THE SIMPSONS NEWS

I’ve started opening the door to the office I’m in. It gets really lonely in that big room and it helps me feel like there are people out there when I leave it open.  It helps invite people to come in and say hi as well. That helps.

Last week, I got locked out of my office. I came in at 7am and found the door locked and I didn’t have a key.  Lucky for me, my producer gets in around 8:30am so she opened it for me.  While I had time, I cleaned up my old cubicle a bit and wandered around the studio. Especially in the area of the studio where they’re producing the Marvel comics animated shows, like HERO SQUAD and THE AVENGERS. I walked around and geeked out over all the cool superhero artwork on the walls.  It was both a fun and irritating morning.

FAMILY

Saturday was my mom’s birthday. We celebrated it by taking her out to a picnic in a park by a lake. We had a great time. We threw Frisbees, ate sandwiches, took walks, threw rocks in the lake and generally had a good time spending time with her, even though I got sun burned…and really sore.  Ouch.

Happy Birthday Mommie! I love you.

BOARD GAMES

Two articles ago I wrote about how Mariam and Anthony came over with baby River and how Anthony and I played some board games. I also wrote about how we were going to plan to get together to play again sometime but this time, with everyone.  Well, sometime was last Sunday.  They came by in the late afternoon so we had plenty of time to play.  It was going to be a big experiment, as far as I was concerned, because I wasn’t sure if the kids would let us play. We were going to play CRANIUM but their copy of the game had run off somewhere.  It was a shame because I think the kids might have been able to participate.  I ended up bring out CARCASSONNE because I thought the kids might want to participate helping out one of us in that game.

It sorta worked but Dante left in a huff after I told him he couldn’t flip over all the tiles and that he had to wait his turn. Elizabeth lasted a bit longer before she felt she wasn’t really playing, got up and left.  We played the game to it’s end and then ate dinner. I put the kids to bed after we were done eating and we started a game of TICKET TO RIDE: EUROPE.

It was a very fun game with quite a few laughs.  Especially once Anthony realized that he could start messing peoples routes up.  He messed me up pretty good a few times and then he tried messing Mariam up. Once the game was over we started counting up all the extra points.  That’s when the game really got interesting, mostly because Anthony and Mariam ended up with a tie for first place.  The tie breaker would be the “Longest Route” card.  Mariam won it and won the game.

We were all in good spirits after that and wanted to play something else but it was getting late.  I brought out LOOT, which is a twenty minute long game.  Alesha was on the phone pretty much the whole game, so it kinda messed up the fun of the game a bit.  The rest of us were having a huge battle for merchant ships.

Overall we had a good time and the kids were surprisingly good.  All of them, including the babies.   Baby Ambrose hung out at the table and watched a lot.  Unfortunately by the time I was holding him, he started getting fussy and  the place on the table I was sitting at made it awkward for me to take care him well.

We had fun, and it’s possible that we’ll do it again sometime.

ART

I’m definitely past the “not wanting to work on my project” hump.  Now, I can’t wait to get a chance to work on it.

Soon after I posted my last article, I remembered a website I bookmarked that might help me with my reference problem.  I checked it out. Turns out I was right. It was exactly what I needed. It had both, good costumes and great character types.  I spent my lunch hour downloading photos that I might be able use.  That same night, I came home and began to sketch from them:

But then I thought to myself, maybe I should draw some silhouettes  before I continue drawing faces. I went and got my copy of THE SKILLFUL HUNTSMAN, opened it to the silhouettes pages for inspiration.

The pages in the book where cool.  I thought to myself, I could do that. I was wrong:

Wow, THAT didn’t go as planned. I rolled a critical miss on my “draw cool, well designed silhouette” skill check.  Doing them is waaay more difficult than I had anticipated. I thought I understood what I was doing but I guess not.  Frustrated, I stopped for the night and decided to try something else  the next day.

After reading my last post, Zach Bosteel suggested that I ought to look at actors Tilda Swinton and Steve Buscemi for inspiration for character types.  He was dead on. I thought they might actually work pretty well as Sorcerers. I started to sketch them:

My drawings didn’t quite capture their likeness but that wasn’t the point.  I just wanted to capture their “type”. Still, I WAS trying to capture their likeness just as a personal challenge. Failed my “capture likeness” skill check too. You’d think with a face like Steve Buscemi’s I’d be able to draw him easier.  Tilda Swinton, is just a pain to draw since she’s so plain.  I’m just really bad a caricatures I guess. I need to practice it much more. I got what I wanted though, so I kept on going.

I then went into my photo reference and began mixing and matching a little. These are the photos I used:

My first thought (Groups 1 below) was to take the Steve Buscemi type and give him crazy hair while combining the vest from the guy (in the second photo above),  the long haired guy’s pants (from the third photo above) and the happy guy’s shoes (from the first photo).  In the end, I didn’t like it one bit.  I then used jawbone boy’s face (the last picture above) and put it on that body (Drawing 2 below). It worked better but I still wasn’t happy.:

I gave that up and tried a different direction. I used the photo below and drew the guy on the left, pretty much, straight out  for drawing 3 (above):

I  liked it.  I thought I could use that design as the second male Sorcerer. I thought it would be funny to give that guy a Steve Buscemi type face which would be the reason why wares his hair down over it.

A few days later I looked at some more photos and picked these:

I took the guy  on the top right and tried drawing him (drawing 1 below).  I thought it was funny since the guy looks like a rejected Duran Duran band member.  I then thought I’d try something I’d been thinking about for a while and tried drawing jawbone boy with a hoodie (second photo above) (Drawing 2 below). I didn’t like it so I tried drawing the Duran Duran guy again using different shapes which I liked (Drawing 3 below).  I then skipped back to the other design idea and tried to make the collar work (Drawings 4 below) but it just made him look like an astronaut or something:

So far I’m leaning more in the direction of the Duran Duran guy.   I kinda like the idea for some reason. It makes me laugh. I also like the jawbone boy’s face thought. Either way, I’m getting closer to what I’m going to end up using.

What do you think?

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