Marriage

Today I am marrying the most amazing woman, Angela Schuh. I met Angela last July, and we fell in love. I look forward to spending the rest of my life with Angela, doing everything I can to make her the happiest woman on Earth. Thank you in advance to all our friends and family who attended, and to all who couldn't come, but sent their best wishes.

I love you Angela.

Rachael Loehr

Hello everyone. I've been very busy working on many different projects lately. One of them was the Rachael Loehr Fundraiser at my church. Rachael suffers from heart disease, and we are raising money for her, and her family. There are all kinds of costs involved in getting to Seattle where they'll do the operation, when a donor is found. If you want to hear Rachaels story in her own words, you can find it here. Go about 40 minutes into the video, the interview with Rachael is about 12 minutes long. I warn you though, it's an emotional story. She shared it with us on Sunday. She's a courageous young woman, and her faith is very strong.

One of the events the church is hosting is a pirate night where the kids and adults who act like kids dress up like pirates and watch a movie and eat a spaghetti dinner. It should be a lot of fun. I donated artwork for T-shirts they'll be selling there, I've done a lot of vector art in the last year and so I was able to convert my pencil sketches very quickly. Here is the T-shirt design:


If you'd like to order a tshirt, you can find an order form here. If that link doesn't work for you, send me an email, and I'll email you the file.

I had a lot of fun working on this project. It's very fulfilling to work on something like this, where your artwork helps people who really need it, and you get to do God's work rather than just work to make a buck. Iris Wellman was basically the art director for this job. It was a delight to work with a client who trusts in my creativity, and can make command decisions. Here is my pencil sketch:


I took the same art and re purposed it again to make posters they could sell at the pirate night along with the T-shirts. I've been working on this style for a few months now, sort of a 2D/3D look. I've got a couple of ideas on how to use it in animation, and also in a book project. Here is the poster artwork:


So that's just one of the many projects I've been so busy with. That's why I haven't been blogging much.
As I finish up the other projects I'll post them here. Thanks for stopping by. -- Ryan

Snow

A little late, but here are the follow up snow pictures. We ended up getting much more snow than these pictures reflect. They were taken on December 21, 2008, at that time we had about 7 inches here at Lucia Falls. We ended up getting about 19 inches total. This was the most snowfall in December ever in our area. It was truly beautiful. It's all melting now, which is okay, because it really does put everything at a stand still, since we so rarely get snow accumulation on the valley floor. Out here where I live we're used to snow, but not this much. Everyone is going back to work now, and things are returning to normal.

These pictures were taken with an Canon Powershot A460 which I borrowed from Angela. My apologies for the size of the animated gif, it's 2 meg. I couldn't make the physical size any smaller, as that would have made it impossible to see what was going on. If people are having issues playing it, I'll seperate the frames into 3 different animated gifs, that should help. Let me know. -- Ryan

Snowstorm

These pictures were taken on my birthday December 17th, 2008. It snowed all day, and as snowed every day since. I'll try to get some more pictures taken and posted this weekend. We're supposed to get another big storm tomorrow.

Silverlight Animation

This animated gif is created from the vector art I created for Jeff Paries book on Silverlight2. If you recall, I posted my pencil sketch for this back in July. Here it is again below:


I've already been informed that monkeys do indeed have tails, and I have added a tail in the pencil test, but haven't had time to do so in the vector art version. While this animation is not perfect, Jeff tells me it is the first character animation, and walk cycle done in Silverlight, and that he's already had people asking him about it. To which he replies, "Buy my book! It's all in there."

Silverlight 2 Animation (Foundation) Released

Here's some good news: Silverlight 2 Animation (Foundation) has been released! It is now for sale on Amazon.

I created the vector graphics used in the projects inside the book(No, I did not create the cover image). It was a challenging project, as I don't have as much experience with vector graphics, and hadn't worked in Illustrator that much. But it was also a fun project, and I got to create some cool stuff while learning a whole lot.

Silverlight is a very powerful tool, a useful alternative to Flash for creating digital media for the web.

I don't have cover credit, but my name and url are inside, and I'm hoping it will generate some more freelance work. Especially since I've already spent the money from this job!

Wall Street Lemmings

Wall Street Lemmings have been wreaking havoc again. I had this idea a week or two ago, but didn't sketch it out. I have very little spare time anymore, but I made time to draw this one. They've (WSL) ruined the retirement plans of so many people. Personally, I'm never going to retire. I've known that for years. One of the fringe benefits of being an artist is you never make enough money to retire. 8 )

As for me, I'm going to concentrate on storing up treasures in heaven. Try and lighten up folks, it's only money. Enjoy your life.