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When You Are Reading a Letter....

This image is the menu that can be found at the UPPER RIGHT corner of your letter.

UPPER RIGHT of your letters. Get it?

Click Print. It's Ark West's new interface.
I can check into your account and see if they have a way to revert, but I'm almost sure they don't have such an option.

Hope You All Had A Better Thanksgiving Than This Kid

YOUTUBE LINK

Click Headline for Retronaut Website

Saw this photo on the retronaut web site. I would have been 6 years old and spinning the comic book rack in a T G and Y store. All those covers look vaguely familiar. Challengers of The Unknown ( I wanted to be Prof. ) An obviously Wayne Boring cover Superman. The Frank Frazetta looking character having a smoke should just turn around and say "One of each please." Then cash in a few decades later.

Apparently July 1959. I'm a couple of months from 6. Probably half storybooks and maybe the occasional comic book if one caught my eye. I was lucky as a child that my Mom liked escapist stuff like Sheena-Queen of The Jungle, Flash Gordon.
Link to a page with a lot of the July 1959 Covers

This deal (link back to page) is John Carter movie news. Looking good. Good write up.

Check Out My Back Up of TAG Blog History

Click here or the title
Having the blog a couple of different places makes it feel backed up.
Now it says everything is posted by MrGoodson2. I wondered if someone wanted to destroy all the jpgs could they do so from the TAG settings?
The files are Picassa files, given a google ownership by whoever posts them.
Can someone only delete all their posts? I know the entire blog can be deleted, but if that was done, would that affect my back up? Interesting don't you think?
Here's a drawing to decorate my post...
Using the paint program art-rage to "trace" a jpg. Nutty Mad Chief Lost TeePee. Cool effect huh?

Doing an experiment by deleting the movie post that used to exist below this one. See if it directly affects my back up
I'll have to wait until tomorrow to be certain that the deleted image no longer appears in a picassa album. I was hoping it being in two places made it a "new" graphic. But my bet will be it disappears tomorrow.
INTERESTING. Yes, It did delete the original JPG. But it created a thumbnail that is still in place.

Making Comics-Podcast-Nate Simpson-Click Headline

Rick. If I'm not mistaken Nate's your friend in TAG North. Right? Non Player is discussed. The guys doing "Making Comics" have a lot of good content on their webpage.

My Tuesday sketch early. Ripped from today's headlines!

Zip File of 100 plus Kirby Double Page Spreads

Click Title for link

Been reading my Showcase anthology of Challengers of the Unknown. Half and half of Kirby and Bob Brown ( Space Ranger) Notice that one panel of the guy giving an outline of the bad guy's goal. Complete game design in one sentence.
The Bob Brown cover art really blew my mind. I saw that and realized that was one of my favorite images of all my comic book reading of that time. Aliens, Giants, exciting angles, great posing. Then the interior. It all came back in a big way. I always loved Space Ranger.
Kirby wins of course.
But he's diluted by all the Wally Wood "improvement" on a lot of the inking. That flying panel is Kirby and Wood. Great poses.

Check out my Labor of Hercules. Taking my phonebook sized Fantastic Four essentials and turning it into a bunch of pages stored in sleeves. Now I can scan at will and get great scans.

Kirby In A Binder

Watch me do 50 Pull Ups

Adobe Flash Meets Its End

Flash served its purpose for a long time. It brought us a more powerful Web, and helped shift it from its hypertext-based roots to something far more interactive and useful, beginning as early as the late 1990s. And now, Flash's time has officially passed—on mobile devices and otherwise.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2396094,00.asp#fbid=wVKyNx0lD3j

How I make a Lulu Book

The Bottom Of This page, Get your Template

Looks like this

This is my favorite format, the 6 by 9 trade paperback
The resolution is 300 dpi. I devise photoshop actions to up-rez and re-size the art I want to use. Then I paste art into position and make PSDs. Levels of art in the sequence I typically visualize for the book.

Then I go to the menu shown above and turn the layers into jpgs.

 The menu above plus the dialogue that opens below is how to make the PDF.

Opening up the menus above allow you to browse to those jpgs and turn them into a PDF. Then go to the PUBLISH Format Choice part of Lulu and upload it. Have your color covers separate but formatted in the same DPI etc. Lulu has an easy to use wizard for uploading the necessary files.

That's it. Easy.

We're On Cold Hard Flash!

Hey, check it out -- the animated spots Ed and I did for Public Storage are featured today on Cold Hard Flash. Kinda cool to get some of our work up on Aaron Simpson's site, and great PR for Pencil Test Studios. Click on any of the images and it'll take you to the permalink.

Click Headline to Check Out My New Lulu Book-Go To The Link at the Bottom To See My Lulu Tutorial

The thing below is an old digital painting I made into an animated gif in photoshop. It's only 4 frames right now. I'll probably go back in tonight and pump up the fx and the smoothness

Warming up. Going to do some digital sketching today

Go Here To My Web Page For How I Make A LuLu Book

Website Updates

Hey guys, sorry I haven't posted in a while, it's been pretty busy at work. Now that it's calmed down a bit, I'm happy to finally announce some long overdue updates to a couple of my websites. First off, we did a big redesign to the Pencil Test Studios website. It's much cleaner looking and has a wider variety of samples for your perusal. Check it out here. And if that's not enough, my illustration rep, Shannon Associates, completely redesigned their site as well. I have few new illustration samples up on my pages, which you can see here, here and here. Tell your friends!

the most popular image....

After seeing I got 34 hits on this image alone yesterday. Mostly from Indonesia. I looked up the keywords on several search engines and found that 4 of my drawings were in the top 4 rows of the search engines.and the stats show BIG hits over the last 60 days. Guess people are looking.

Rockford Files Sketch

Occupational hazard, too many guys like this with the question "You Jim Rockford?"

Found this old sketch. Almost finished my new Lulu PDF. It's the reason for running into all the stored art on disc. It's looking good. I'll make it a free download on Lulu. If you want the book, it will probably run about 6 to 8 bucks. Show that off tomorrow.

Drew Freidman - Halloween Album Art

Click Headline or this
Lot of great Jack Davis art on the Blog.
I found the Roddy MacDowell sound files of the Lovecraft album. Easy as typing in Macdowell reads Lovecraft. Easier for you.

PopCap in Poster

 This looks like a pretty stupid movie, but the poster caught my eye.  This is the section of Seattle that PopCap is located in.  In fact, our building is in this poster.

Panel by Panel

A panel from the Bounty Of Zone Z. Formatting stuff for my Lulu book.

Also added some of my Junkyard Dog boards, beautifully formatted into a PDF format by ToonBoob (edit: ha! Toon BOOB. Toon Boom) Storyboard Pro. It's like a nice frame. Makes the art look a lot better.

This Guy, Ryan Heshka, really gets the era of the pulps he is glorifying

new sketch + ps enhancements

Playing around with Photoshop and my latest sketch

DANGER 5

DANGER 5- Click for Youtube video
Scott Morse said he wished he had done this. I wish I had done it too. Or at least played Hitler.

Even though the intent is to project solid cheezeball, it's obviously got a ton of money spent on it. Maybe more than would be spent on a conventional bit of storytelling. I think Batman in the 60s was considered too expensive for it's own good.

1st page of a story?

Caelum Studios - Stuff I'm looking at

It is fun but painful to go through my old art. I'm going to make a new blog with some of it called "ForFuksSake-ISuk!" Found this from when some of us nuts were sharing a studio.
Mostly I'm going to make myself a new-sequential oriented Lulu book that I'll be using as a submission thing for the CTNexpo. Drop it on a few, hungry for talent, tables.

Custody battle in space. Good shit. With an emphasis on shit. And I'm pretty sure that's zipatone you're looking at there. And no compositing in photoshop of type either. I think we were barely using photoshop when I did this. It was print outs of the type, spraymounted to the page. Very early use of the new found technology using comic sans for a typeface.

Stan Sakai Exhibit

Stan Sakai's art is at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. The exhibit, Year of the Rabbit: Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, has original art work by Stan Sakai as well as the actual comic books, toys based on the characters, and works by other artists featuring Usagi Yojimbo. The exhibit will be there until October 30th. Dan and I saw the exhibit recently and enjoyed it. I wrote a short review about it, and the other exhibits that were there, in my blog.

This weekend we are going to the Tim Burton exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It should be interesting!

Photoshop Blog I Created - Click Header

John K was wishing for a good digital inking tool. Prompted me to share all my recent dabbling with paths as a way to do clean line art.

Halloween Audio

My new site

Seems I needed to update this site with my commercial work. I may have a few NEW leads on work. thus the focus. Its still being worked on hope to finish tonight.

http://bluetigerillustrations.com/

The Worried Bat

Digital. Lot of working into the surprises of using an inverted mask. A goof.
It's Tuesday!
I think.

For Marty. A Daniel Clowes sketch from my Fantagraphics twitter follow.
"Why should I, Reggie Van Dough, have to wait in line with these commoners."