I thought it might behoove me to grow up a bit and stop sending out grab bags of miscellaneous clips to those who inquired about my animation samples. So I present you with the first-ever Sledd Studios Animation Demo Reel. Enjoy.
Credits: Virtually every single aspect of this reel, right down to the soundtrack, was created here at Sledd Studios. The one exception being the stock model of a desktop computer that shows up a few times starting around the 1-minute mark, and I’ve got my eye on him. Love it or hate it, I take the blame.
Welcome to Sledd Webb v. 4.0, the latest (and I mean that in more ways than one) incarnation of the online presence of Sledd Studios, your one-stop-shop for retro-futuristic and high-tech digital illustration.
This new site was designed with one thing in mind—simplicity. If you are here, it is most-likely because you either want to see my artwork and/or need to contact me. Well no more looking around for either, my friend. If what you need isn’t right here in front of you from the get-go, it is but a click or two away. Oh yeah and did I mention that you get bigger artwork this time around? ’tis true!
So poke around, have fun and drop me a line if you have a question or find something interesting.
Sledd Studios' primary export! Stylized digital artwork that contains a generous mix of 3D rendering and traditional 2D pixel-pushing, with loads of graphic "pop."
Travel to outerspace via cyberspace on rockets piloted by robots, or play games on the highest-tech gadgets with the fastest internet access—or maybe just look at pictures about those things—because that's really all I have to offer.
A motley collection of product illustration, infographics, textbook illustration and other bits and pieces that, for one reason or another, I decided not to include in the main illustration section.
Sometimes these reasons might be obvious, sometimes not. All that matters is that, in this realm, I am King—and the King need not justify himself to anyone.
So this little gal (I think) seems to have taken a shining to me. She used to be a tad more shy, but apparently sees me as easy pickin’s now. And man does my phone record crappy video. May have to make a new version at some point where I don’t bounce around so much.
It’s no secret. I like comics. I have flirted with comic-esque stylings in my artwork since pretty much day one. Not too horribly long ago, however, I decided it was time to get a bit more serious than my typical coquetry could afford.
As a digital artist, whose first line of offense are 3D apps (Cinema 4D and Modo), my two primary concerns were speed and style. The speed part was the primary hurdle, since 3D artwork just takes a fair amount of time. Not that non-3D art doesn’t, but the bulk of work in 3D is essentially a huge amount of “prep” work before you can begin creating anything resembling “art.”
Style wasn’t as much of an issue since I wanted to retain most of my existing look, but I wanted to imbue it with a similar warmth and grit found in some of my favorite graphic novel works. Some trickery needed to be implemented in order to combine the two.
So off and on over the past couple of years, I have been working on a number of techniques and habits which I could apply to my existing style to give it said warmth and grit, while not deviating too much from my existing workflow. The hope being that I would not only wind up developing a viable practical solution for storytelling, but also add a few extra flavors to my usual editorial and advertising fare.
I have been sneaking a few of these tricks into jobs for a while now, but have recently begun production on a project which finally brings all of this R&D to bear, and I thought I’d share. I have added some samples to my portfolio for your perusal and, with any luck, your enjoyment. Keep your eyes open for future updates and I’ll see you next time.
Just a quick little update to inform everyone that I recently signed on with stockillustrations.com in the UK to broker my stock deals. Although I’ve offered stock rights for years to those who asked, I decided to finally make it formal and pick a company to handle it.
At the moment, I’ve only uploaded a few pieces but I’ll be adding to it as time allows. I’m known as John 00424 (yes, I’m either an android or a clone, not sure which) and you can find my stuff here:
Feel free to continue to contact me personally for these transactions, especially if you need the pieces customized in some way, but if you just want to get in, drop a credit card number, grab your art and get out, give these guys a shot.
Sledd Webb is currently perpetually undergoing an upgrade. Everything *should* be working more-or-less but you may run into some minor visual glitches until everything is ironed out.
OK. So no new Life in the Bighouse episode last week. I’ve been a bit busy. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the comic has it’s own website now, so all past and future strips can be found at http://www.lifeinthebighouse.com.
I’m going to try to knock out two episodes this week but we’ll see how that works out. In the meantime, if you’re interesting in reading and getting updated on new episodes, feel free to register at the new site. I could probably migrate you all to the new list but you may not care about it…so I won’t.
During the process of setting up an auto-notification for subscribers to Sledd Webb, I discovered that all of my email forwarders had gone poof at some point in time between today and last September. Among these forwarders was the info@sledd.com address that is used by the mailto link on my site.
So if you have attempted to contact me via this link, I apologize. The snubbing was unintentional.
On February 13, 2004, Sledd Studios said “goodbye” to longtime foodwarmer and friend, Mike, the Sledd Studios microwave oven. “Although it was a big surprise at the time,” says Mike’s best friend and employer, John Sledd, “he really was getting up there in age. We should have seen it coming.”
Mike was a microwave of the old school. Sporting a dial instead of a keypad, he responded with a single, lively, bell-spawned “DING” at the end of his cooking cycle, instead of the more obnoxious and repetitive “beep beep beep”s of his more contemporary colleagues.
“Mike simply stopped working one day while defrosting a group of Cod fillets” says Sledd. “One minute he was there, humming along as usual and then there was just silence. It was so eerie how there was still time left on his dial but nothing was happening.”
“Mike will be missed” said Sledd. “I will never be able to look at another bag of popcorn the same way.”
Hey John, Once again you amaze us!!! Thank you so much for cranking this out so fast. We really appreciate your time and talent!! — Sally DeFlumere, Electronic House Publishing
