CGHUB - The Social Network for Professionals in Entertainment

 
I just recently came across CGHUB and have been hooked since my first visit to the site. Basically, it's deviantART without the 13 year old anime fangirls clogging up the feed with their really quite terrible "artwork." This is a place where you can really find talented individuals with an eye for creature and character design. The majority of the work posted on the site is digital, both 2D and 3D, but you can still find traditional artwork on the site. I have found profiles of concept artists who post some of their work for films that have recently come out, like Pacific Rim, The Hobbit, and others.

If you have an account, you can post your own illustrations for the world to see, as well as comment, like, share, and favorite other people's work, and subscribe and follow different artists whose collection of work you would like to revisit in the future. When posting new works, you can ask other members of the site to critique your work. It's a helpful tool because better artists than you man stumble across your image and give you just the advice you needed. 

On the home page, the Editors Picks are featured at the top (a collection of really superb works of art), and below them are a collage of "Popular Now" works of different sizes, showcasing a variety of styles and content from different artists. Whenever a new image is posted, or some other notifiable activity occurs on the site, there is a tiny thumbnail at the very top of the page saying ______ left a comment on _______. While sometimes this might be a little useless, occasionally cool new artists can be discovered by clicking on this link.

CGHUB also hosts Articles, Forums, and Challenges for its users to participate in. Job postings are available on the site as well, so professionals in the field looking for work can post their availability or organizations looking for artists can put an ad on the site when they're looking for artists. When I'm out of school, I plan to use this to try and find some work.

If you like this kind of website, I would suggest you check out these other art sites: Behance, CGSociety,  deviantART, ConceptArt.org
If you're interested, my profile is at kilianmcmann.cghub.com.

Flash Animation by Adam Philips

I can probably speak for many people out there, that when we vision well designed animation, we may not consider simple flash animations. And among the large amount of cheap animations and stick figure fights there is Brackenwood by Adam Philips. Adam is an Australian freelance animator whose main body of animation work, for which he is best known, consists of flash animation compositions published on his website Bitey Castle and on the flash portal Newgrounds (there, as of March 2010, his movies have over 14 million views and he is one of the highest ranked artists). He is the creator of the Brackenwood series.

Readers should seriously take the time to at least watch one or two of this series.

You done watching? Alright then.

I think now you can see why they're so great. Adam has taken a simple medium and elevated it to a serious production level. The story he's crafted with Bitey (see picture)

 is mysterious and exciting.The music and visual aspects all come together to make a great series.

And while it costs a fee, he does offer courses in animation for those who are interested. I think some cartoons on TV currently could use some pointers from this guy.