THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Thankfully, I’ve had a light work load week this week.  Mostly working on a Couch Gag.  I’m sure the next episode I get put on will not be this way.

The holidays are coming up and that means we get some days off.  This SHOULD be a good thing, but it rarely ever is.  The reason being that, even though we get some days off, our deadlines stay the same.  This generally means that we have the same amount of work to do in less days AND with less people (since some people take more time off).

I really hope the next episode I work on, has the same level of re-writes as the episode I’m on right now.

PODCASTS

I’m gonna be telling you about the PAPER WINGS podcast today. I don’t think I’ve brought up this podcast before.

The PAPER WINGS podcast is a podcast hosted by Chris Oatley and Lora Innes.  The point of the podcast is to help you become a better artist and land your dream job in comics or animation.  It’s one of the best podcast around when it comes to this topic.  It’s a very positive and inspiring podcast, full of great information and advice.

Earlier this week I was catching up on some past episodes when I got to episode #17. It’s titled: Creator Interview with Comfort Love and Adam Withers, where in they do exactly that, interview the husband and wife team who write and draw the Harvey Award nominated comic, THE UNIQUES.  I have to say, it’s one of the BEST interviews about creating and making a living off of your own comic creations I’ve ever heard.  I listened to it in my car on my way home from work and my jaw was on the floor from all the fantastic information in this interview.

If you’re an aspiring artist and creator, this is a MUST listen.

CLICK HERE to for the link.

ART

Finished designing the last demon for my project! That’s it, no more things to design (that I’m aware of). I can finally get to the ACTUAL production of my film.  Next week I’ll begin storyboarding my film.  I have yet to record myself, and to be honest, as things stand with my crumby computers, I don’t know how I’m going to do it.  I’ll figure something out though.

Okay, so here’s the design:

It’s not much to look at I’m afraid. The design needs to be a tad more work but it’s what I want.

Okay so this was one of the toughest designs I’ve had to do.  I kinda had something in mind but when I tried it, it fell apart on me. Since the theme of this demon was blades, I wanted to draw something that fit the theme visually. I began with the sketch up top on the right. I was thinking I wanted to have a creepy head where you can only see it’s ugly mouth and the rest of it would be blades, but what I drew was not what I wanted and it would have been a pain in the neck to draw all those blades all the time.  So I thought, maybe if it was armored, but then I realized it didn’t say “blades” to me, so I began experimenting with having the armor be sharp.  That’s why it has those sharp looking shoulder pads.  Thing is, I didn’t want to have to draw all those sharp things over and over. It would have made it too complicated to have made it look right.

I went to my reference folder that I keep, which has photos that I thought would inspire me.  It had some creepy looking gas masks and I thought maybe I would use that as a theme and maybe have tentacles or something coming out of it. This is what I started drawing on the top left of the page. I really didn’t like any of it though and I gave up.

The next day, I went online for inspiration.  I looked at photos and I was getting nothing, until I came across another gas mask but this one seemed hand made and all torn up. My original idea kept creeping back into my head, of having a head with only a creepy mouth showing. I combined the feel  of the gas mask from the photo with the mouth showing idea and stuck two blades in the eyes. I thought it was creepy. But then, it needed a body. I just started drawing, something gaunt and thin but when it came to the one hand, I thought I’d give it blade fingers, then the other, I thought I’d do something else and gave it a blade arm, as if he might have gotten it cut off and replaced it with the blade.  Finally, I thought I’d give it stitches, so it seemed as if it cut itself a lot, by accident.

That was it. I liked it. I might need to mess with it a little to streamline the design but It’s pretty much what I wanted.

So now that I’m FINALLY done with pre-production, it’s to time to get to the good part…

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