Calling Jeff,...er, Skrbbl

I will do a mold for you. i also replied on my other blog. How long ago did you ask me if I could do a mold for you? As I explain on the other blog, the silicone rtv rubber can cost a lot if you have something big you want a mold of. What is it.? A Bionicle thingey? Hey, how many TAG people still have their sculpey refigerator magnet? I Do.

The Wrestler

Goofing off Sunday Evening listening to radio

Welcome Rick Randolph

Hey E'vbody,

None other than Mr. Rick Randolph, illustrator, game artist, actor, raconeteur and spreader of joy the world over, is joining our merry throng.

Let's hope Ellis will send him an official invite so Rick can start sharing his art work with us. Cuz I don't know how to. Hint Hint.

I Got A Million Of Them

Really, this is one page of a hundred page PDF doc. You want the link. It takes about 4 minutes to load. Uh Oh, it's 11 :59, bettter hurry

I Love Jim Gorham!

Tuesday Drawing!! Oh why not stir the pot? He doesn't come here anyway.

Grey marker first, then Expresso medium marker, then twist up crayon and white out for hightlights. Oh, then Dirty Dancing.

MUFFIN HEADED LOBSTER BOY

He looks very nervous...

I think he sees a wedge of lemon coming his way.

Or maybe a pat of butter.

Secret Wars Re-Enactment Society

You'll laugh your arse off when you take a gander at the Secret Wars Re-Enactment Society. See if you can spot our own little Scotty Buncake in the piece.

Creative Session Preview ...

Tomorrow will be a busy day ... Rockstar has its monthly creative session where people who have created digital paintings can have them printed out and then obtain advice and tips from others in attendance ... This will be my first time to attend (and I credit Tuesday Art Group and my own blogging with getting me to the point where I believe I can attend). I may have another quite different work done by tomorrow, but for now I'm putting an pre-session exclusive up for TAG to critique ... ;-)

I have in mind an intellectual property tentatively called "Privateer" that puts the reader/viewer/player in the person of a government official who is also a poacher and smuggler of alien creatures, biological products, technologies, and such (anything that will turn a profit). His goal is to get as much as he can out of the planet he's working on while walking a delicate tightrope between Eco-Rangers, other poachers, and the planet's lone sentient species. Only later does he uncover a terrible secret that could undermine everything he is doing, both good and bad.

This painting was inspired by Wayne Barlowe's Expedition paintings, and it will be the jumping off point for other digital art, as well as vehicle and creature designs. Oh, and I won't forget to also post updates to my Hero Worship scribbles ... It's all about becoming comfortable with the medium and the tools ...

My HomeMade, Spinning , Vertical Drawing Board

 I still have an easy way to go back to a flat table top. Just lift the vertical board away from where it leans on bicycle storage rack hardware. I already had the clipboard. Under the Clipboard is a cheap lazy susan, probably used to spin plants with or somesuch. It's all stuck onto the main board with hot glue. After i saw that Stephen Silver mostly worked vertical I had to try out building something for myself. I like it but especially for inking. Being able to easily spin the art, you're always pulling a line at the most natural and easy angle.

 for an url

Pupils?!

This is my latest computor edge cover... and the editors added pupils to my characters! They've ruined the wide eyed innocence of the characters with their little pen point pupils! Now they look drugged or crazed! They should have told me they wanted the eyes changed... I would have been happy to do it. I liked this cover and it's a shame that its been messed with. Sigh.

Freelance While Unemplyed

A place specializing in building theme parks for the Chinese also had this idea of a Jack Kirbyesque comic book adventure arena for a traveling show of wrestlers. It was a pretty good idea, a traveling tent show kind of deal specializing in bringing in huge size hick audiences. One of the things I did while unemployed 6 months ago.

SketchySketchSketch

Just some scribbles. Trying to work out a caricature of our VP of animation. Actually I like the smaller one better. I might blow that one up and clean it up later. The cars I think are remnants of seeing the "Cars" development stuff. I've been drawing alot of them lately.

"Hero Worship" Scribbles ... ;-)

It's Tooos-day ...

These scribbles are for a project that I am working on with the pastor of my church, Trinity Episcopal in Escondido. We're writing what amounts to a book called Hero Worship which provides lesson plans and inspiration for church teachers to dress up as a homegrown super hero in order to teach kids about the "super" heroes of the bible. We have everything done except for a chapter that gives adult-style background on such Old Testament heroes at David, Jonah, Deborah, Gideon, and Samuel ... All the lesson plans are ones that we used in class and the bible hero we created, aka Bibleman (apologies to the already established Bibleman character) is still going strong!

When finished, sketches like these will become part of the chapter I am writing to help the teachers decide what kind of costume to prepare so they can appear as a superhero to the class.

Comments? Always welcome.

Thursday Drawing (heh heh): Bot in Progress

Is it really Thursday??? Hey guys. I was just up in the Bay Area visiting friends and missed the Tuesday drawing. So here it is on Thursday. BTW got to visit Pixar and got to see their "Cars" gallery. I have to say that when I saw the trailer I wasn't really impressed but after seeing the art I got excited. Also my friend saw it and said it has more emotional than Toy Story 2!! Wow!

Here's What I'm Working On

Sorry I've been so bad about posting, but here's what most of my sketchbook pages look like these days. I don't know why, but currently the process seems to start with a lot of words at first, which slowly, over time, resolve themselves into pictures. Also, I'm uncomfortable with showing work in progress. I suppose I should do some side sketches in the meantime, but I lack Rick's spontaneity, tending to become fixated on just one project at a time.

L'il Red Robot

Here is the updated view of the L'il Red Robot ... I'm getting back into the swing of creating in Photoshop. Watch for add'l visual sophistication to bleed in as posts continue ...

CLOCK TOWER

Yet another setting from that Kindle story I tell myself I'm going to finish.

Hey, I got a piece accepted into Spectrum 13, which is due out in November. It's something I did for Everquest 2. Don't think I can post it here.

But I'm finally working on my first website. Hopefully that'll be up soon and I can post the piece there.

It was a rush reading the acceptance letter and knowing that artists like Brom were judges. Glad I finally took the chance - I'd been wanting to for a long time but was always too scared.

Page o' Weirdness

When the girls eat breakfast before school I will sometimes do some sketches while we chat... that's what we've got right here. The drawings have nothing to do with what we chat about, it's just something to occupy my hands. This is the original arrangement of the drawings... I only messed with the levels in Photoshop.

Quickeys

I have a rapidly depleting 1 by 1.5 size pad of post its in front of me today.

I added another doodle for my Tuesday contibution

Things are Mostly Good

Hey, give me another day or so. See that goopey looking piece of blue rubber. That has the ape body in it. Unfortunately the kicker or catalyst must have been mixed lightly in this last bit of the rubber. I've tried to scrape a little extra catalyst into the goopey parts to get it to harden up. I want to give it a day or so and hopefully I can make that final cast and send your kit back. I've published a couple of shots to show you how well everything else has come out. I'm sending you all that, extra heads, a mini asaro planes-of-the-head, and a disk with Beast of hollow Mountain. I'd hate for the body to be the only flawed and messed up part so I want to be patient and hopefully it will cure given the extra time.

My Brother and Me: "Are We THE SAME AGE?"

It's his birthday today, (for the next week we are technically the same age), and he's been bugging me for a caricature.

Quite disturbing, I think.

I'M the oldest, by the way.

My last post until I'm back in the U.S. of A.

My Desktop Image

Just to make sure Skrrbl is aware his sick mind is very viral. See the other, even sicker image, on story boredom.

Special Image for Jim G. For loaning me his Billikn kit of "GORILLA". This is foamcore boxing in preperation for silicone mold pouring. Two sheets of foamcore and about 10 glue sticks. And about three blistered fingertips. The main thing is not to waste the rubber so a lot of the foam core conforming around the shape of the kit part.

Pitching Your Ideas (Part IV)

Up to this point (Parts I - III) of this posting about pitching, I talked a bit about preparing for making a pitch, setting up the appointments, preparing the "leave behind," and being prepared to listen to what your pitch contact is saying to you during the pitch.

Here is the final segment.

Rick Schmitz, Brad Constantine, and I drove up to LA first thing in the morning and met with an executive with Film Roman. We were glad that F.R. was the first pitch because we didn't know that much about them and we needed a chance to get into some sort of groove. The exec let us pitch all our properties (Fly By Night, Digitiz'd and Creeple) and then he asked some questions about them. The most interesting was whether we thought the pitches were suitable for Flash anmation techniques ... and we said that out of all of them, Creeple was probably the most so, Digitiz'd the least, and Fly By Night somewhere inbetween ... ).

And that was that ... about 40 minutes, some nice coffee and water and a great, friendly meeting. He'd get back to us.

Next, we went to a comic book store to drop some minutes before lunch with Jeff Ranjo at his (then) digs at Disney ... What a great time, great conversation, (and the food was good, too).

Then we had to rush over to Cartoon Network to meet with Heather Kenyon (Family side) and Anissa Dorsey (Adventure side). Kenyon met with us first and we pitched Fly By Night and Creeple to her. The Film Roman experience showed because we were much calmer as we moved through the material. We were also calm because Kenyon's demeanor put us at ease -- you could tell she wanted us to succeed, maybe even as much as we wanted to do so ourselves.

The pitching went well and afterward Rick and Brad chatted about their background and experiences as I went next door to pitch Digitiz'd to Dorsey. Like Kenyon, she was professional but friendly. I went through the pitch with her and the we, too, chatted for a bit.

Here are the breakdowns of results:

1) Fly By Night: Was a keeper for Kenyon (though subsequently passed on). Good characters, nice casting a family of vampires against a high tech city, excellent designs and leave behinds.

2) Creeple: Also very enthusuastic about the visuals, but Kenyon wondered about

3) Dorsey asked a lot of questions, then basically passed on the pitch because she already had too many superhero stories and couldn't see adding another, especially one that didn't wasn't an established property. She also doubted whether a female superhero could generate interest in their core demongraphic (youngish boys) to get going. Lastly, she thought that Impy, the avatar, was too much like the Genie in Aladdin ... too derivative.

Being prepared is always good, and one of the pointers that stuck with me was: "Think on your feet during a pitch ... don't just lay down and die." So, after Dorsey finished, I asked if I could make a counter suggestion ... and that was to take the young supporting character and elevate him to be the star of the show. Then, Impy could become his sidekick... the female superhero angle would be gone, the main character would be a young male with attitude, and who wouldn't want to have a digital sidekick to help get you into and out of trouble.

The upshot is that Dorsey liked the twist and invited me to put together new materials and come back up for a second session. I did so, and the meeting went well, though Digitiz'd was ultimately passed on.

The last pitch of the day went to Nickelodeon. While we were pitching, who should saunter down the hallway outside our conference room but Doug TenNapel ... and he stopped in to pump us up (and deride the videogame industry that still employed all of us at that time (and continues to do so). In the end, while the Nick exec liked some of our approaches, they were looking for a zany compliment to SpongeBob Squarepants and nothing we brought compared even a bit favorably (Creeple came the closest).

After dinner, we went home, buoyed up by the experience and looking forward to the future.

Ask me any question you might have about pitching - I'm an email click away. Pitching is a process of learning, experimenting, and challenging yourself to develop something that makes someone stop and say, "I've never seen anything like that before ... and I want to see more!" And while the future still holds limitless possibilities, think about making a pitch yourself (yourselves ... ).

Like us, you won't ever regret it.

Bravo!

Hey guys. I was just checking out the cool crits you've been giving each other and that's just awesome! You're using the internet for good and not evil! So I was just thinking that maybe we could add an extra tool for those discussions. I will make everyone an administrator so that you can add drawings or go over somebody else's drawings (if they desire). Just go and edit the post adding your drawing to the already created post. Simple! Oh just try it and see how it works. Okay? Sorry not much time to post as deadlines abound!

Anatomy Hands

Here are some pencil sketches, ostensibly meant for "The Anatomy Book Project." The biggest hand is the good one; I'm very marginal at hands, and can only produce worthy results after a great deal of application. I'm curious what you guys think of the style on the big one, which is a somewhat tonal approach crossed with a little linear flourish. I think the best part is the forearm/upper arm region, where I'm indicating the muscles very graphically (maybe I should say "linear-ly", if that's any sort of word). I am attracted to this because I like the shapes of the fingers in this flayed, corpse figure.

I did this study from a photo I took at the now-famous "Body Worlds" exhibit (still at the Science Museum in LA, by the Colisseum?). I'll post the photo reference, too.

I have a much more finished version of an arm up at the notorious EUROCHINO site, which you, dear fellow TAG-iste, are welcome to inspect.

Word.

Cartoon Guys

Examples of my attempt to get the swing of cartooney character design. The Blue pencil is Silver refining the designs I brought in. I went with the guy having a bowling shirt and kind of a childish demeanor. Thanks for the guidance on "cartooney" Jeff.

Tom Carroll's 1st TAG Post (tah daaah)

A page of scribbles in support of Voodoo Gangsters. Visit my blog pitchscribblerant -- Rick Schmitz shouldn't be alone in his shameless blog plug :-) -- and you'll see that I began this a while ago and have now begun to consider it as something to pitch to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim group. They like 15 minute cartoons that have topical (often inanely topical) humor. Voodoo Gangsters, as part of a segment that I call "Gated Community" might be just good enough to make it. The topmost image is of the first Voodoo Gangster I drew ... the inspiration, so to speak. The page of scribbles I did yesterday. Some are original, others are based on what I saw when I Google Image'd "Voodoo Mask" ...

BTW: I couldn't help but scribble a little voodoo doll with my initials stitched across the chest. While I'm not superstitious by nature, I think I'll have to watch my back for a while ... ;-)

More to come. Comments welcome.

Shameless Plug Post

For my Tuesday drawing I thought I would post a character from my blog to generate some traffic to it. http://rickart.blogspot.com/