Here’s what I’m thinking for format and schedule of this blog:

I’d like to post twice a week. One post will feature my own work and the other will contain references to other works I like, with commentary.

So in the spirit of post type number two, I wish to introduce John Kricfalusi

For those of you don’t know, John K. is the creator of Ren and Stimpy, among other things, and runs a fine blog. He’s kind of credited with the revival of animation that began with Ren and Stimpy at Nickelodeon and has been carried on by many outfits all the way over to the Cartoon Network.

His blog includes really interesing commentary and theories on animation, and great samples of his own work and other artists he admires. Plus, he’s a funny guy.

Make sure to check out his Beautiful People posts.

Now, just a sample of things I’ve found on his site that have had me in stitches:

Okay, just a couple of days to go until the end of the month, and I’ve got a ton of stuff to post. I’ll probably be dividing some of these sketches up into several posts, for thematic reasons, and cause there’s a lots of them.

washed up super heroes.

The drawing below is a good example of not letting your subject matter tie you down. I drew this as my wife was watching the end of Pretty Woman. There’s a scene where Julia Roberts is having lunch with her hooker friend, and is wearing this red pants suit and has hair that looks like it was chizled out of ice.

The sketch is more of an impression than trying to be a mathematical likeness of Julia.

Trying to be too exact while sketching can be really stifling, in fact Walt Stanchfield advises that you modify a pose to make it more dynamic. He also talks about the idea of empathizing with a pose–trying to understand it emotionally–then sketching that impression. Sketching what you feel, more than what you see.

What’s up with these grey smudges? Maybe I need to push down more on my sketch book when I’m scanning.

Okay, I’m finally caught up scanning everything I want to scan from my sketchbook. I’ve been reading some notes by Walt Stanchfield and I thought it had been too long since I’d done some gestures. Here’s a sampling, although I really should be drawing from life to do this.



Elegance.

Emotion!
Monster!
Lilith.
My wife thought this drawing was very boring and advised against me posting it.

Just for the record the sketches below are of eyes previously drawn by Phil Noto. I love the way he draws eyes. What I try to implement in my drawings and that guys like Phil Noto, Frank Cho and Ian McCaig do very well is render the eye with form.

A naive rendering of an eye doesn’t take advantage of all of the complexity in the eye, instead it paints the eye onto the face as if it were drawing on the surface of a balloon. An eye is a sphere with flesh wrapping around it in very interesting ways. I love seeing the dimension of the eyelids, especially the suggestion of the edges and how they twist and pinch into the curruncula.

That’s something I constantly have to try and push myself to do–draw with form. It’s so easy to pick up a cliche I like and totally flatten it.

Phil Noto also does great stuff with eyelashes.

After getting all pumped copying Phil Noto’s eyes I hopped over to gettyimages and made some sketches of faces I found interesting. Hopefully seeing different variations of faces will help me to avoid future cliches.

Mirna Sirtis!

By request, here’s some of the development that went into Super Secret Project.

By the way, did I mention this was the funnest thing I’ve done in years? Well it was.

Here’s some of the Klee stuff I was looking at. I love that Klee’s stuff is whimsical, and unsettling at the same time. I shied away from the unsettling bit in my stuff, but I hope the whimsy is still there.

and here are the original color studies I did in painter before I did the finished panels below in Illlustrator.

I’ll try and get the animated bit up soon!

These are some concepts I did for a super secret project we were working on over at 8fish. I don’t know if I’ll get in trouble for saying to much about it since it’s for spec on an ad campaign that hasn’t come out yet.

What I can tell you is that I drew inspiration from this gem and I found on cartoon brew a whiles back, with a little bit of Paul Klee thrown into the mix.

I’ll try and post some of the thumbnails I did preceding this stuff.

Action!

The kids video game in this is the coolest thing I’ve done in a long time.

Thanks to Gibbs Rainock who did the majority of the animation on this thing. You can see more of his stuff here.

More Jot!

More sketches coming soon.

Here’s the rest. I think the problem was on my end, but on the balance I don’t know if I want to uplaod all my images to blogger.

I think in the future I’ll host them elsewhere.

Okay, I’ve already done some sketching so I’ve got to catch up. Here’s some hilights from my sketchbook so far.

A little bit of Bone to practice my line quality. This pic was preceded by about 10 pages of practive strokes including ellipses. Circles are hands down, the hardest thing to draw.

I’m also using a brush marker, which I don’t like as much as a brush, but I’m pretty okay with the results here.

Brush marker and prismacolor black pencil. Prismacolor black pencil is a great drawing tool introduced to me by the illustrious Ernest Harker who runs the show at 8fish, where I do most of my work.

My wife doesn’t like the look of marker. Maybe this will change her mind!

Okay, looks like I can’t upload a bazillion images to Blogger at one time. I’ll try and post my other sketches in another post.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to post every page. This is just the first page to prove when I started it.

The sketch on the left was inspired by a trip to this sight:

Kristen’s Sketchblog

cool stuff eh?

*sigh*

Well, I’ll keep at it and see if I can do something as cool Kristen one of these days.

So about a year and half ago a wiseman at Comicon told me that I needed to do a lot more sketching. He pointed at another fellow and told me that man filled a sketchbook everymonth. He then pointed at another gentleman and explained that said gentleman filled a sketchbook every week.

A lesson was learned!

Since that fateful day I’ve had a handful of sketchbooks that have been filled in under a month’s time.

But what’s certain is that it’s never been documented on the web.

Soooo….

I’m going to selectively be posting sketches from my April sketchbook that was started March 31st (head start) and will be finished April 30th.

By the way (BTW) the wiseman, the fellow and the gentleman can sometimes be found hanging out at the drawing board

Every programmer that’s worth his salt knows that the first program you write is a “Hello World” program. It’s a program that basically just says, “Hello World”.

Since this is a blog, and its computers, I figured it would be a good way to start. Hence:

hello world

Now we can get down to business.