A really cool gift!

Haha! Someone actually made this for me as a graduation present! It was completely unexpected! Man, extremely cool that they thought of me! This is the second Toothless cake ever made for me, so that is pretty cool!

Dragon Journal pages 5-6

Next journal pages! These pages are dedicated to Toothless's head, both its anatomy and its range of expressions. Hope you like it. Honestly, I am considering expanding this page sometime in the future, because two pages simply are not enough to capture all the properties of his head and his expressions! As usual, the image is in full HD, so if you open it in a new window, you should get to see the details. If you want to read it, there is a translation key several journal entries back. Thanks for looking!

How To Train Your Dragon! My favorite movie of all time...why? Entry 9

Alright, sadly we must now move away from the real "heart issues" of HTTYD. Those were tons of fun to write, but I think I have expressed all of them that I can think of to the best of my ability. Still, a great story needs a great medium to flow through. I scratched the surface of this in my fifth entry, but I am coming back to it now. One of the reasons HTTYD is such a great movie is the visuals. As if the story was not beautiful enough on its own, DreamWorks used their amazingly talented artists and technicians to make the look of the movie every bit as beautiful as the heart of the film itself.

First off, I already have mentioned that it was filmed like a live action movie. In entry five, though, I was mostly referring to the plot and physics. In these next entries, I am referring to gorgeous lighting, texturing, animation, voice acting, camera work, and soundtrack. All of these facets of the movie contributed highly, and they made the amazing plot into an incredibly beautiful, pleasant, and gripping experience. 

My first filmography based entry....the LIGHTING! Good grief this movie had the most splendid lighting! Roger Deakins intentionally made the lighting highly realistic. Each day, the light is slightly different. You have certain days where it is overcast and others where it is brilliantly sunny. The surfaces absorbed these different lights, and it gave the movie an incredibly realistic and pretty look! Some scenes are dark because they would realistically be dark. The scene where Stoick rejects Hiccup is a great example. Light comes only from the door. This leaves characters faces often in the dark, but man the realism and terror given off by just that simple minimalistic lighting is brilliant! The light in the movie bounced into the environments and brings them to life. The ocean, the cove, the dragon arena, the romantic flight, all these scenes are brought to life by the simple beauty of light. You have sunsets, you have moonlight, you even get the aurora borealis! The different lights used in different times really helped this movie feel like you could stand up and walk right in. This was a perfect mix of semi realistic shapes, astonishing texturing, and gorgeously convincing light. I will deal with those former two later, but for now, I would highly encourage any of you reading this to appreciate the simple beauty of the light in HTTYD. Look how it bounces off Toothless, watch the glint off of Astrid's axe, and appreciate the intense look of the dragon mound. The lighting in this movie was one of the many things that drew me in and made me love it! 

Digital Painting of HTTYD 2 Hiccup

So, after about 12 hours of work, I have finally finished my digital painting! This is Hiccup in his aged, HTTYD 2 version! His costume is pretty complicated, and the images I have seen of it have been vague, so my painting is probably not completely accurate. This image is HUGE! Please open it in a new window in order to see it fully. I really hope you like this. Doing people is challenging for me, and I have a difficult time making digital paintings look good. Please enjoy it, and feel free to comment! Looking forward to HTTYD 2!!

HTTYD pet PEEVE! Number 1

Know one knows how it happened, but sometime in the dark, rough, and dangerous path of production, Toothless was advertised as being blue, and ever since the blue Toothless has remained to haunt my life! I can't stand him being portrayed as blue! He is CLEARLY black in the film! Yes, in certain lighting he can have a bluish tint, but he is still black in natural lighting. In certain scenes he looks grey, but do people tell me he is grey? NO! They just ask me why he is portrayed in advertisements as being blue.

True story. I walked up to the shop of the Arena Spectacular (you have no idea how excited I was), and I began to point out the objects on the shelf I wanted to purchase. I pointed to the Toothless plush and said, "Can I have the Night Fury plush?" She responds, "Which one is that." I try and ignore her ignorance and naturally say, "The back one." She turns around looks at it and says, "It's blue." I was seriously tempted to ask her to step aside and let me hand out the merchandise!!! Yes the plush was very dark blue, but there was a bright blue Nadder sitting right next to it. I am glad to see that the adds for Riders of Berk, the toys for Defenders of Berk, and even the promotional images for the second movie have displayed Toothless in his proper color, deepest black! I know it is a little thing, but it ticks me off severely! I've watched that movie more than 75 times, and through at least half of those I've focused on every detail of that beautiful dragon. So when vendors tell me that I should wise up and notice that the plush is blue not black, I feel at least slightly justified in my annoyance! 

Update

Ok, to those of you who are following, first off, thank you! Secondly, I am here to explain the sudden lull in posts. I am working on a digital painting. It is quite large, and hopefully when I am done, it will be well worth the time I have put into it! Check back in a couple of days, and hopefully I will have completed it. Thank you very much for following!

Night Fury Graphite

This is one of my older drawings. It was actually the first one I did using the parchment colored paper. I used graphite pencils to shade. Unfortunately it is really reflective, so getting a good photograph was difficult. I actually was copying an image from The Art of How To Train Your Dragon which is an amazing book! Hope you like the drawing! Sorry I could not get a better picture. It looks a little nicer in person.