Nikita... My Man.

Are you coming?..

Autumn...

Well, there you go. I think, summer, it was here just yesterday... But it's gone. So quick, as usual. It's autumn now. And I saw some snow up in the mountains already. Jeez... Time is running.  

I wanna say Big Thanks! to my buddy Jesse for taking us (me and my son Nikita) out for plain air painting today. That was fun :) 

We went down to Barnet Marine Park. OK, we're all set up... 5 minutes of painting and it started raining a little. It was good for a minute, because I got some nice rainy texture on my paper. Then, the rain went down harder and had just washed away my water color in 30 seconds. Same happened to my son's marker drawing. Poor little kid got so upset so he walked away into that green little field and was seating on the grass over there right under the rain. Well, we packed our stuff back up and drove back home to get the paintings finished by memory. Nikita did another nice drawing right on top of a very cool rainy wash-out. 

Jesse's wife joined us later. The fire place was on. And a glass of white chocolate port for the big guys and chicken soup for the little one helped out to finish the day on a good note... 

Cheers...

B.

Once Upon A Time In America...

Once upon a time I did this book jacket for a famous gangster saga "Once Upon A Time In America", for a Russian publishing house. Water color.

Gooooood Mooorning!..

Italiano...

Gooood Morning!..

Something fresh...

Here I am, got some fresh sketches here.
- my son Nikita
- and a little bit of watercolor again -- the portrait is just a warm-up, popped out of my head -- imagination... The landscape is based on another sketch I did recently while canoeing on a lake.

Ovi — 8

If you like hockey, you know this great player, crazy number 8 — Alex Ovechkin.

A lil' bit of a fresh stuff...

Raging Bull is coming along...

There you go, a little update on the Ice Rage stuff.

John did a nice job again :)

We've got new guys who are helping with the modeling process now. Welcome on board friends!

It is coming along...

Ice Rage. In Progress...

Hi everyone! Here we go, we've been busy making this Crazy Rooster's sculpture. Thanks to John Silander, good job! Now, can't wait to get it modeled in 3D. Our next collaborator is Tracey Hayes. Thanks Tracey! Meanwhile, John's working on one of the Bulls. Exiting!..
More pictures [here]

ICE RAGE: we're looking for collaboration!

Hey, Super Guys out there!
Here is the deal. We'd pitched this "Ice Rage" concept (click it) into the network about 10 months ago... And we've got lots of very cool and supportive feedbacks from different guys, including credited animation professionals, hockey journalists/TV-hosts, NHL media-executives and players, artists, designers etc. We (my partner Andrey Brotzky and myself) wanna get a CGI animation test done (45-60-90 sec?), and are going to find a few Cool-Talents-Crazy-About-Hockey volunteers to set a Team up. So if there're some of you interested in participating, who are preferably live in/around Vancouver, BC and very good at:
– rigging, modeling
– texturing, lighting, comping
– animation
– sound, music
– editing
send us your e-mails to boris[at]andreev[dot]ca, with your CVs, portfolios attached . We can't wait to discuss the matter with you now.

As soon as the test animation's done, we're gonna use it as a second step in pitching the project. All committed collaborators are to be credited in the final pitch. You could use the pitch as a promo of yourself (as a part of the team). What ever happens afterwards, any serious deal appears... we'd like to negotiate it with you later.

Well, feel free to contact me what ever you feel you wanna say. Just let's make a very cool Canadian hockey-animation happen! Finally...

Techno doodle...

Well, I don't know... it's a bio-futuro-tech-something...

How about a pint of beer?..

WoooShooo Bird....

Well, again, it's all started with a few "warm ups"— speed calligraphy lines.
And then,.. something had just clicked in my head...

Same technique...

Hey there!
Here is the same stuff -- Corel Painter and it's cloning/painting trick. Just couldn't stand it :) This technique is kinda fun. If you use it smart, it'll give you some sort of feeling that you are a real Painter :o) Haha...

Creating a Chalk Underpainting...

Hello Patrick and everyone! As promised, I'll show how to get that effect you can see below at the "Here we are..." post. So, first, you'll need Corel Painter on your computer. Then, visit this link, please, http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/ca/en/Content/1170190221936 and watch the video named "Creating the Chalk Underpainting". Using this technique and some very basic painting skills, you will get something like this:
Then, what I've done, I created another layer at the very bottom and did one more underpainting using one of the oil brushes. What Painter does, it delivers all these oily bumps through the whole bunch of layers up to the very top one. So here we go:
Hmmm... Not very impressive, eh? :) I did it very fast. It could be done better, sure thing. But, anyways, even this messy underpainting does its' work in this case. So, having these two layers done, you'll get this:
The last touch, if you want to add some fine details quickly. What I did, I just put the original photo image in between, applied a mask on the top Chalk Underpainting layer. I just slightly revealed a few "important" spots.
That's it!

It's fast and pretty fun to do.

Best regards,
Boris

Kids...

Hi there!
Here's a little update, a couple of sketches I did today.

My son, he has lost his first tooth. And, sure thing, he is very excited about this fact.

Here we are...