Thursday, September 10, 2009
Fraught with Drama....
New comics are on the way... two more to draw, 3 more to color... and who knows when THAT will get done ;-) Well, anyways, here's a teaser for you:
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
DUDE--- doodles!
okay, you're not getting the new comics until maybe next wednesday, so until then you're gonna get stuck with more of my pointless doodling. So deal widd'it.
coupla caricatures, a few feeble attempts at capturing that galumphing run which is so unique to the giraffe...
...And a drawing that quickly descended from an attept at a basically realistic sketch of a horse's head into the anarchic cartoony chaos you see as the result of trying to entertain and surprise the small audience of youthful observers who were watching in astonishment as I drew this. always fun to turn the act of drawing into an entertaining show, and kids always make the best audiences, as a simple thing will delight and amuse them- little things like having both eyes on one side of the head, or super-exaggerated short legs, or a ribbon tied into a bow on the "pony-tail."
coupla caricatures, a few feeble attempts at capturing that galumphing run which is so unique to the giraffe...
...And a drawing that quickly descended from an attept at a basically realistic sketch of a horse's head into the anarchic cartoony chaos you see as the result of trying to entertain and surprise the small audience of youthful observers who were watching in astonishment as I drew this. always fun to turn the act of drawing into an entertaining show, and kids always make the best audiences, as a simple thing will delight and amuse them- little things like having both eyes on one side of the head, or super-exaggerated short legs, or a ribbon tied into a bow on the "pony-tail."
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
artist at work...
No new comics this week, but they're coming, I promise!!! I've a lot of other work that holds a priority over this. Until the next page is ready, here's a peek at part of one of the panels I have done already...
Monday, July 20, 2009
Bonfire Sketch-aroo
new comics are on the way, but not getting done this week, so to tide you elite few readers over until then, here's some sketches i did at a bonfire recently. two of the originals were given away, so all I have are facebook-sized photos of them.
I still have this third drawing but I'm to lazy to hunt it down ant scan it in to post here. Maybe later I'll replace this photo with a proper scanned version.
this fourth one was of one of the girls at the bonfire, who had just about the coolest hair-do ever. In fact the drawing really doesn't do it justice.
EDIT: (updated) here is a scan of the third sketch. You may notice a slight alteration i made to Edwin's fishing pole
between the time the drawing was photographed and when it was scanned. These sketches were all done with a ballpoint pen, so after i scanned this in, I had to Photoshop out the original fishing pole.
I still have this third drawing but I'm to lazy to hunt it down ant scan it in to post here. Maybe later I'll replace this photo with a proper scanned version.
this fourth one was of one of the girls at the bonfire, who had just about the coolest hair-do ever. In fact the drawing really doesn't do it justice.
EDIT: (updated) here is a scan of the third sketch. You may notice a slight alteration i made to Edwin's fishing pole
between the time the drawing was photographed and when it was scanned. These sketches were all done with a ballpoint pen, so after i scanned this in, I had to Photoshop out the original fishing pole.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
biggified
I probably won't have any new comics this week, due to the fact that I have so many other things I need to be doing, but as a consolation prize for the faithful few who read these posts, here is a full-sized version of one of the cartoons from volume 1, issue 6 of my series of cartoons. You can see the cleaned-up pencils for this cartoon here.I have the rough sketches somewhere too, and the original doodled idea, but I'm too lazy to dig them up at the moment...
This picture though should give an idea how large a scale I work with to produce the detail in my comics. I generally do the final versions of these on 9 x 12 inch Bristol board, inking the old-fashioned way with a dip pen. Then I scan this and color it in photoshop and assemble it into the page layout I've established for the series. Sadly the size that blogger limits me to causes some detail to be lost, so I try to keep these from being overly cluttered by minutiae of details that will never be seen in the final version.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
X-pired Supers in "Altered Egos"
so, here it is- a project that I've been involved in for the last...month-ish? I came into it after the basic idea had been established and a pretty thorough outline had been written out. I was given this outline/script and proceeded to polish it into a final script, adding several of my own ideas that the other members of the creative team agreed to (the biggest additions were the opening narration and thedialogue-less sequence which I timed out to the introduction from Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra", which is most popularly known for its use in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey) then after we cast the roles from people in the drama group, we had one rehearsal, then 2 weeks for the actors to learn the parts while I planned camera shots and thumbnailed them out.
I even did a very rough animatic of the "Also Sprach Zarathustra" sequence to work out how i would eventually time the cuts and actions to the music:
Then we all got together on the 20th and shot the bulk of the footage over a six-and-a-half hour period. Despite the longer-than planned shooting time we had fun, and the actors came up with a lot of fun ad-libs I incorporated into the final edit. The remaining 3 hours or so of shooting was done the next day at a separate location. (the window in the beginning and ending was filmed a completely different place from the rest of the scenes.) This shoot produced 2.5 hours of footage that I then had to capture from mini DV tapes onto my computer. Once this was done, I edited the piece together. This took about 22 hours, the majority of which was split between two days, the 24th and 25th. Finally, after some feedback and additional tweaking, it was shown on Sunday night, the 28th, at the young adults group that meets at Glad Tiding in Reading.
there was one shot I wanted to something special with- the last shot, I wanted to digitally zoom out and add a photoshopped matte painting to make it seem farther away, but I scrapped the idea because the camera wasn't locked down when i filmed the shot:
I even did a very rough animatic of the "Also Sprach Zarathustra" sequence to work out how i would eventually time the cuts and actions to the music:
Then we all got together on the 20th and shot the bulk of the footage over a six-and-a-half hour period. Despite the longer-than planned shooting time we had fun, and the actors came up with a lot of fun ad-libs I incorporated into the final edit. The remaining 3 hours or so of shooting was done the next day at a separate location. (the window in the beginning and ending was filmed a completely different place from the rest of the scenes.) This shoot produced 2.5 hours of footage that I then had to capture from mini DV tapes onto my computer. Once this was done, I edited the piece together. This took about 22 hours, the majority of which was split between two days, the 24th and 25th. Finally, after some feedback and additional tweaking, it was shown on Sunday night, the 28th, at the young adults group that meets at Glad Tiding in Reading.
there was one shot I wanted to something special with- the last shot, I wanted to digitally zoom out and add a photoshopped matte painting to make it seem farther away, but I scrapped the idea because the camera wasn't locked down when i filmed the shot:
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Disney's Stories
Ever since I was a little kid there have been 3 things I loved to do more than any other. One, as evidenced by this picture, was performance.
This was during a visit from our grandparents- we decided to put on a show for them and it ended up being a reenactment of the "Dance of the Hours" sequence from the Disney film, Fantasia. We went all-out with the costuming, and really got into our roles. I got my brother to be the crocodile, using his green raincoat, green pants and green slippers and a red sweater for a cape; my sisters wore their gymnastic leotards to take on the role of hippos and ostriches. As the elephant, I went all in grey; grey hoodie and sweatpants, grey socks on my arms and feet, with a grey sock on a bent-up clothes hanger for a trunk, and a grey clip-on tie for a tail. The sign my sisters are holding up said, "The End," naturally (an early attempt at Brechtian techniques?). I guess this was also my earliest foray into the world of theatrical directing.
Disney movies seem to have played a role in a lot of my earliest inspirations.
The other two things I loved best were writing stories and drawing. In the room where I was supposed to work on schoolwork, we had a mickey mouse lamp, looking pretty much exactly like these pictures I dug up from ebay:
I still have the lamp, but the shade, being probably just as old as I was, crumbled years ago and was replaced by a more generic one. But while the shade still existed, I used to look at the characters on it, and one day c. 1990 (I would have been probably 8 then), when I was supposed to be doing math or something, I took some scrap paper and tried to copy the characters, then on the back of the papers I wrote a short story about each of them. Actually, looking at some of these, and given how young I was, I think now that I may have just put the paper up the the light and traced them. But I was proud of my accomplishment at the time...
on the page above you can see a partially erased rendition of one of the chipmunks.
maybe next time I'll put something up that wasn't traced...
This was during a visit from our grandparents- we decided to put on a show for them and it ended up being a reenactment of the "Dance of the Hours" sequence from the Disney film, Fantasia. We went all-out with the costuming, and really got into our roles. I got my brother to be the crocodile, using his green raincoat, green pants and green slippers and a red sweater for a cape; my sisters wore their gymnastic leotards to take on the role of hippos and ostriches. As the elephant, I went all in grey; grey hoodie and sweatpants, grey socks on my arms and feet, with a grey sock on a bent-up clothes hanger for a trunk, and a grey clip-on tie for a tail. The sign my sisters are holding up said, "The End," naturally (an early attempt at Brechtian techniques?). I guess this was also my earliest foray into the world of theatrical directing.Disney movies seem to have played a role in a lot of my earliest inspirations.
The other two things I loved best were writing stories and drawing. In the room where I was supposed to work on schoolwork, we had a mickey mouse lamp, looking pretty much exactly like these pictures I dug up from ebay:
I still have the lamp, but the shade, being probably just as old as I was, crumbled years ago and was replaced by a more generic one. But while the shade still existed, I used to look at the characters on it, and one day c. 1990 (I would have been probably 8 then), when I was supposed to be doing math or something, I took some scrap paper and tried to copy the characters, then on the back of the papers I wrote a short story about each of them. Actually, looking at some of these, and given how young I was, I think now that I may have just put the paper up the the light and traced them. But I was proud of my accomplishment at the time...
on the page above you can see a partially erased rendition of one of the chipmunks.
maybe next time I'll put something up that wasn't traced...
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Dusting off some Internet Cobwebs...
and now for something completely different... here is a website that I designed way back in the college days for the web design class I took, oh, sophomore year? We just had to come up with a simple concept, create multiple inter-linking pages with interactive features and some extras like roll-over buttons, on-click buttons, etc. the content was entirely up to us. so I quickly threw together some special drawings for the titles and buttons, and dug up some old cartoon doodles I had laying around, filling out the collection with pictures of some friends and family I happened to have about. If you browse the site you may even notice some early prototypes of characters that I currently am using (or will be using) in my When's Day Comics that I sporadically post here.
be sure to check out the "search for a date" feature to discover such hidden treasures as:
an early version of whippersnapper kitty...
a primitive (but kinda cute) version of Edwin Aardvark...
and Hookhand Harry, a villain who has yet to appear in the regular comic strip series! (but stay tuned!)
You'll even find some visual disney references on the page, along with a couple of pretty fun roll-over animation on certain links!
I chose not to post the photographs I had used for the Toon page's Search for a Date feature, for obvious reasons, but most of the names were already falsified, so I just left the page itself up minus the pics.
be sure to check out the "search for a date" feature to discover such hidden treasures as:
an early version of whippersnapper kitty...
a primitive (but kinda cute) version of Edwin Aardvark...
and Hookhand Harry, a villain who has yet to appear in the regular comic strip series! (but stay tuned!)
You'll even find some visual disney references on the page, along with a couple of pretty fun roll-over animation on certain links!
I chose not to post the photographs I had used for the Toon page's Search for a Date feature, for obvious reasons, but most of the names were already falsified, so I just left the page itself up minus the pics.
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