everyone, I'm going to be a mentor for Motivarti.org 's Fall 2013 curriculum.  If you'd like me to be your mentor, apply at their website by July 24th!  Click on the image for more details:


Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Roswell Doodle BG paintings

Here are the backgrounds I did for the July 8th Roswell's 66th anniversary doodle game.  Play the game here!





Some sketches done beforehand, exploring a limited palette and a certain soft/graphite stylization:


We compiled a reference board first before drawing anything.  I consider this one of the most important steps, but many often skip it in their haste to start a beautiful painting.  The board clearly shows what we have in mind with reference from real life and pre-existing media:


Wednesday, July 03, 2013

Google Doodles (April-July 2013)

Hi everyone, it's been a while since my last post!  I started working at Google as a "doodler" in April, here are the doodles I've done so far:


Valdimir Durov's Birthday


Franz Kafka


RCMP's Anniversary


Gustaf De Leval's Birthday


Satyajit Ray's Birthday


St. George's Day

Friday, February 01, 2013

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Pixar's Newt (2008-2009)

Oops, I had to remove some of those images, sorry about that!  Here are the paintings I did that are on the Pixar facebook page.









Newt Images © Disney/Pixar

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Pixar's La Luna short (2011)

Oh hey, some actual work!
I did a few paintings for a Pixar short released in 2011 with Brave:




La Luna Images © Disney/Pixar