Wednesday, November 23, 2011

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.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

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.

Monday, November 14, 2011

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!

Thursday, November 10, 2011

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.

Wednesday, November 09, 2011

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


Friday, November 04, 2011

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.

Thursday, November 03, 2011

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.


Wednesday, November 02, 2011

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




Tuesday, November 01, 2011

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!