THE SIMPSONS NEWS

First week of working on show 13. I was assigned act 1 and 4.

This show’s writer’s were freelancers. According to my director Mark Kirkland, the writer’s union requires the show to bring in at least one outside script every season.  Turns out, this script, is pretty darn good and very funny.

Speaking of Mark Kirkland, I was listening to the TOON IN! podcast last week and I heard an interview with him on the podcast.

I found it fascinating and I highly recommend you give it a listen.

To listen to it: CLICK HERE

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.)

Alright, so it’s time to start adding poses for my “motion test”.  I’m limiting the poses to five total (including the last pose, which I’ve already finished and colored). If I think I need to add an anticipation pose (antic) or an overshoot (ovs) I’ll put them in later. For now I’ll just want to draw clear, well drawn “key” poses.

Easier said than done.

For the first time since I started writing my process, I didn’t want to post up my drawings.  I’m having sooo much trouble with these drawings.  I’m not happy with them at all. Still, it’s part of the process. I need to show them even when I think I’ve failed or when my skills aren’t up to par.

Generally, when I begin posing out a scene, I draw the gestures of all the poses I’m going to use.  I do this so I can check if my poses are going to work how I want them to, without having to go into the labor of making pretty drawings. This is what they looked like:

Looking at hot dog….

About to take a bite…

and sees something...

reaction shot from pull out (as will be seen further down below)…

Once I’m satisfied that I’ve got the poses that I want, I then begin to flesh out the drawings.

Okay, so I’m used to drawing bug eyed yellow people for a living. The style of the show is such, that I don’t really need to give them really naturalistic poses.  When I’m confronted with characters that DO need to give natural poses to, it suddenly becomes really difficult.  I can’t rely on the bad habits that I’ve picked up in my last 17 years.

So here’s me, trying really hard to make Rob look like he’s holding a hot dog very naturally:

As I drew the drawing above, I realized I hadn’t really worked out Rob’s model as much as I thought I had.  Especially the hair from this point of view.  Also, I wasn’t too sure about the nose, mouth and chin relationships.  I drew the drawing below over the drawing above:

I still didn’t like the drawing, though I thought it was getting better.  I took some time solve the hair problem and I drew the drawing below:

Better hair shape but I STILL didn’t like the drawing.  It felt staged.  He just didn’t look natural. Who holds a hot dog and admires it like that? It looked a bit weird. I thought perhaps it was just a matter of turning the head and shoulders:

But it was even worse when I did that.  I didn’t even bother drawing a nice version, I could tell it wasn’t going to work right away.

I went online and Googled people holding hot dogs. I must admit, in the back of my mind, there was this thought that perhaps I should change the hot dog to a hamburger or a pizza, because the idea of a pretty boy in a tight shirt admiring a hot dog seemed to hint at something I didn’t intend. In the end I convinced myself not to. Mostly, because I personally love eating hot dogs and I just wanted it to be a hot dog. I also looked at it as a challenge to myself.

One of the things I looked for, were photos where guys held hot dogs without it being an ad.

I found that the ones that looked most natural to me, were the ones where guys held something else in their other hand, like a drink. Another thing was that they didn’t really hold the hot dog up high, but kept it at chest level.  So I gave Rob a drink and lowered the hot dog:

It was better.  So I cleaned it up a bit so I can see it better:

…and RUINED IT, by giving him a crazed expression.  I’m going to need to go back  to the drawing above and figure out a better expression than the one I gave him.

I got frustrated and decided I should just keep going with the other poses and come back to the first pose later. Here’s pose two:

As you can see from all my drawings here, I don’t have a light touch.  I scribble a lot until I find what I need. I explore until I can visualize where I want to go and then do another pass to clarify the scribbles:

Once again, fail. I don’t think this reads the way I want. It’s too stiff. It needs to be redrawn in a different way.

I moved on to the next panel anyway:

Not sure about this one either. I’ll need to see what I do with the panel before it, in order to decide whether or not I should keep it. I cheated drawing it because all I did was cut and move the face and arms around from the pose before, instead of redrawing the pose.

I kept going and drew the last pose:

Not sure how it’s working so far.  It seems off. Especially because of the slanted background.  I may need to slant Rob a bit.  Also, I think I need to move the camera down so Rob’s feet aren’t on the edge of the frame.

Overall, I’m just frustrated with the work.  I need to work through it though.  I know at some point, I’ll hit something I think is working and I’ll come out learning something.

VIDEO

This is an amazing animated short.  Very inspiring. It’s a very interesting marriage of Japanese and western animation influences:

FAMILY

Big things are happening here with our family.  At least big when it comes to milestones for two of our kids.

The first one is that Dante (2 1/2 years old) went pee pee in the pottie for the first time.  This is big for us since it means less diapers to buy when he finally get pottie trained.  He’s been doing good so far and we’re very proud of him.

The second is that baby Ambrose can now scoot himself around the house.  We love it. He looks so funny doing it and he’s that much closer to being able to crawl.  The best part about it is that now we can set him on the carpet and relax while he entertains himself playing with toys and chasing after his big brother and sister.

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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.

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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 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.

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.