It's Autumn!

Oh look, I carved a pumpkin. Is it a velociraptor or a retarded face?



Here's some mooseboy

MB_KnifeIn from Christopher Ybarra on Vimeo.

MB_KnifeOut from Christopher Ybarra on Vimeo.

Halloweenery

So it should be noted,
Dinosaurs don't make particularly good waiters, partially due to poor hearing and the inability to speak. Their skin smells like cheap latex too...


However, they'd probably wouldn't take crap from customers.




Mooseboy animatic is almost done! Really getting stoked to animate some man on moose action.



But I digress, this past month I've been attempting to read some scary novels after coming across a copy of Coraline (the book) at a local goodwill. Must say, the illustrations by Dave Mckean are fun to look at and the story will give you the creeps with some of the imagery.

After finishing that I figured I'd dive into something a little more sophisticated with the Phantom of the Opera~ til next time, Happy Halloween!

Life Drawerings from Tina's Animal wildlife drawing class!

Dang

And I told myself I'd take this blogging thing more seriously, shame on me! *Smacks wrist*
Here're some doodles inbetween breaks on Mooseboy, shots to come shortly

Panera Sketching 6/6

I've come to realize the majority of my cafe' sketching is starting to take place at Panera's. Damn, why does bread have to be so accessible? Regardless their free refill coffee and Mediterranean sandwiches are reason alone to go.

Visited my friend Krys down in Aliso Viejo, it seems busier than the one closer to my house and the people seem friendlier...unfortunately its about an hour drive away.

What's Wushu? Isn't that just Kung Fu?

It didn't occur to me until the other day that I haven't exactly discussed what wushu is...

The terms Kung Fu (Gong Fu for you hard-core Chinese culture enthusiasts) and WuShu seem to be used loosely and the only clear difference in literal meaning.

Kung Fu - Achievement gained through work; Skill gained through training.
WuShu - martial art.

Kung Fu today will 98% of the time refer to traditional Chinese martial art styles (Hung Gar, Northern Shaolin Kung Fu, Taichi, traditional animal forms, etc...)

Wushu, today, will 95% of the time refer to the practice of contemporary(modern) Chinese martial arts in a performance sport (Long Fist, Southern Fist, weapon forms, etc...)

However, Kung Fu can still be referred to as being in part of WuShu because Wu Shu styles are heavily rooted in traditional Kung Fu forms, and visa versa because traditional Kung Fu forms can be competed in WuShu competition. In a way there is a very yinyang relationship between Kung Fu and WuShu, they're two parts of the whole that is Chinese martial arts and still have a little bit of each other within one another.

Most people however just see Kung Fu as what you learn to defend yourself and what Bruce Lee did, and WuShu as martial dancing and what Jet Li did.

There are different ways to divide the styles of WuShu and Kung Fu, all you Avatards will remember Sifu Kisu giving his little shorts on Nickelodeon on how he based firebending on Shaolin Kung Fu and waterbending on TaiChi, he gives a pretty decent basic run down.

Northern Chinese martial arts tend to emphasize long extended strikes, jumping techniques, speed and agility. I've heard different reasons why this is, one being that it gets so cold in northern China that they need to exercise their whole body to keep warm. Another reason I've heard was that because of the wide open geographical regions it was nesessary to learn how to cover great distances and how to fight long ranged combat with empty handed styles. Northern Shaolin kung fu and Long Fist(ChangQuan) are the dominant styles in Northern Chinese martial arts.

Southern Chinese martial arts tend to emphasize the upper body, strong stances, and compact strikes. This is because its warmer in southern China, warmer climate, more people. More people, more cities and towns require less space to fight. Styles like Hung Gar, Wing Chun, Southern Fist are some of the more popular styles of southern Chinese Martial arts.

I think I just had an apostrophe...

Here are some of the more finer sketches from the last week a mixture from going to the block and camping out at a local Panera's. Really trying to focus on getting looser and more efficient with line use.

And recently I picked up a Gnomon Workshop dvd that teaches how to characterize and sketch the human head, definitely a lot more fun than being stuck in realistic proportions. Always been a little scared to venture out of it but now not so much. So with the one last sheet of drawing paper from last semester's life drawing class I drew an something of a caricature of James Hook.

Skateboarders are really fun to draw, but quite difficult if the mechanics aren't understood. Unfortunately without the ability to stop time a lot of physical activities become difficult to draw. For instance I've tried drawing soccer players and noticed its very difficult unless you've actually learned how to handle the ball properly. On the other hand martial arts poses are a lot easier to draw because I just started wushu/kung fu about two years ago and have had the body mechanics of kicks, punches, and jumps broken down for me along with practice.

It kind of raises an issue with me, how is someone to become a successful animator, illustrator, or artist in general if they only draw what they are looking at and not what is seen? If a studio a large studio needs to put out a scene that involves another art form such as dancing, martial arts, or even sports they usual give the artists a break down of the basic techniques so it looks fundamentally correct on screen. For instance, Avatar: The Last Airbender had kung fu consultation, Happy Feet had professional tap dancers doing motion capture, and in the upcoming Toy Story 3 Spanish dancing fundamentals are given to the animators to give Buzz and Jesse a more authentic dancing scene.

Toy Story 3 Spanish Dancing

Personally though I don't think art students are being pushed enough to explore different art forms. The more I explore different arts the more I'm starting to notice that there are no real differences between the fine, performance, musical, and martial arts. Basic shapes are no different from basic steps, chords, or stances. Strong fundamentals seem to make for great aesthetics, or at least as far as I know...which is still relatively little.

It seems that aesthetics aren't being valued as much as they should though, posted are two examples of wushu forms.

Nandu, an advanced division of wushu focuses on doing the most difficult movements possible. It really draws a crowd because most of the stunts done usually by film characters like Raymond Park's characters Darth Maul and Snake Eyes. It's more of an athletic display, and that's where it really suffers because this seems to be where a lot of wushu practitioners stop treating wushu as a martial art and it becomes solely a competitive sport. Take notice that most competitor's forms overuse front slap kicks and hammer fists along with a ridiculous amount of posing. Here's one example of that. Sure it looks cool and bad-ass at first but after only two years of doing wushu seeing forms like these bore the hell out of me. It becomes a display of physical capability than a competition of artistic creativity because the athletes make their own form in the advanced levels.

Take this routine for example, a lot of the movements are reused over and over but the combos (which are separated by pauses) are well proportional to each other in length. Long combo followed by short followed by long and so on. It's to be noted that proportion is a principle of design in the fine arts, and that that the less variation the proportions of (in this case) combo length the more stale it becomes. If I could draw this routine it would be a lot of circular shapes that vary nicely compared to one another.

Here's another nandu form, mistakes and multiple usage of hammer fists aside, its much more appealing because the movements have much more variety. The combos contrast a lot more too, perhaps a little too much if one movement can be called a combo. If I could draw this routine it would be a lot of different shapes, some incredibly large and some barely visible.

I'm starting to appreciate the older forms a lot more than the ones now. The movements are a lot more intricate. If this form was a drawing it would be much more variation in shape and colors than the other two, but the contrast in proportions would be a bit more subtle.

This being said I just wish a little more creativity would be put in the majority of personal forms. Similar combos are being used when they have complete creative freedom when making their forms.

Most art students get the fundamentals crammed down their throats so its a little difficult to compare what is tending to happen between wushu and art now. But if I had to it would be like back in high school when everyone was trying to imitate an anime style (which is best compared to a disease) and everyone's art was starting to look the same.

That being said I am still learning a lot about what makes art 'beautiful' or 'ugly', and a lot of what I just wrote is just a current view on wushu forms from what I know using principles of fine arts.

On another note I saw the Prince of Persia this past weekend.

Fun movie with a lot of action film cliche's, definitely worth watching, especially if you play video games. Still just intrigues me why Disney, of all companies, decided to make a video game movie. After all, they tend to have a notoriety of...well, not being good (Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, Tomb Raider) I won't go into cultural accuracy only because I haven't studied a lot of it, but the one thing that bothered me about it was the way some of the Persians were portrayed as was similar to the Immortals from the movie 300. Kinda makes me wonder if ancient Persians will be portrayed as anything else other than pale and scarred sub mutants with superior human strength and agility. All for the sake of entertainment I suppose.

First Post

Just recently started picking up the habit of drawing every day, whether it be cafe' sketching, imaginary illustration, or animation tests. No body's probably gonna look at this blog for a while so I'll skip the art posting this week but next week there will definitely be stuff.

So I guess an intro is in order.
My name's Christopher Trevor Ybarra, I'm an art major at CSU Fullerton and currently dwelling with my family in the quaint little town of Whittier, CA. I work at a boba tea house called Guppy's as a waiter. There's not much to me other than that other than my enjoyment of kung fu, skydiving, archery, swing dancing, and adventures in general.