Hello, Roto

I was dabbling with rotoscoping tonight and thought I would show some of what I did. The whole clip is only about 2.5 seconds, but it is a fun little experiment.

My youngest brother captured this shot of me and my other brother, and I printed each frame and retraced it in pencil, then superimposed a cartoon character in place of my brother and myself.
It gets a little more interesting, but I don't want to give away the ending...

Hopefully I get some more free time from work soon so I can finish it and put it all together as a video to post here... for now, view the first 1 second of an early pencil test (I like to test as I go along to make sure it is moving the way I want) :

crazy week

I had a week off work, and went to the NFAF. while driving, while waiting, and while about to nod off in the hotel, I drew. And drew. Here a few of the weird things that came out the end of my pencil.

A claymation duo called Wallet and Grimace:

A caveman attempting to invent corporal punishment:
A dragon-creature spewing ash:

A pet alligator whose job is in danger of termination:

A somber satyr playing a melancholy tune on his bone-pipe:

My brother wearing a funny hat he got:

A grotesque couple:

And some preliminary planning sketches for some additional bits of the squirrel animation I have [not] been working on:

'kay, bye.

let there be neon

I have been working on an effect for the next animation project, to make a neon light flicker. First I made a separate drawing of the lights, the opposite color they would be when I put them on top of my background painting.
Putting this image on a separate layer in photoshop, i inverted the colors, so the black would be a bright white, and the other colors would be neon-looking.


i made a separate version of the background with the colors taken out, to use for the un-lit version. This way i can make the neon appear to flicker when it is animated, alternating between the two versions.

oh, and i have been playing with some lighting effects for the other parts of the room, too.

Title Wave

Two more title cards done today and yesterday...

BG or not BG that is the Q

I've been doing some painting again as you can see, a couple title cards like this first one, as well as finally got around to finishing the background pan for the raging bull 'toon. I had to make a separate piece and photoshop it together so the pan would be able to scroll 360+ degrees.

Then I threw a colored drawing in to see how the character looks against the background.

I'm liking it. Now comes the hard part- animating this beast of a scene.

Respite of the Muses

In a feverish state of mind, I scrawled furiously, carving deep into the pad with my nub of a pencil, anxious to get as much on paper as I could while the ethereal and fickle muses still hovered in my presence. While sleepwalking through rote retreads of the character I created several months ago, inspiration came when I made a "mistake" in the placement of the facial features. As I examined the altered appearance of the man, I suddenly saw a world of opportunity for exaggeration, caricaturization gone mad, and I seized the moment, pushing my drawings further and further, until Nick was no longer the semi-realistic man here:He went through a rapid period of evolution,until finally he became the absurdly distorted abstraction you see here:Eagerly I pressed on, my eyes glazed with the mad gleeful fury of the ecstatic state of inspiration I had entered. I began to experiment with other characters, pushing them, pulling back again pushing another direction, exploring the limits of acceptable believability until exhausted, I dropped pad, pencil and glasses by my bed and collapsed into a sound slumber.

Cartoonudity

Ah, neglected sketchblog, here, have a little something I drew up yesterday. Bon Apetit!

putting the pain in painting

Naturally, I am sketching all the time, but I don't get to paint as much as I'd like. I did get to do a little recently- I have an acrylic landscape of a desert mesa beneath menacing dark clouds, but I don't have a pic or scan to show.
I also did this watercolor a few days ago of a morning glory that my sister has in a pot on our deck.
For some reason I like to play with the painting after it's scanned, see what it would be like if i had painted it differently, say, in sepia tones...


or with super-saturated hues...


ah, well, must go to sleep now, I'm bushed after working 13 hours today.

Rabid Rabbits

I have frequently found funny
the idea that a bunny,
a mild creature known for silence
could have tendencies for violence.

In high school, we had a rabbit in a cage in the science teacher's classroom, who was renowned for his insatiable hunger for the teacher's fingers. It was inevitable that the overactive imagination of myself and a small circle of cartoonist friends would envision the horrors he might wreak if released from the cage. The rabbit was called Erlenmeyer, after the Erlenmeyer Flasks commonly used in chemistry.


After drawing this picture on the back of one of my folders, I came up with an idea for an over-the-top sequel to the low-key, low budget original:


I redrew it again later, but i like the first rough sketch better-

Running with the theme of docile animals gone berzerk, I created a spin-off character:


There were some subsequent redesign doodles on scraps of loose-leaf during the duller classes in college...




Then finally, i came up with the three-quel, just in time for the May '07, the month of the three-quels...


here, Erlenmeyer has lost the Steven Seagal pony-tail in favor of a grittier Nick-Nolte look.

all that jazzzz

I went to see my brother play clarinet in the junior high all-county band and orchestra, and brought a sketchbook along. I find crowds a good place for sketching faces and different body shapes. There aren't many cool poses, since they're usually all sitting, but I find it is good for discovering new facial features and combinations.
Then when I got bored of drawing folks in the crowd, I just began doodling other things out of my head.