Dead Tired

As soon as i am well-rested, I will sit down and post a nice, long, WORD AND PICTURE filled post on a subject i have been pondering lately- the relationship between Personal Style and Great Art. Stay tuned, and don't touch that Scroll-button!

colorific

Here is a boatload of different color variations for the Raging Bull character...

Going Ape

Just playing with some color ideas for the bull character here, but i also did a bunch more sketches of the other characters...
and here now i present the secret origins of the Panda character- Ta-dAAAAH! it's another doodle, from the cover of a college notebook. When the guys at school saw it, they ribbed me about the unintentionally alluring panda, and the catchphrase Sexual Panda was born- and lived for about 5 minutes until it got annoying.

Layout in the Sun

i finished roughing out the layout for the Crossword project, and the paint just dried on the revised background for the Squirrel project...and the ideas are starting to flow, story-wise for the crossword project- here are some more background characters, as well as a new main part, a monkey who may make a good foil for the Raging Bull's Rage, by irritating him to the point of insanity by incessantly giving him all the answers to his puzzle, and not letting him do the thing himself.funny, he started as an old doodle, too! i guess it pays to save that stuff!

sour face!!!

I took a couple penciled frames that i have drawn and quickly threw some color on them to get an idea how the squirrel animation will look when i eventually finish it and put it on my background painting, here's a peek...

FRAME 88
(which i drew most recently)

FRAME 124-ish
(which was drawn earlier)

From looking at these, i noticed some troubles with the character's readability against the background, so i am currently re-touching the painting, getting rid of some of that muddy garbage that spills from the can, so that i will have more negative space around the character...

Meanwhile, I also am continuing with my new idea for an animation project, adding characters

and extending my ideas for the layout. Here is about 2/3 of a small sketch i did of my idea. above is a smaller thumbnail, that shows the dining area that would connecting the two ends of the drawing below...

The scene will start at the main door, as a chicken rushes in, apologizing for being late to work, then we pan 360 degrees around the room, following a brutish cook-slash-waiter, Nick, as he deals with various complaints throughout the dining area, then come to pause on the bull at the bar who is struggling with a crossword, trying to guess a 3-letter word for starchy tuber. from there, I'm not sure what will happen yet.
In case you are puzzled with the crossword yourself, the answer is "Yam."

Raging Bull

I'm still trying to come up with a character for my next project, but I think I may have an idea. I was searching through a bunch of really old stuff of mine, and found a few that had a little bit of the feeling I'm after.
So I tried making some new sketches to sort of feel them out.

The one i like most, oddly enough, is the bull character, which originally was just a doodle in the margins of an old school notebook. I did several sketches of him this afternoon to explore his range of expression and personality.Somehow, a sketch of the squirrel I'm currently animating ended up on this last page, as well as another partial sketch of the caveman artist. I think I have decided that I'm going to use the bull for the crossword animation, so i did a couple quick sketches to figure out the layout of the scene.
meanwhile, I am still busily working on my squirrel animation- i am about 25% done. It's kind of slow going when I spend 10 hour nights at work, and sleep most of the day, not to mention the projects i have with the Fine Arts Festival, working with kids from my church on their dramas, but whenever i get a free moment, I hunker over my desk in the basement and scribble furiously away at the animation. Currently I have about 80 frames with cleaned-up lines.

cross words

These are some sketches i did sunday, trying to come up with a character design for my next animation project. I am trying to match the character to a voice i created when recording some dialogue about a plumber-type character trying to figure out a word in a crossword puzzle that has him stumped.

samson

These characters are not mine. While blog-surfing i found these on another guy's site, a fellow by the name of Josh Lieberman. The characters intrigued me, so i thought i'd try my hand at them too. To check out the original artist's work, go to his blog at http://kn8ian.blogspot.com

Inspiring the next generation...

My two brothers (ages 11 and 14) have been watching over my shoulder as i work in my free time (and i wish there was more of that) to create my short animation, and i have been using them as a sort of test-audience to screen my ideas. They seem to draw inspiration from me for their own artistic endeavors, and so i have sought to be a worthy source of such admiration. I suggested that they should try to animate themselves, and when i got the response "maybe someday when you show us how," I said to them, "you've been watching me do this for the past month, if that isn't showing you something..."
Then i went into my room and, digging through my archives, i found an old notebook that i got when i was in 7th grade (1994-1995), which, though supposed to be used for school, ended up becoming devoted to my earliest attempts at creating moving cartoons- somewhere around 14 total individual short flip-animations of tap dancers, morphing creatures and other, more bizarre animations that defy simple descriptions.
when they saw that one doesn't have to be an adult (or a facsimile thereof) to create simple animations, both guys set forth to create their own projects... If i get time, maybe i will share their results on here. For now, here is a sample page from the notebook that i used to inspire them, filled with drawings from when i was probably about 12 or 13.

There's Bologna in our Slacks!

So, um, guess what I've been watching...