Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Look at these clips

http://www.adultswim.com/shows/pilotweek/

and tell me, do they not all feature the same exact character: a reckless slob that acts completely irresponisibly and occasionally gets stranded in a boat at sea or crashes a car through building facades. Whoever green-lighted/"developed" all 5 of these shows secretly wishes that (s)he were sociopathic.

Friday, May 18, 2007

Colbert Plays DVNR'ed Charlie Brown




For a second i thought, that's weird animation effect to wobbly erase the outlines... than i realized exactly how random the line erasures are. Teh culprit is DVNR again!



DVNR_CB
Uploaded by tacos4all


I ought to make a slo mo version later.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Panda! Pa Panda, Kopanda!!


Gene Shallot


Tee Vough my Azzzzz

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Need inspiration? And Cheap?

Look no further than the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive at animationarchive.org. You can't visit this site without getting some sort of idea. They have so many of the most skillful and beautiful cartoons, animation, and illustration art that I've never heard of anywhere else. Every time, I visit i find at least one "new" image tha t blows me away. My favorite area at the moment is the Golden Age of Illustration. The work there is so beautiful and blows away so much of the work done since. Moreover, I will probably never have to buy any books on animation and illustration including the original (copyright infringing) version of Preston Blair's seminal Advanced Aniamtion , which has jsut about all the information you would need to learn to animate 1940s style cartoons. A lofty goal for sure!

And of coares there is Chiquita Banana ♥

Just check out my previous post if you don't believe the blog can get you going.

Saturday, May 5, 2007


I was looking over some of these Heinrich Kley sketches from a recent ASIFA post and i noticed two things while perusing his sketches:

A) He seems to see the structure of the thing first and then sort of traces or with his actual line. (see above image) That's why he probably can draw his line's so freely and confidently. He knows where they are going already, so it's just a matter of adding flourish to it.

B) Sketches in general seem to contain nonexistent lines. By this i mean lines that are not actually visible in the physical thing you are drawing.


For example, in Kley's leopard here there are are lines whizzing about every which way up and down its tail and spin and around it's legs. The almost seem to indicate internal anatomy or just general line of action for different parts of the body. It's almost as if the artist is drawing path of some sort of metaphysical energy that isn't necessarily visible. Life itself!



I don't know what that circle in the hippo's neck is supposed to be but i sure does look exciting! And it doesn't look "wrong" or "bad".


If one were to make a polished drawing of these sketches These would probably be the first liens to get omitted as "unnecessary" clutter. However a lot of times when i do that with my won sketches (and i see it frequently in others too professionals even) it seems all-of a sudden less alive. "They" say the trick to making a finished drawing is to capture the same vitality of the sketch, but somehow i think it's impossible, because those superfluous lines are illustrations of the life energy itself. So any time you omit that are you necessarily making a less vital drawing? I've always had this saying that the best way to honor a spontaneous moment is not to capture but to create another one. So perhaps the best way to translate final drawing from a draft isn't to faithfully trace it but rather to use it as inspiration and guidance for your final set of lines.

Shameless Imparting



So the other day Johnk posted all sorts of details about these storyboarding lessons he's giving his pupil, Rex. At the end of the post is the complete outline for the cartoon Rex was storyboarding. Well, the story was so inspiring and I got really excited about it. All these pictures started popping up in my head. So I started illustrating my own take on the outline. Of course I had already viewed Rex's drawing for most of the cartoon so most of it ended up being plagiarism. However, I think my main point of this was to elaborate my own details into the storyboard. Moreover, I screwed up some of the details, such as George should be stuffing an elephant seal; I just drew a generic sea otter thingy.I also had a bunch of ideas about the rest of the story but @ 5am I sorta needed to get SOME sleep. Ha. IN any case here's what I DID draw: