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.

Pelican Briefs

I was watching some of Disney's True Life Adventures, and i had my sketch-pad in hand, and realized that, to someone who is considering animation as a way of life, watching these nature films was at least as useful as watching cartoons, if not more so.
later, i was sharing some of the sketches with my younger brother, who has been borrowing my copy of Art Moger's book The Complete Pun, and he said, "where are the Pelican's Briefs?" so i drew a pelican in his skivvies. Then my brother did his version of Pelican Briefs on the same page.

Then finally, i did my version of his version... on lined paper, of course, like an idiot.

nothing new...

still bein' lazy, so i don't have any new pics to post.
well, maybe one:

weaponized proboscus

I got some free time, what with getting some more snow courtesy of Fickle Mother Nature, and sketched a 3-part progression (a tryptic if you like, but it's nothing so artsy as that makes it sound) for the amusement of anyone who chooses to take a look.

I fixed the left leg on the female here, along with a couple other, subtler alterations; it just didn't feel right before.

The proportions in this drawing are a little outta whack, but whatever, I didn't feel like re-drawing it.




And here is the original version of the first pic, which I had colored before I decided to changed the actual drawing...