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.

Monday Artday - Fast Food Farthing

Here's the colored penny farthing, cartoony style. When I saw the term bike, the old-timey big wheeled bike sprung to mind, and all I had to do was think of somewhere to put one. I'm going to try to work more on my coloring, just coloring in the inked in spaces makes it look a little flat. About 5% of the coloring was done with my fancy new drawing tablet, my early b-day present, those things are cool.

Penny Farthing - Still the Greatest Invention Known to Man

Monday Artday is closing in on the end of its "bicycle" challenge. People have already submitted cute robot on a bike, a crazy bike that looks like it's made of squirrels and antlers - but so far, there is no representation of the greatest bike ever......the penny farthing! I must admit it was hard as hell for me to figure out the spokes, and they wound up a little arbitrary. Also some of my earlier tries had pretty wierd looking legs, so congratulations to anyone who can draw a realistic bike! I was going to post it yesterday, but got addicted to Plants vs Zombies, a pretty fun game where you plant attack plants to protect your yard from zombies.

Illustration Friday "Infinite" - Smashing Pumpkins

"Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" is one of my favorite albums ever, and I guess going with a music themed Illustration Friday last week left my mind primed to do another. This time I tried to do a little more realistic drawing - I know the guys in this band aren't what I'd call pretty boys, but here they look a little on the mutant side. The guitarist on the left wound up looking like a fish man, and poor John Chamberlain looks like a retarded caveman. Corgan put on about 90 pounds in my interpretation as well. Oh well, I guess that means Smashing Pumpkins won't stumble across my blog, decide the picture kicks ass, and take me on tour with them. I used a ref pic of a classic poster of the group.

Illustration Friday "Welcome" - WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

 

SHANANANANANANANA KNEES, KNEES! 

OK that's the first thing I think of when I hear welcome, now the song will be stuck in my head for days. Also, Slash must be the easiest musician on earth to draw an identifiable cartoon of. I know it's crudely done even for my drawings but.....IT GETS WORSE HERE EVERY DAY!

Graphs Never Lie, especially if they are color coded

At work, I make a lot of charts - most of them are boring and science related, and even required to be in black and white. Here's an incredibly useful one I made - if you didn't already know the 2008-09 Lions sucked, this chart sums it up for you. It shows how far they made it into the game before being down by 17 or more points, which is enough that it would take a pretty serious comeback that only a diehard fan would expect. One of the most special ones was week 12, where the Lions actually TOOK a 17-0 lead against Tampa Bay....then gave up 35 unanswered points. And if you missed this week's game vs the Saints - they were down by 17+ at 28:50 into the game.

Monday Artday - Breakfast Battle!

This week's Monday Artday topic was "Cute Object", as in add some personality and cuteness to some inanimate objects. My original idea was to do a bathroom with a happy smiling toilet, sink, and TP roll - then it could double as encouragement for my kid to potty train (however, it also runs the risk of possibly making him think the toilet is alive and scare him so much he never uses one again). But I decided to animate this BreakFast Battle instead. The characters were drawn in ink, and I finally learned how to be a little more efficient with coloring them in Photoshop so it doesn't take days. One last piece of trivia - the wooden surface this takes place on is my actual table!

Wallabies Unleashed

So here's the face of the 2009-10 Windsor Wallabies, my fantasy football team; may they fare better than last year, when the season went so bad I switched to the logo of Orlovsky's famous safety that summed up the Lions season.

Healthy Competition

It's almost NFL football season, which means it's almost Fantasy Football season for us armchair QBs/RBs/WRs/TEs/Ks/DSTs. I've been in one league run by my friend for like a decade, although it's gone through some improvements (online scoring vs manually reading box scores) and several website changes. It also switched to keeper format a couple years ago, which was the start of my downfall (check the stats on Mushin Muhammad, Curtis Martin, Ahman Green, and I think McNabb for 2004, and compare to the next year when I kept them). Anyways, I'm the Wallabies and my brother is the Mad Dogs, which obviously is the story behind this classy picture.

Illustration Friday "Strong" - How much is in there?

Living in a college town at the start of football season led to the immediate association of "strong" with "drink". This scene has probably already played itself out a million times this fall, at campuses all over the world. I was going to put some Greek letters on their clothes, but I guess getting stupid drunk in college isn't limited to Greeks. Although I used to be happy with just pencil sketches of everything, now it seems incomplete unless I ink it and add at least a splash of color, so for this one I did a real quick color job in Illustrator. Keep browsing the Illustration Friday posts this week, there was a really good one that also did "strong drink" of a guy hacking up something at a bar too.

Addicted to Filters

Maybe if I don't get my Illustration Friday pic done soon, I will just call this one "Strong Green Wavy Lines".

From The Briney Deep....

The latest submission I have for Mojizu is this Zombie Tuna. I got a five pack of different width pens to do more inking, but I seem to only like the smallest one and the biggest one. I left this one with the black ink lines - I was thinking about recoloring each one so it was a darker shade of the shape it surrounds, but decided not to do all that. I was happy to see lots more comments and a higher rating on my Rat Wizard on that site, and I am more proud of my fish!

Fresh from the Rat-Infested Swamp!

Here's another character for Mojizu, the aptly named "Rat Wizard". So far he's my highest rated submission, but still not beloved enough to be close to making the Moji War. He was drawn out with Sharpie, vectorized and colored in Illustrator, and shaded in Photoshop. One quick filter made the alternate version, with more blocked-in dark areas.

Illustration Friday "Caution" - Experimentation

This week, to illustrate the word "Caution" for Illustration Friday, I decided to go with a topic I'm quite familiar with, teaching undergrad chem labs. It's a little dramatized - the earlier labs here are actually designed pretty well to prevent the possibility of any dangerous unintended results. When stuff goes wrong, it's usually just someone didn't follow the procedure to the letter and is getting results that don't make sense and they lose a few points for the week. I'd like to recolor this sometime, and make the panicked running instructor into an avatar for me, I drew it a little too small in this version to get much detail.

For Monday Artday - Big Ol' Moon

Since I've become addicted to websites that let you post art, I've joined the blog Monday Artday. It has two overlapping, biweekly challenges, where you illustrate a given word. It looks like fun, but there is some pretty great artwork on it, so I feel kind of like I'm showing up in an NFL locker room with a nerf football. For "Moon", my first thought was drunken college kids mooning someone, but I figured I'd keep it classy and do a collage. I'm kind of excited with all the textures you can do in Photoshop, either with the built in filters or by blending in a textured photo, so that's basically all this picture is. It includes textures from my ceiling, towels, play-doh, and a couple chairs. I tried to make the textured shapes all resemble moons within the big moon.

And since the picture is taking a long time to upload, I'll let you in on another artistic secret of mine........Goose Island Oatmeal Stout is delicious!

Mojizu, Rookie Wizard

Another Mojizu creature is up - Rookie Wizard! It started out with paint, I tried to fix up some mistakes and add detail and outlines in photoshop. It didn't turn out quite as awesome as I intended, I'm just trying to get each one better than the last (Qazax and Idle Octopus were rated like 3 points out of 10 by votes). I was envisioning lots of folds in the wizard's robe that just looked dumb when I did them, and I wanted the skull to be sort of translucent, but in the end I think this looks pretty good. It did turn out a lot better than my first all digital attempt, where the big grey skull looks less than intimidating!

What the crap?

Apparantly I'm not the HTML coder I thought I was (extreme amateur) as my special animated swf banner no longer shows up, and even the little list of links I had isn't working. I had messed with the "Link List" widget and tried to make it so you could put the hyperlink followed by a short descriptive text in normal font, but now I see only ________ and ________ so ____ that.

Illustration Friday Impatience - "Sneak Peak"

Is there anything that makes a kid more impatient than knowing there's a big present that can't be opened until "later"? I must admit I was also impatient in creating this - I smeared marker and pen all over the place. Not the most technically sound piece, but it's good enough for me today!

8 Arms of ACTION....well it has 8 arms anyway

Another Mojizu submission - Idle Octopus! I guess he sets a bad example for the kids, so I'll give him the PG-13 rating right now, and if some terrible parent lets them stumble upon this website and see him it's all their fault now. This is a really cool site, there are a lot of cutesy, simplistic designs mixed in with some incredibly detailed monsters. A lot of the artists are actually pro illustrators or designers, and it really shows mine up.

Mojizu, wacky character creation

While surfing people's Illustration Friday entries, I found someone's link to Mojizu, a place where you can submit wierd characters and others can rate them. I have sketchbooks loaded with doodles to colorize and turn in to that, and the first one is.......QAZAX!!!!!!!

Illustration Friday "Idle" - Saturday = Good

Ahhhh, idleness, one of life's finest pleasures. I immediately thought of hammocks, since I've never known anything productive to happen in a hammock. Mostly I used it as a chance to mess around with shadows and shading in Illustrator. Next time I may be more ambitious and add some detail.

Header is now Bagalagalaga-tastic!

I know it's a bit of overkill for a blog with one post, but I finally figured out how to do some really basic Flash animation, so I whipped up the fancy letters of the "Bagalagalaga Logo". Of course I wanted to try actually posting it somewhere, and I had a rough time of it, my internet connection (borrowed from the city park area wireless if near an open window in our bedroom) was doing crazy crap, and the one how-to article I was relying on ironically had so much animation on the page it was freezing up Explorer every 2 minutes. Finally, I started again and found someone's blog that told me how to get it done in like 5 minutes. Thanks funonmars!

Illustration Friday - "Tango"

Found Illustration Friday the other day, and it seemed like a fun idea to help get me back into drawing again. It gives you a word that you base your illustration on for the week, and you send it in with a link. It was the first time I've tried out Adobe Illustrator and its "Livetrace" options to vectorize a sketch and color it, and the edges came out a little awkward. This week's word was "Tango", which originally didn't seem too interesting - you could draw two wierd creatures tangoing or something I guess, but I decided to go with "Beginner's Tango, Room 215, 6-7PM". The outlines were sketched and scanned, but the faces were drawn in Illustrator, making them look like they don't quite fit in.