Moving Pictures

Here's two flash animations I made recently; I uploaded them to megaswf.com and you can view them by clicking on the links below the still pictures. If anyone has better ways to upload and display swf's in blogger for free, please leave a comment! I would like to embed them directly into posts so there's no clicking links and navigating away.

The frog animation was the first simple one I did, trying to learn how to make the fly follow a path. You might notice if you drew out the path the fly follows, it never loops over itself - Flash wouldn't let me use guide paths that crossed over themselves. Again, if anyone has ideas on how to overcome that, please leave a comment!

 

The Wallaby Brutally Assaulting the Dog is not an endorsement of hurting animals (I don't want to lose my $100 million in endorsements), but was used as visual trash talk in my fantasy football league. Unfortunetly, my Wallabies were soundly defeated by my brother's Mad Dogs thanks to Brandon Marshall breaking the all time single game receptions record and everyone on my team scoring about half their average.

The joys of animated GIFs

No file format seems to be quite as entertaining to me as an animated GIF, no matter how crudely it is drawn. I got Flash with the CS4 Suite that I wanted mostly for Photoshop and Illustrator, and haven't done much with it, but since animated crude drawings are 1000x more entertaining than my still crude drawings, I think I'll start practicing with this stuff.

Fantasy Football - Wallaby Cheerleader

The greatest (Jack and Jill related) comic of all time!

 

So while I realize these crude sketches of the story of Jack and Jill going up the hill aren't very impressive, I basically just wanted to say that it is a fun exercise from the book "Drawing Words and Writing Pictures" by Abel and Madden. It's a very comprehensive book about creating comics, guiding you through organization, layout, character creation, and some comic-specific techniques like brush inking and lettering. It's not a how to draw superheros book, it's how to make a solid comic strip or book on any subject, even without mind-blowing art (yay!). It's got lots of homework assignments and challenges to do to get you involved, and even a website where it helps show some example critiques of people's work on these exercises, it's a very cool read for anyone who is into comics at all! Also good are DC's Guide to Inking/Coloring/Writing Comics, they are more geared toward hero comics and have good examples, but they're not as interactive as Drawing Words and they're spread out over several books.

Too fast for Illustration Friday

Wanted to draw something quick, looked at Illustration Friday theme of fast and thought of frog's tongues of course.

Monday Artday - Pumpkinhead goes trick or treating

Here's the character that combines my love of jack-o-lanterns with my love of Batman, on his way to trick-or-treat. It's going on Monday Artday for the "jack-o-lantern" challenge, of course someone beat me to the concept of a pumpkin-head kid going trick or treating, but Batman trumps everything. This little guy was supposed to just be a part of a bigger composition for that challenge, I didn't think I'd have time to finish the sketch though. I also was having trouble getting the human head jack-o-lanterns to look grotesque enough.

Photoshop skills

Ah, technology! I can now answer the question, " What would my brother look like with Joaquin Phoenix's beard" without waiting for months!

Sketchy Sketchy Sketch Sketch

These are... sketches!!!

Illustration Friday "Pattern" - Dino Wallpaper

Here's my pattern, using Photoshop to draw, color (with 2 filters), and arrange a bunch of dinosaurs into a wallpaper. I wanted to submit this link tonight before the new word of the week comes up, so Brontosaurus sadly did not make the final cut.

As a bonus for the "pattern" topic - here are two patterns I stared at a lot in my youth. First, the DC characters wallpaper, featuring short shorts Robin, and Shazam, who is remarkably like Superman with the Flash's color scheme and lightning bolt symbol. It's still up there, even though the youngest kid in the house is 21, and the other walls of that room are a bright orange and yellow.

Then there's the speckled desk in the speckled room, the desk has some darker trim and speckles so you don't walk into it. Here is our old word processor, it was cool because it had a screen like a computer, but when you hit print, it started click-clacking away with typewriter keys and would take about 5 minutes a page.