Vectorman question

Does anyone know who did this drawing?  I know I didn't do it... I'm thinking it was either Marty or Jeff Remmer.  Any ideas?

Painting Into This Pencil / Photoshop head start tomorrow

I'll use Manga Studio and the Frenden brushes.

Then if I like it, I'll colorize it in Photoshop.

 Changed, finished a couple of things.
The plan is paint this evening.

WIP. Started , smeared it into a uniform mess. I'll see if I have the patience to paint into it enough to make it a decent piece.

 I like it. I hope people that aren't color blind don't find it too wacko.
Still going to paint into it. This is all mac mini work. I want to give it some imac-cintiq touches.

 Look at this. The top unsaturated item is Blogspot uploaded. The bottom saturated is Tumblr upload quality.
The more I study it, the Blogspot is probably what I was shooting for. I wonder what the deal is. I may saturate some more here and there based on the power of the saturation I see in the tumblr upload. But it also got mushier.

 I'm done. Or at least I quit. Edges were fun but I still lack a lot of spots really finishing it. But it taught me some things about how to get the oil look I may want to use later for other things.
Came out yucky. Un-unified. The Goons chest. The shadow above the forearm. A mess.
But it would be throwing time away. Just something I learned from.
I have to also get that cintiq calibrated to match standard monitor brightness and saturation. That will take research. I've tried in the past. Need to try again.

EF-12...my latest obsession

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. It's a totally free, totally customisable fighting game engine made by a guy who worked on the Tekken series. I've always wanted to make  a console-style fighting game and this framework makes that possible. I've been talking to the EF-12 creator, Masahiro Onoguchi, and he's a super cool guy. He needed some help with translation for some of his documentation and I volunteered. Having a lot of fun learning how his engine works. Pretty amazing stuff.

Here's a link to the official U.S. download for EF-12 if anyone is interested:

Official EF-12 U.S. Link

You can get content into EF-12 via Maya, Softimage or Blender. Basically, anything that can generate a Collada file should work.

Girl Genius Business Manager

 

I thought this post might be of interest to everyone, but especially to Rick and Marty.  There's an online comic book called "Girl Genius" written and illustrated by a husband and wife team, Phil and Kaja Foglio. It's won numerous awards and has been going for the past fourteen years.

 

At this year's Con, a woman who works as their business manager, Carol Monahan, (in the top photo on the right) gave me a sales pitch and told me all about their comic.  She seemed very knowledgeable about the whole business of running a self-published comic business, and gave me some examples of her role in advising them, and how she's saved them money in cases involving printing the hard copies. She charges them by the hour for her services.

 

"Girl Genius" seems to be doing a thriving business in selling printed copies of the books in spite of the fact that the entire comic can be read for free at their website.  The creators published it as a web comic at first to generate low cost publicity and moved on from there.

 

Anyway, Carol seemed very friendly and personable, going so far as to invite me to e-mail her if I had a few general questions about publishing my comic.  She is based in Seattle so I thought that she might be someone worth networking with, especially if she's at this year's ECCC.  Rick, maybe there's someone among your TAG North friends who knows of her?  Anyway, I thought I'd throw this out there in case you get a chance to meet her and get a read on her.

My new technique. MS5-Frenden Oil brush- into doodle

I'll do a new one for Tuesday

Link to the Tumblr to compare what the Frenden Brush lets you do- very quickly, to a doodle

Today's Doodle

Another late night doodle

Peter starts his photo reportage

Excavating the Pyramid.....I found this

A quick doodle while watching Thor

Thought I rough doodle a bit while watching TV. Brush pen and pencil. Had some "Me" time from all the drama lately and it was quiet.

Chubby Cheekers in "BIRTHDAY BUNNY"

Here's a little Chubby Cheekers story for your (belated) T.A.G. perusal.

I learned so much doing this--you can see the style and approach evolve as the pages go along. Jimmy, Ellis and Tom Moon provided inestimable technical support (thank you sincerely). Rick and Scott provided the quality target...Ranjo just provided annoyance.

Please let me know what bugs you and/or what you'd like changed!

Preview!

Here's the game that we made in a month... Swipe the Gold!  It will go live in the Apple App Store on Monday, but if you have an Android device you can go get it RIGHT NOW!  Swipe the Gold for Android!  You can also find more screenshots at that link.

This was a hoot to produce and I was responsible for all the art stem to stern.  It's what is called an "incremental" game.  If you've played Cookie Clicker or Make it Rain then you know what sort of game it is.  The pirate motif was really fun to play with. 

akeytsu

This looks pretty cool. The creators make some exciting claims. Hopefully it delivers in power and in price.

akeytsu

Comic Con Next Week!

 

I don't know what there is to say about next week's Comic Con, but it just seems like we should have SOMETHING to say about it!

Pesky eternal internet

Today's email from LinkedIn.

Internet lifeline established from the Realms of Purgatory....FINALLY

12 Days out from my sentence to Purgatory from Paradise. What a nightmare it's been. I have very little room. 50% of my stuff is in storage. Dealing with my problematic parents, crappy neighborhood, dirty house, The frigging over 100 degree heat. Even the Internet install was a major afternoon effort with all the upgrades they had to do just get this rotting house up to 21st century standards. At least it's done and I have some comfort in that. Still, I miss SD something fierce.

Ranjo Sighting!

While helping Denise move into her Grad School housing at Caltech, the Ranjo-Scanlons came by for a visit!  We had an awesome meal with them and it was good to catch up with MC and Jeff.  Jeff says he's been having some login issues with the TAG blog, but he has been coming by to see what folks have been posting.

Cosmic Theatre Book Prototype

 

I'm going to be taking a class in making books by hand.  It's taught by Sibyl Rubottom at her studio print shop, Bay Park Press, an artist's co-op.  My goal is to create a prototype for my Cosmic Theatre book, plus I'm just interested in some of the more creative aspects of book creation.  This will give me a chance to actually hold a physical copy of my work in my hands and feel how it reads. I'm working on doing some supplementary art and writing to flesh out the book as a whole, adding things like "About the Author" and "Foreword" pages. Just those little extras that help introduce the book to the reader instead of having them go in cold.  Sibyl also teaches classes at the Athenaeum in La Jolla.  Maybe you know her Marty?

http://www.bayparkpress.com/
"Proprietors Sibyl Rubottom and Jim Machacek founded Bay Park Press in 2000 to foster the production of artists’ books and printmaking, and to promote interest in the letterpress printing process in San Diego."

Art Deco

I got roped into doing an "Art Deco" invite for a church group. Thought for sure there'd be some internet image with nice border that I could gank...but I didn't think too much of what I could find. The pride here comes from all the border elements--that's all me. And I haven't a clue how to do vectors in Pho Sho--I just fake it by making lines and rounded rectangles with the shape tool. I  hollow 'em out to my desired thickness and just started combining stuff....

So sad.

Commission

For the writer of the Demon capturing TROPHY story.

This is a novel called Dawn of the Infinity.

A starship with a troll doing the chief engineering.

 Horrible. The perspective just flat kicked my ass. I'd have to start over to get something I liked.
Maybe I could do like Tom, Lift parts and drop it into a new background

Still bugged but I'm done.

The ellipses arrangement was never solidly worked out.

They'll always bug the eye. The shadows on the inside of the circle. No reason for them to exist as cast shadows.

Made this so tough on myself. If I had started with the basics of ellipses drawn within rectangles, bisected in perspective, I would have had zero trouble.

My art brain needs work.

Instagram Leaves Me Out

They now have a Roku channel called Rokagram that lets me see people that use instagram exclusively. I'll probably pay the one time 5 buck fee for it.

I wanted to see all the Kali instagrams. She had so much fun at the time I went broke and completely out of touch. Doing Channel 101s, working for Disney doing the new Mickey shorts. Drinking booze.

This one photo from about 2 years ago. A library card. She's impressed by Marc Davis checking the book out. Look who else checked it out.

Next up, all of Ranjos Instagrams.

Or maybe Peter Csanadi

Muscles of the face flash play thing

Check out this expression maker., click APPLICATION-Click a muscle-Then click the far right tab, ACTION.
http://www.artnatomia.net/uk/artnatomy2014.html

Here's the look

Kind of cool.

I'm drawing everything with my left hand from now on

Dummy and Ugly.

Kind of like Goofus and Gallant. 

But I can't decide who does things right.

 I've decided Ugly is Goofus. Dummy is slow but he does right.
Inked with a Pilot rolling ball pen. With my right hand.

Drawing with your non-dominant hand

Jury duty makes you do strange things...like start writing and drawing with your off-hand. Interesting results. It's kind of crazy how your brain remaps neuro-muscular commands, i.e. it's not very good at it, initially. For the first few days, your arm is all over the place, but stick with it and things start to click... sort of. One of the hardest things to control are those deft, little strokes used for hatching and those controlled strokes used for strong contours. I'm actually going to keep with this..it is definitely the best way to break out of a rut. Makes drawing the same old thing a completely new, challenging experience. Here's a Hulk, sketched with my left hand in Krita (a fantastic free, open-source drawing program).

Following Tom C's lead. Doing art for Avis Newsletter

Larry, the fellow pictured, is quite a character. Always making me laugh. 

A regular Don Rickles. 

It will be interesting how many quotes people generate.

Another one is

"Everyone picks on Charlie Brown."

He's Charlie Brown. Surrounded by mean people.

 Larry above.

Final version was caused by the desire not to offend.
I'm so coarse.
The revised idea is probably going to be more fun.