Luis’ Illustrated Blog

THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Had the day off Monday for Memorial Day, and came into work on Tuesday.  Stayed late to make up the time since I was going to stay home and take care of my kids Wednesday. Today I’m back at work. I plan to finish what I got assigned and I’m probably going to get more work.  Staying late again today.

I’m very tired.

ART

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

Because of Memorial day, and because I had to spend Wednesday taking care of my kids, I didn’t really get much done on my drawing this week either.  I DID get a little bit done though.

One of the “bigger” things I changed was the pose for the flying ape.  I like this pose much more than the one I originally had.  I then photocopied my drawing and shrunk it.  The reason for this was so that I could have a smaller copy of the ape faces.  The winged apes were “off model” their faces where too big.  I erased the faces I had put on them and then re-drew their faces off of the shrunk copy I had made.  I think they look much better.  I also changed the “texture” of the viper’s body.

I took a long hard look at the drawing so far and began nitpicking the things I didn’t like. I wrote it all down on a sticky note as a “to do list” and pasted it on the drawing.  I added the things I needed to finish to the list as well. Crossed out the ones I finished doing as I went:

The drawing was on my table at work and a co-worker came in to talk to me.  He took a look at my drawing and began to make suggestions, unasked. It kinda took me aback a bit, but I listened.  He said two things and asked me one question.  First he told me that the viper fangs I had drawn were inaccurate, and it dawned on me that he was very right.  It’s one of those things I just mindlessly overlooked.  He made a note of it on a sticky note and put it on my drawing.  He then suggested that I put the tail of the viper in the left corner of the drawing so that there wasn’t empty space there.  It was a good suggestion. He made another note of it on a sticky note and put it on the drawing.

I made the adjustments he had suggested soon after.  I’m not happy with the viper tail the way I drew it so I’m going to adjust it. Other than that I’m happier with how the drawing is turning out.

Taking critique is difficult, especially when you don’t ask for it.  It’s beneficial if you learn to block that prideful side of you that immediately get’s insulted. It’s a skill that takes practice.  In this job, your stuff is always getting critiqued. Sometimes it’s done well, and sometimes it’s done lousy.  Whichever way you get it, you need to be able to leave your ego out of it and listen to what is being said objectively.  In the case of my co-worker’s critique, I’m glad I listened.  He offered suggestions and pointed out a blunder, I didn’t know I’d made.  I think the drawing is better off for it.

As I said before, he also asked a question, namely, why I hadn’t drawn the running Winged Ape from 3/4 back view. I told him I’d intentionally did that in order to have more of his face show.

He kinda apologized for saying anything but I told him I was glad he did.  Especially in this stage of the drawing when I can still make fixes.

Getting critiqued is a huge part of my job now. As a board artist it’s rare when I show my work to a director and it’s accepted as is.  Sometime there are a few changes, sometimes half of what I do is changed and sometimes it’s completely thrown out an I have to change it all.  I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me when everything gets thrown out.  Usually, the director comes up with better ideas which make so much more sense, that I end up not minding at all.   I learn more putting my ego aside and I end up happier for it. It’s a skill I haven’t mastered yet.  I think the more I do it, the better I’ll get.  It’s part of my job now more than ever.

VIDEOS

I loved this little shorts. They’re fantastically animated, they’re simple ideas and they’re darn funny.  They make me want to animate:

MY WEEK

On Wednesday, when I stayed home to take care of the kids, I discovered to my dismay, I had to go to the supermarket.  The baby didn’t have any baby food.  I don’t like going to the store with all the kids. It’s a pain.

It didn’t help that it was cold and it seemed like it was about to rain.  It took almost an hour just to get the kids ready to go.  We made it to the store, bought what I needed to and made it back to the car, with some help of a supermarket employee. She took pity of my situation.  I was a bit overwhelmed with the kids and the groceries.

After getting all the kids in, I sat down and started the car.  On my windshield I saw a folded piece of paper with writing on it. It read:

“FOR YOU! GOD BLESS.”

The exclamation mark “dot” was shaped like a heart.  I thought it was an ad but I took it off my windshield and put it in the car anyway.  I looked around at the other cars but I noticed that no other cars had a piece of paper on their windshields.  I shrugged and drove away.

As I drove back home, I thought about the piece of paper,  “Maybe it’s a note from someone I’d helped out in that parking lot before. Maybe they recognized me and wanted to just say thank you.”

I got curious and when I came to a stoplight, I opened the paper. In it I found money. I was really surprised. I took it out and found that it was eight dollars.  Very odd amount.  It must have been something spontaneous.  Whoever it was, must just grabbed what was in their pocket and put it there on my car.  I wonder why? In any case, it was a very nice gesture.  Thank you whoever you are.  It’s appreciated. I could buy a lot of things at the dollar store for my family with this much money. Every little bit helps.

I pray God blesses her.

For more comic and stories written by me, CLICK HERE.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS

For the second time in a row, we’ve receive, as a gift, the latest DvD box set of the newly released Simpson’s season.  I like this quite a bit.  Especially since I haven’t been able to afford buying some of the past ones.  The nicest thing about the gift though, was not that it was given to us by the studio,  Fox or even Gracie Films, but in fact, it was given to us by Matt Groening himself.  Each box set came with a thank you note signed by him.  That was REALLY nice of him. Especially since he didn’t HAVE to do anything of the kind.

Thank you Matt Groening!

ART

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

This is taking more time than  I thought. The one hour a day I get, in order to draw my stuff, is not enough time to work on this drawing.

I blew up my thumbnail about 200% on a 11×17 sheet of paper. I took a sheet of tracing paper and began cleaning up the drawing, as well as adjusting the poses.    I adjusted the position of the Sorcerers by moving them over a bit to the right.  I also changed the pose of one of the Sorcerers to make him a little more dynamic.

I’d drawn Rob first and after I drew the Sorcerers in, I discovered their feet and Robs feet where not quite in the right place. Rob’s feet were in front of the Sorcerer’s feet, so I had to erase Rob and redraw him higher up.  I also ended up redrawing him three more times because I didn’t like his proportions at first and then I tried a different angle for his head, but it didn’t look right.

Rob is also bigger in this final drawing than he is in the thumbnail.  I wanted to be able to see him more.

The winged apes are not even in the drawing yet because I was having trouble finding good poses for them.  Poses that look threatening and at the same time, place their wings in such a way, that they didn’t cover each other up. In order to figure out exactly what poses I was going to put them in, I need to do some sketches.

Even looking at the drawing as it is now, I kinda want to move the Sorcerers over a bit more to give Rob a little bit of “breathing room”:

Drawing a finished piece is far trickier than a sketch. Mainly because you actually want your drawing to be well drafted. With a sketch, you can live with things being a bit off.

Usually, once I’ve done a thumbnail or a general sketch as to where the characters are going to be placed in a drawing, I find the horizon line.   When doing so, the most important thing, is to make sure that characters  have the horizon line cross them in the same part of their body a it would, if they were standing side by side. In the drawing above, the horizon line (which is drawn in red) crosses everyone mid-foot. The exception being the closest Sorcerer, whose feet go slightly below the Horizon Line to give the ground a bit of a curving feel. Once I have the Horizon Line in place, I draw a perspective grid all over the page. That way, I see the 3 dimensional space the characters are suppose to inhabit at a glance. I’ve only drawn one perceptive point so far, only because I don’t absolutely need the other point just yet, I will draw it in in once I start with the details of the background.

I then start adding a bit more construction and form on the drawings of the characters.  I also try to improve everyone’s poses and gestures. In the case above, I’m still not completely satisfied with Rob’s pose and drawing, so it still needs a bit of work.

I need to make sure I get the drawing above right for a couple of reasons. 1) I plan to do different finished versions of the drawing using different styles, in order to figure out what I want the final look of the cartoon to look like.  2) I plan to animate it.  It will become the experimental piece that I will use to figure out how I’m going to approach the animation in the cartoon. I’m thinking of a few programs I can use, and I might want to see which ones works the best.

What do you think so far?

MY WEEK

Met my friend Paul in the hallway at work and asked him how he was. This lead to a looong talk about art, drawing, pushing one’s self, discovering new ways to work, and many other things.  I ended up showing him some of what I was working on, and Paul showed me what he was working on.

What the was working on blew me away.  He’d been doing some concept art on a project for a mutual friend of ours.  The art was done using Storyboard Pro and I couldn’t believe it was done using that program. He’d managed to make Storyboard Pro do things, I didn’t know it could. It was very inspiring and it’s go me thinking very hard about the potential of the program.

VIDEOS

I saw this video of John Cleese talking about the creative process, and I found it to be very infotaining:

VIDEOS

Paul Nowak of Eternal Revolution, enlightens us on the rising importance of e-books:

For more comic and stories written by me, CLICK HERE.

If you like what you read, please consider signing up to my rss feed.

Comments are appreciated as well.

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Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.

THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Still working on that crazy Couch Gag this week.  I’m very surprised at how much work is being put into it.  I doubt anyone will say anything more than, “Wow, that was a weird Couch Gag,” and then forget about it and watch the show.  Oh well, it’s not like it isn’t fun to work on, so I don’t really mind. It’s just interesting to note.

I’ve also been working on revising Act 2.  This show has the least revisions of any show so far this season.  It’s a darn funny show.  Can’t wait to see the final version.

ART

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

It feels now like I’m just drawing for the sake of drawing and I’m not getting anywhere with my project.  I just want to get on with finishing it at this point.  It feels to me, as if I’ve solved everything and I’m ready to start with the “good stuff”.  I know this is just me being impatient though. The last time I worked on a personal project, jumped right in and started working without solving everything, I got myself in trouble.  Halfway through my project, I realized there were some art issues I hadn’t resolved and it ended up causing problems.  Had I taken the time to work them out earlier, it would have been a smoother process.

For my own sake, I might as well write down what I still need to do.

1. Decide on a final look for the cartoon by drawing a clean concept piece.
2. Design monsters.
3. Tighten up the story a bit more in order to know what monsters to design.
4. Come up with a color scheme for the cartoon and characters (see 1.).
5. Finalize all the Sorcerer designs.
6. Once the final look is decided, do an animation test.

(Sigh) It kinda sounds like a lot to do before I can even begin storyboarding.

I’ve been trying to complete task No. 1.  It’s tricky  because I want to draw a finished piece that incorporates some of the “fun” things I want to draw in the cartoon.  I decided that the thumbnail sketches I had been drawing depicted a scene that didn’t have much action in it. I’ve decided to see if I could, maybe, draw a picture with something exciting going on. This is what I’ve got so far:

I’m still going to need do a few more thumbnails though. I think I want to, at least, show  the  Sorcerers more. I want the drawing to say, “Danger and excitement” all in one drawing while allowing me to work on the color and style of the cartoon.

WEBSITES

So I followed the source of a link that lead to my blog out of curiosity. I found one of my animated GIF files that I did years ago, being talked about on a Spanish speaking forum.  To my surprise, a couple of posts later, I found that one of the forum users had translated it into SPANISH. I thought it was great that the person did that and I was really flattered. Then I looked closer at the translated version and saw the translator had decided to take my name off it. Why?!

I was planning to put the translated version up here on my blog.  I was going to but my name back on it but I found out, to my dismay, that I couldn’t.  I don’t know how the guy managed to edit my GIF but I wasn’t able to edit his.  So I’ve decided NOT to put the translated version here even though I thought it was neat.

Perhaps I should do a translated version myself instead. Maybe next week, if I have time. Meanwhile, here’s the original version of the GIF if you haven’t seen it yet:

I just finished rereading the original blog article this drawing was posted with. It seems I was going a little insane at the time.  It also answers the question as to why the drawing is signed “Frog 08″.

VIDEO

I liked this cartoon below. It’s sad but true. When an artist goes out and draws in public, this sometimes happens:

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Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.

THE SIMPSON NEWS

I managed to finish my ACT 2 assignment on Monday.  I would have finished it last week, only I took a longer lunch break than usual last Friday. I went to a local sports bar, with co-workers, to watch the Spain vs. Chile game.  It was a lot of fun, but it meant I had to make up the hours this week.

I’m now working on ACT 4, which has less to do than ACT 2.  I’m hoping to be done sometime today.

ART

Okay, so this page of drawings was just drawn to have something to post up. I did some adjusting on the Sorceress’ face so that it was a bit more stylized. I also drew out her face so I could, at least, see what she looked like.  I straighten out her skirt so it wasn’t so girly, and I worked out a bit of the arm detail of the long haired Sorcerer’s arm:

On Monday, my wife got invited to a get together with some friends from her work and the whole family went.  At one point during the evening I did my typical anti-social thing and began drawing in a corner. I decided that I was going to try to draw Steve Buscemi from a photo. I pulled a picture up on my phone and began to draw it.  The reason I did this was, since I was using him as inspiration, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to just try to capture his likeness “for real” in case I could apply what I learned from doing so to my design. So this is what I drew:

Red color pencil under drawing, inked with a Pentel brush pen. I used 2 Copic neutral grey markers and a black one for tone with a Whiteout pen for highlights. It came out okay but I think if I drew a few more I would eventually “be right on”.  I think, had you not known it was him, you would find that it looks familiar but you couldn’t put you’re finger on who he was suppose to be. At least it was fun to do and it’s WAY better than my other attempts.

So did I learn anything for having drawn the above drawing? I have no idea.

I definitely want to start on the backgrounds now. I’m going to see if I can find some time this weekend to go out and “location scout”. It’s possible I won’t be able to though, since I have a wedding to go to this Saturday  two hours away.

I’m still not sure where exactly my story should take place.  At first I thought it should take place outside a Wienerschnitzel type place. Then I was thinking that it might be better if it’s takes place in front of a portable hot dog stand.  If that’s the case, the story can take place, just about anywhere.  Thing is, I want Rob (the protagonist) to sit down on a bench to eat.  Then again, he could sit on a wall or…well just about anywhere.  So where should this take place?  A park? A street corner? I want obstacles and things to destroy so that at the end we just see the smoldering ruin of the area they just fought in. Also, it would be nice to have some “natural” obstacles so that it’s more difficult for Rob to get away. Any ideas?

If I don’t manage to get any photo reference, I’ll try doing a “style test” with all the characters. Basically I’ll just do a finished drawing with all of them in a picture, possibly in color.

VIDEOS/ART

I’ve known about this for a while but I kept forgetting to post about it.

It’s a video of Pixar storyboard artists at a panel from the CTN Animation Expo last year. They talk about their job, their influences and their approaches.  One of the speakers, Ted Mathot, is a ex-Simpsons layout artist.  It’s a must watch if you want good tips on Storyboarding and visual storytelling. Click the link below to watch:

PIXAR IN THE HOUSE: STORY STORY STORY

This next video, is a talk on how to get into the animation industry by  Dreamworks director Steve Hickner. I really enjoyed this one as well:

HOW TO BREAK INTO ANIMATION

BLOG

It’s tough being an introvert in a world of extroverts.  There’s a lot of misunderstanding that comes along with being one. I know, since I AM one.

Two years ago, at the end of a post on this blog, I linked to an article called:

Caring for Your Introvert.

I’m not sure how many people caught that link since it came at the end of a long random bit of writing. I found the article refreshing and enlightening. I thought it was important enough to call attention to it since it helps people understand introverts a lot more.

Recently I’ve become aware of yet another article on introverts.  It’s a good compliment to the article above so I thought I’d post a link to it too.  Read both these article if you want to learn more about the introvert in your life:

Field guide to the loner: The real insiders

For more comic and stories written by me, CLICK HERE.If you like what you read, please consider signing up to my rss feed.

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Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.

THE SIMPSONS NEWS

After having finished with a Couch Gag on Monday and the finishing touches on Act 1 of show 3 on Tuesday, I was assigned one of the craziest, most complicated Couch Gag I’d ever done and it’s do Friday…no pressure.

MY WEEK

Okay, so I loooovve watching the World Cup. It’s the only time I go out of my way to watch ANY sport.  I don’t really do that but for the World Cup, I make an exception.  Why? I don’t know. The tournament has a  special place in my heart, I think, from watching it with family and friends and the vibe has never left me. I just enjoy it A LOT.

Problem is, it’s taking up all my time.  At least, all the time I’ve reserved to work on my private things like this blog and my personal projects.  The games just happen to fall exactly during the times I tend to use to work on those two things.  I’m writing this so you’re not surprised as to why my blog entries are suddenly so short and uninspired for the next Month.

It’s the World Cup’s fault.

ART

World Cup is taking all my time so I didn’t really get much drawn this week.  I developed the Sorceress a little bit more.  Decided on a face and refined the shapes a bit more to my liking:

FAMILY

Ambrose went to daycare for the first time this week.  He and his big brother and sister went to daycare everyday (except Tuesday, where they spent it with my parents) this week and the next. Alesha has gone back to work for the next two weeks and then the school year ends.

Ambrose was a very good baby and behaved himself. I’m very proud of the little booger.

VIDEO GAMES

STAR WARS video games have some of the best cinematic. Case in point:

It looks like they took the likeness of actor Sam Witwer and modeled it into the character.

And then there is this one:

There is something kinda DRAGONBALL Z about it.

VIDEOS

For those of you who are fan of George R. R. Martin’s SONG OF ICE AND FIRE books and have yet to see this, here is the teaser trailer for the HBO series based on the books:

For more comic and stories written by me, CLICK HERE.

If you like what you read, please consider signing up to my rss feed.

Comments are appreciated as well.

I also have a store. Click Here and check it out.

If you would like to have a text ad on my site, click on the red BUY LINKS button under the Archives list.

And while you’re at it, please Digg me too.

Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.

THE SIMPSONS NEWS

I after finishing up the last of the scenes on the show I was working on, I began helping out on another show. I’ll begin working on the first show of next season sometime next week.

FAMILY

Happy Easter! I’m so glad that Easter finally came.  Lent is always a tough time to live through.

For Easter, we got together with the family at an Easter party at my aunt’s house. The kids had a great time, looking for eggs and eating candy.

I had a good time because there was some very yummy food.

He is risen!

MY WEB COMIC

I’m almost done so I’m posting up the first three pages and will continue to post the rest of it in the next three weeks. I hope you like it:

To be continued next week…

What have I learned from this so far? Quite a bit actually, but the biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that coloring a comic is really tedious and time consuming. It’s very doubtful that I’ll do another one in color any time soon.  I’ll leave it in black and white.

VIDEOS/ART
These videos by Mike McDonnell on Warm Up Sketching are really helpful. I’m going to try putting the advise into practice when I go into figure drawing for now on. Check them out:

VIDEOS

Reading comics on the iPad? What’s that look like? Here’s a review of the Marvel Comic reader app for the iPad:

Now I just have to figure out how to put my comic up on the iPad.

BLOGS

You will notice that I now have a new page up on my blog called, “My Stories and Comics“. From now on, whenever I complete a comic, story, or drawings with a theme, I’m going to be creating a special page for those things so you can read them all in one sitting instead of having to search through the blog looking for all the parts.

I will be working on it to try to make it look nicer than what I have now.  For now, it’s just functional. Take a look and let me know what you think.

VIDEO 

Yet another funny review. This time it’s a video review of STAR WARS: ATTACK OF THE CLONES

Warning, the video is very funny but has some bad language:

If you like what you read, please consider signing up to my rss feed.

Comments are appreciated as well.

I also have a store. Click Here and check it out.

If you would like to have a text ad on my site, click on the red BUY LINKS button under the Archives list.

And while you’re at it, please Digg me too.

Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.

THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Having fun drawing my scenes so far.  Nothing fancy or crazy to report.  Thing are back to normal at work.

ART

For Part 1, CLICK HERE.

For Part 2, CLICK HERE.

For Part 3, CLICK HERE.

…and that’s IT.  That’s all I wrote.  There isn’t anymore.  It took, off and on, about three years to do this much.  Mostly because I was trying to redesign the comic and recompose the pages.  As well as trying to adjust this first part of the story so that it really grabbed you.  This only caused me to burn out on it and I ended up abandoning the comic in the end.  Should I have?  I really didn’t want to redraw 22 pages again after all that time.

Biggest problem I had with the comic? I took it waaaaay to seriously.

Below I have included the original ending to comic I had written.  It’s actually a really bad ending, now that I look at it again.  I’m VERY glad I changed it.  The comic that followed that ending was actually going to begin with the three main characters sitting around a table, drinking tea as the Golem explained what was going on.  Very dull with a lot of exposition.  The new ending I ended up going with, in contrast, was going to lead the characters, in the next comic, right to the “meat” of the story and was going to push the character to make some difficult choices right off the bat.  That was going to be far more interesting:

See what I mean? Really bad ending. It’s also very unclear if Angie is sick and has something wrong with her, which was NOT my intent.

Well, anyway, what do you think?  Did you like it? Didn’t like it?  Are you disappointed  that there isn’t anymore?  Was it not that good to begin with?  Would you have payed money for it had I finished it?

I’m really curious.  If you really liked it please tell me. If you didn’t like it, please tell me that too.  It won’t hurt my feelings or anything.  I’m MUCH more critical about this story than I think you will ever be.  You may just confirm my suspicions by telling me what you didn’t like.  If you DID like it, please tell me why as well.  Especially since there are things I think are really working in the story.  In any case, depending on the reaction, I may or may not continue the story.  I mean, if no one likes it enough for me to continue, it’s not like I was going to anyway, but if suddenly, I get thousands of people wanting more…

For now, I’ve got tons of other ideas to attempt.

Next week, THE BLACK TERROR KID.

FAMILY

My Abuelita is not doing very well lately.  I would appreciate any prayers you can send her way and our families way.  Thanks.

WRITING

Because I’ve been trying to come up with a fun, SHORT, story or skit for my next project, I’ve been rereading my books on story theory lately.  I’ve decided that I was going to try to structure whatever story I ended up telling “properly”, or at the very least, as well as I can.

Part of the reason for this is that I’m having trouble putting the idea I have together into something, ANYTHING, remotely entertaining.  I have and idea and can’t seem to actually execute it so it’s kinda driving me nuts.

The first book I decided to reread was:

• STORY: SUBSTANCE, STRUCTURE STYLE, AND THE PRINCIPLES OF SCREENWRITING by Robert Mckee.

This book actually helped out a lot.  It’s a very popular book on the Three Act Structure Theory of writing.  It’s good, even if you’re not writing a screenplay.

I’m avoiding the “Heroes Journey” Theory of story right now, mainly because I find it annoying at the moment.  Nothing wrong with it or anything, it just reminds me of Joseph Campbell and I find him annoying right now so I kinda want to avoid the theory for that completely subjective reason.

The other book I re-familiarizing  myself with is:

• DRAMATICA: A NEW THEORY OF STORY by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley.

I’ve never tried this theory out myself but it really makes a lot of sense to me.  It’s a very deep and intense theory that puts forth the proposition that all stories are grand arguments about a specific subject, that must include all sides of a given argument in order to feel complete.  Kinda like St. Thomas Aquina’s Summa Theologica  only in story form. I think it’s a very clever theory but overwhelmingly cumbersome.  That said, it’s VERY helpful if you’re in the place I’m at right now where you’re not sure which way to go. It gives you enough structure from the get go so you can start building a workable story that will hopefully trigger the inspiration to get you what you want.  It’s also a good theory to use to double check the integrity of a story you’ve written by checking if it’s well balanced.

You can Download the 4th edition of the DRAMATICA book online for free at the Dramatica site, you can read it directly at the site for free, or you can go to iTunes and download the 10th edition of the DRAMATICA book as a podcast. In many ways, listening to the book on audio is like listening to a university course in Socratic Logic (I should know, since that is how I learned Socratic Logic).  I don’t know if I can recommend this theory or not since I have just now begun to truly use it but I’ll keep you updated with what I discover.

BLOGS

I became aware, through a “retweet” Topher Davila sent on Twitter, of this article from the FIRST THINGS website:

SCIENCE FRICTION

by Robert R. Chase

It’s an article about Christianity in Science Fiction stories and it’s really great.  It opened my eyes to a LOT of really interesting Science Fiction stories that have very positive Catholic elements that I didn’t really know where out there.  I highly recommend reading the article.

ROLE PLAYING GAMES/VIDEO

In case you ever wondered what a game of DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS looked like as it’s being played,  here’s a fun video of the writers of the animated show ROBOT CHICKEN, playing a game:

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Came back on the show this week and it was as if I’d never left.  I was handed 32 scenes to finish by the end of the week (yikes!) and I’m off and running. Time to earn my keep.

FAMILY

We had a baby shower this weekend. Lot’s of family and friends showed up. We received many helpful gifts. The shower itself was really nice and the food was fantastic.

I did my typical anti-social thing. I really don’t know why but I’m getting worse about hanging around people. When my brother and his wife Deborah showed up, I  spent my time with them, but that was mainly because they came over and sat down where I was at (and also asked to play a game with me). After talking for an hour or so, I took out two board games that I had brought and played it.  I’ll write about that another day.  I enjoyed myself.  They left early and I sat by myself thinking about stories and my next project.  A few people came by, sat down and talked to me for a few minutes but it wasn’t long before I was alone again thinking.

Later, Angelita, one of my cousin’s daughters, asked me if I wanted to play the board game TROUBLE (it’s that, LUDO/SORRY type game with the “Pop-O-Matic Bubble” that rolls the die for you). There where four of us playing, my three year old daughter was one and my two year old son was another.  My son lost interest quickly and Carolina (my cousin’s eldest daughter) took his place.

That game is awful. It’s such a bad game. We all thought so. You can’t leave the your “Home” base and start moving your pieces around the board unless roll a six.  Which you have no control over and if you manage to do so, if someone lands on your piece, you get that piece sent “Home” again.  It was such a bad game though, that it was actually fun.  We enjoyed making fun of it as we played and didn’t take it seriously at all since it was so luck driven.  I think, the best part about playing the game was that my daughter ended up winning.  She trounced us all.  She rolled so many sixes it was crazy.

Thanks you all for giving us such a good and memorable baby shower.

BOARD GAMES\VIDEO GAMES

I was listening to the Dice Tower Podcast Tuesday and I was made aware of a Carcassonne site that had all kinds of variant rules and printable tiles for the game.  If you like Carcassonne and you want to try new and fun ways to play it, I highly recommend it:

Carcassone Central

Also this site led me to discover a Carcassonne like game for the iPhone with a Sci fi theme that seems really cool called XENO SOLA. It looks cool.

ART

For Part 1 CLICK HERE.

For Part 2, CLICK HERE.

To be continued next week…

BLOGS

The Art Center Blog is fast becoming one of my favorite art drawing blogs to read.  There are a ton of great tips and drawing advice worth reading about there.

One of the article that I really enjoyed recently has been some videos they’ve put up on the merits of warm up sketching during figure drawing.

I highly recommend the article. To read it, CLICK HERE.

VIDEOS

So before I started back at work, I discovered and got addicted to watching yet another anime cartoon.  This time it’s a series sequel to one of my favorite animes SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS (the first part of what was called ROBOTECH in the U.S. which I wrote about show a few weeks back). The sequel I’m now watching is called MACROSS FRONTIER. It aired in Japan in 2008 and has not yet seen a U.S. release.

When I became aware of this show, I thought I’d give it a look because I’ve been recently re-watching the original 1980s MACROSS.  I wasn’t really expecting to like it much.  Mostly because I haven’t really gotten into too many anime cartoons in years.  Also, because the last two MACROSS shows I’d seen, didn’t really blow me away either.  Namely, MACROSS 2 (which was pretty bad), MACROSS PLUS Vol. 1-4 (which looked fantastic and were fun to watch but the story didn’t blow me away) and MACROSS 7 (which was a sequel series to the original MACROSS, that was just plain dumb).  This one though, knocked my socks off. It had enough call backs and archetypes from the original MACROSS show to make it feel familiar, but at the same time, they changed things enough so that it’s new. In fact, if you’re familiar with the original show, there is a type of inside joke fake out that they do all the way through the series where you think they’re writing the same story and then turn you’re expectations on their heads.  It’s great.

Besides, I just can’t help watching cool robots fighting aliens. Especially when the robots transform from jets into robots. The effects on the robots and vehicles are mostly CG.

MACROSS is known for one of the female protagonists who ends up becoming a famous pop singer.  This meant the show had a singing component in it that sometimes made it a very lite musical. This version follows the tradition only I actually like the music for once and don’t find it annoying.

I’m also a big sucker for love triangles in my anime (as you can see from my own comic above) and this one has that too.

This is a fun cartoon to watch if you’re a MACROSS fan like me. Best MACROSS since the original. I’m not sure if the show will have the same impact on someone who hasn’t seen the original version but you might enjoy it anyway.  Give it a shot if you can find it online.

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Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.

THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Well, it looks like I’m going back to work a week early, which is awesome.  I’ve managed to NOT worry about money these last few weeks by avoiding spending any money (aside from bills) and NOT looking at my bank account.  Still, I know I need to start earning, we didn’t have a cushion when I left work.

I WAS enjoying having the time to work on my comic though.  It’s not like I can’t continue working on it once I’m back at work.

I also didn’t make it to figure drawing this week, to my great disappointment. Alesha was REALLY not feeling good and I needed to be home to take care of the kids while she tried to recover and rest.  I had a good time with the kids though. I’m planning on going to figure drawing from now on, even when I’m back at work next week.

BOOKS

Author and Publisher Paul Nowak is about to complete his latest book: Microcapitalism: A Small Business Manifesto.

According to Paul Nowak:

“Microcapitalism is a an economic system based on small property and small government, about keeping productive property - capital - in the hands of as many private citizens as possible.”

The idea of Microcapitalism is not exactly new. Nowak writes:

“Despite the integral nature of microcapitalism, it was not formalized as a socio-economic theory until the early twentieth century, when Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton began to promote the idea as “Distributism,” a counter to socialism and big-business capitalism that were unraveling the backbone of society. “

Something that seems very relevant to us today.

He’s planning on releasing the book for the kindle on April 15th but he wants to also raise the capital to publish it as a physical book. To this end he’s sent out a call of assistance by asking for sponsors and donor at the Microcapitalism page in KICKSTART.

If you’re interested please check out how you can help.  For more information, there is a video at the KICKSTART site as well as a clearer explanation of the book in question.

To read the press release CLICK HERE.

To read an article Paul Nowak wrote on the subject of Microcapitalism, CLICK HERE.

ART

For Part 1 CLICK HERE.

To be continued next week…

VIDEO

I’ve recently come across an Anime about drawing  “Do it yourself Comics” (DIY).  It’s called Comic Party and I really enjoyed watching it.  It’s about a guy who gets manipulated by his crazy friend into writing, creating, publishing and selling his own comic.  It’s really funny and “educational”. It was originally a Manga.  I thought the idea to make a comic or an animated cartoon focused on making comics was a great one. They did a fantastic job of making a very emotional story out of it.

If you ever get a chance to watch this anime, you ought to give it a shot.

CLICK HERE to buy an Uncle Chestnut T-shirt with my art on it.

If you like what you read, please consider signing up to my rss feed.

Comments are appreciated as well.

I also have a store. Click Here and check it out.

If you would like to have a text ad on my site, click on the red BUY LINKS button under the Archives list.

And while you’re at it, please Digg me too.

Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.

THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Finished with the last show I’m going to be doing Story Reel work on. I have now officially been moved to doing layout.  I was so rusty I didn’t really know where to start and how to do it. Fortunately I started remembering it all and things started moving faster as I went.  Now I just have to be able to get the scenes out on time.

ART

So before I had created my blog, but after I had done the Trip to Italy sketch diary, hired to draw some pages for a small The Krusty Book.  The best thing about one of the assignments I had gotten was that I was asked to draw a comic strip of Krusty the Clown only small called Li’l Krusty (ala. Peanuts or Little Lulu). I couldn’t believe it. I was going to get paid to draw Krusty cute. I jumped on the opportunity to draw Krusty in the cute style I like to use.  Which is the style I use on my blog and in my Italy trip journal.

I don’t have a copy of the finished pages, just the roughs.  So here are my rough pages of the strips I did. Oh, and I didn’t actually write the gags for these cartoons. I just drew them.

Lot’s of tracing back drawings in these.

Had fun drawing does big eyes.

In the final pass, they had me round out the eyes more when Krusty was in profile and they had me take off the clown shoes.

Chibi Sideshow Bobby was fun.

There came a point with the Sideshow Bobby strips, where the set up no longer needed new artwork so I just photo copied the first few panels and drew the punchline as new art.

In the final art, they also had me shrink Krusty’s ears.

As you can see below, the last panel on the strip above, was changed a bit to end with the monkey more centered:

I never received an actual copy of the book so I don’t even know how the comics turned out.  I DID look in Amazon and found that their preview of the book actually featured a strip.

VIDEOS

Growing up, in order to get my brother and I from spending all our time in front of the TV, my parents only allowed us one hour of TV a day. This meant that I had  to make the difficult decision of choosing a show to watch.  I wasn’t allowed to watch G.I. Joe because, even though my mom never watched it, she thought it was too violent.  So I watched another show, Robotech.  A show that appealed to me much more anyway and ironically, was far more violent than G.I. Joe ever was.

In G.I. Joe the Joes and Cobra used to shoot at each other with laser guns and never actually hit each other, EVER. In Robotech the protagonists where at war with an alien race and quite a few of them died horrible on screen deaths. One of the main characters even bled to death after a battle.  It was a very powerful very dramatic show. It influenced me quite a bit. As a kid, it actually forced me to deal with death and loss. It also showed by example, the difference between infatuation and sacrificial  romantic love. I grew up with and matured with Rick Hunter/Hikaru. It was one of the four Japanese shows I watched in my early years that ruined me to the watered down preachy cartoon shows of the 80s.  Shows I found annoying because I felt talked down to.

Hulu has recently released Super Dimension Fortress Macross (a.k.a. Robotech). Macross is the original version of Robotech as it was shown on Japanese TV.  The version on Hulu is a new dubbed version of the show. It’s great to see the show this way. The new dub is pretty good and actually makes it less cheesy than the original dub.

I highly recommend this show. Though I remember that the art quality starts getting worse as the show goes along. I’m not sure why.

PODCASTS

The Cartoonistas have a podcast now.  Cartoonista Radio.  Find out the inside scoop on all the Cartoonistas.

Visit:  Cartoonista Radio

MY WEB COMIC

I’ve started inking my comic finally.  I really screwed up page 4 the other day. I had to do a patch job on some panels and on a character.  I’ve also decided that I’m going to use computer fonts since my writing and sound effects came out looking really awful.I’m learning a lot and enjoying myself though.  I’ve learned that I’m NOT good at drawing with a brush. It’s much better to have a drawing better worked out before I start inking it.  Maybe someday I’ll be able to, but not yet.  I’ve also learned that I should be watching anything new on a monitor or on DVD while I work.  I get too distracted and I don’t pay enough attention to my inking and it all comes out looking lousy.

Once I’m done inking the pages I’ll scan them all in, re-letter them all and begin coloring it.

CLICK HERE to buy an Uncle Chestnut T-shirt with my art on it.

If you like what you read, please consider signing up to my rss feed.

Comments are appreciated as well.

I also have a store. Click Here and check it out.

If you would like to have a text ad on my site, click on the red BUY LINKS button under the Archives list.

And while you’re at it, please Digg me too.

Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.