Check out this wall art

Here is something that I wanted to do fo the past two years at least, but have only slowly made progress on it. My dad carved this picture into a board using a CNC machine before he left his job as a woodworker. He gave it to me for my birthday a couple years ago and I always wanted to paint behind the carving. Two years went by, and I finally got around to painting it. Another 6 months go by, and I finally blacken all the edges, sand it down and through a light oil finish on it. I like how it turned out.

Roman Alphabet

Check out this playing around with the thick and thin roman alphabet. Seems like this is a good basis that all lettering can be used for. After learning about the history of graphic design, I have a new appreciation and love of type and letters. I also realized I have very little skills in lettering and this is one thing I will be working on.

My Animation Desk is Finished!!!

Holy cow, three posts in three days. It seems like I must have made a new years resolution to blog more often, but unfortunately I didn't. I just have more time on my hands and more things to show. So I am excited to show off my new animation table. Just finished putting the hardware on it and assembling it a couple hours ago. The top had an old dark varnish and veneer on top. I decided to take it off because it was beat up after fifty years of use and abuse (maybe more or less time, who knows?) and found 1 inch thick solid red oak top. It has lots of bug holes in it, so I can see why they veneered it, but now-a-days we have epoxy to fill holes and I think it looks beautiful with all of its natural holes. It is not perfect, but it is good enough here it is. Right now it uses some pneumatic gas spring stays, so it is either open or closed and it is open at 60degs. If you guys want more pics or have any questions let me know.

Indian Love

Come on everyone, can't you feel it? That special feeling right above your gut. You know what I'm talking about, that good old fashioned, --Indian Lovvveeee. Here is a sketch I made when I was home for the holidays. We were watching some sappy Christmas love story I think. Then I scanned it into the computer and painted it in ArtRage. Now I think that I have to go practice lettering and calligraphy.

Jazzy Storyboards

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! It's 2013 and 2012 is in the past. (who would have guessed we would have made it past the end of the world on Dec 21 2012). I thought I should start the year off right with a nice post for my readers. Remember a while ago, I spilled the beans about a new cartoon that I am working on. Well here is the next installment of the creative process. These pages are the results from the gag and story idea sessions I had (unfortunately I was by myself and had nobody to bounce ideas off of). Haven't really worked on it lately though. I bought a car six weeks ago and while the weather was nice, I spent most of my free time working on it. Then once it colder, I took the top off of my desk and stripped the old varnish off, cut half of it up and made a hole in the middle for the animation disk. I finished that a couple days ago and I am currently letting the danish oil finish dry. I don't know how much protection it will provide. I might have to put a poly(polyurethane) coat for durability. Finally these last couple of days I have been painting and playing around with calligraphy, which I am really bad at.

Failed Commercial Work

School is over for the term and due to me moving to another state and waiting to gain residency, it is going to be  little bit before I go back. Which is fine by me!

About a month (or 2 or 3 months?) ago I met with a lady who needed an illustrator to design some pictures for her children book. I met with her and she showed me one picture that she had for the project. She didn't give me much direction to go with my art, so I made some line drawings. Then I took one of them and painted it in a bunch of different ways. After I sent them back to her, she never responded. After waiting a couple of days, I tried some more, but no response. Then about 2 weeks after I first emailed them back to her, my friend who new the lady, told me she didn't like them.

So here they are for you!

It would have been fun to do my first commission, but I wasn't too worried about not getting it. I feel that she might have not been ready to move forward with the project yet, so she just backed out. Or maybe she just really didn't like my art.

Spilling the Beans

Well, these last couple of weeks I have been working in complete secrecy, in the dark, damp underground cartooning lair that I call home. Slaving away day after day on a new animated short that I want to make. Right now I have it storyboarded, and timed out on barsheets (explanation to come in another post).

Lets start off from the beginning though. Where it all started. I wanted to start with an incredibly simple premise.
     - Two guys have trouble getting into a club, and then once they are inside, they find a girl and have trouble inside the club.-

Stay tuned for more titillating images to come.

Failed Concept and Doodles

First up is my concept that I scrapped that was going to be for my buddies magazine. I just didn't think it read well at first glance, and you shouldn't have to figure out what is going on in a cartoon. It should be easily recognizable and understandable. That being said, what do you think it is?

 The rest are doodles from watching tv with my buddies. Some are my of my friends, others are what was on the TV and the rest are from my imagination. The shaded drawing at the bottom was done earlier yesterday.

Landscape Painting

Not that I think this is particularly good, but it was my first try at a landscape. This is something that I will definitely have to work on.

Prob took me about 2 hours from start to finish, from a picture. Man, doing these makes me admire people who can whip out awesome speed drawings in like a half hour. This one isn't even polished and it took me a long time.

Business Card

It's official, I am now for hire. Now that I have my newly designed business cards, I am ready to do business. I didn't think that I would need a business card so soon, but my boss has been talking me up to an acquaintance of hers that deals with publishing. She asked for my card, so I made one up. I didn't want to pay for 250 business cards, that were double-sided and full color, because the cheapest place in town was $40, and vistaprint would still be about $17-20. I decided to do it the old fashioned way, and print it out on nice cardstock at FedEx Printing just a couple blocks away. The end result looks awesome, but it took a little bit of trial and error though.

Here are a couple of unused designs that I came up with, but decided not to use.

 Pencil sketched in ArtRage with rotated and transformed stencils for the blocks of color, I really like the feel of this one with the construction lines beneath.

 The finished product in a couple different examples. Done in Inkscape (which is an awesome free program. Very powerful) I decided it was too heavy though and scrapped it.

Pretty much the final design. After my first printing though, I decided to enlarge my phone number and email to make it more legible.

After the first printing I learned a couple of things that I hadn't thought of. First, printers can't print white, so anything white will show up as the color of the paper being used. That is what I did for my final card. I picked a paper that was tan like my design and printed on that. Second, I saved my images as 8.5 x 11, but I forgot that printers needed around a 1/8-1/4 margins around the absolute edges. So, my first print was automatically scaled down a little bit to fit into the printable area. For my next printing I exported my image at like 10.6 x 8.2 so that it didn't get scaled down.

 Here is the full-sized sheet that went to the printer.

Then I also realized I needed a backside, which wasn't too much trouble to do. Here is my first design.

Here is the full-sized sheet that was used. There was a lot of variation in this design but unfortunately, I didn't save jpgs of all of the variations.

Finally, here is some photos of my card in all of its glory. I then got out my ruler and my exacto knife and sliced them into perfect rectangles.

Overall, it cost less than $2, which is right up my alley. $0.53 per side plus $0.12 per piece of cardstock.