December 19, 2006

Exit ... Stage Left

I sketched this, this morning after reading that Joseph Barbera died Monday. Co-creator of such time-honoured cartoon classics as Tom and Jerry, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Scooby Doo, he was absolutely instrumental in bringing the art of animation to television.

He will be missed ... we're grateful that he didn't go into banking, but that he shaped so many of our childhoods instead.

Exit ... stage left.

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:57 AM | Comments (3) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

November 26, 2006

22 Inches of Pure Happiness

It's been a busy four day weekend for me, as it has been for a lot of people in the U.S. Luncheon with the not-in-laws on Thursday ... a nice time of playing trivial pursuit ... a quick bite for dinner ... and then home to watch a video or two. I went to bed early as there was ONE thing I wanted to get during the insane shopping period called Black Friday.

Yeah ... I did.

You see, I adore my laptop beyond belief. It's a bit old now, a 2003 model, but it's a 17" PowerBook G4 and I love it. Since it's my only computer and I do a lot of graphics work, I really prefer to have a big screen so I can see my graphics ... and still have a little bit of room for the tools.

But Best Buy was offering a Westinghouse 22" LCD monitor for $200 on Friday morning. It's a $500 monitor there usually. And, well ... I get tech envy easily. All I could think of was ... ooooooooooooo, think how big I can make the artboard in Illustrator!

I set the alarm for 3:30, but just happened to wake up around 2:45 ... I tried to make myself go back to sleep, but no dice. So, I trucked on down to Best Buy, which was due to open at 5 a.m.

No traffic. This is a good sign. I figured I might have a chance at getting my delightful new monitor. I tried not to get my hopes up too high, and sure enough, when I rounded the final corner, I just about drove back home. I was sure I would never get my monitor. Here it was, 3:50 in the morning ... and there was already a line past Best Buy, and past the next TEN freaking strip mall stores. With a heavy heart, I joined the futility of the line anyway.

Long story short ... I got the last of the 22" monitors and I am just beside myself with joy. Now, when I need to run Illustrator, I take the laptop to my home office, plug it in ... suddenly i have a dual screen. 22" of pure happiness on the left side ... 17" of pure laptop happiness on the right side.

And, in honour of the happy new monitor, I finished one character for an animation I'm doing for a friend. Here is Kirby, in all his Westie glory:

Now I just have to finish the motorcycle, the character of my friend and a good background and I can begin actually animating the thing.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:58 PM | Comments (8) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

October 9, 2006

Getting Closer

Well, finishing out the basics of the face has gone a long way to establishing his character for me, as has selecting if not "the" colour palette, this colour palette should at least be very close.

Of course, there's still the arms/hands and the legs/feet ... and the all-important tail ... to get to next.

Once I get this "flat" image done, the next step will be to decide how much depth I want to give this cartoon and thus, how much highlighting and shadows to create. I'll then create a walk-around model sheet. For those of you who aren't animation geeks, a walk-around and model sheets are usually the animators' bible for a particular show. They give the basics of what each side and the back will look like, often the walk itself, and of course, common poses and facial expressions. For a produced cartoon, this usually means that the extra-creative folks, the senior animators of the project, do the "key frames" of the cartoon ... and the "tweeners" go in and fill out the frames that are necessary to move the characters between key frame to key frame. So, a good bible for a cartoon is essential as you'll have a slew of people working on the animation and while each person has their own personal style, Bugs Bunny looks a particular way, and the tweeners can't just impose their style on top of the existing design.

It's amazing to me how much adding the basic eyes added to my concept of the design. I've got a really solid idea of what I want to do next, whereas before I was simply playing around.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:55 PM | Comments (1) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

October 8, 2006

He's Coming

I've got more than this done in Flash, but this is what I'm prepared to show at the moment.

For all of my writing -- and reading -- I am very character-driven. Once I have a good sense of the character in my head, I can start asking those characters what's going on in their lives and thus begin writing the story.

I have read a few other writers who make the same claim ... the characters, in some sense, take over the story and the best authors often find that the well plotted outline they had for a particular story just doesn't happen as the characters, like children, develop minds of their own.

For me, that's the part about novel-writing that I've always enjoyed the most. Watching the characters grow and surprise me.

Who else will be in the cartoon besides the still nameless monkey? (Yes, I know you can't much tell it's a monkey from the head and this particular style.) Well, I'm also quite fascinated with dia de los muertos and those cartoon-ish depictions of skeletons. So likely, I will resurrect my Li'l Muerto character from ages and ages ago and see what he looks like in this style of sketching.

So if I'm a bit quiet lately ... hopefully I'm drawing and beginning to write character sketches and sketching the critters themselves.

P.S. Just so no one gets the wrong idea, is NOT my drawing ... that's one of the Blacy icons, not mine!

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:08 PM | Comments (3) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

October 2, 2006

Ghostbot

I love animation. And the Esurance commercials out in the U.S. right now are absolutely charming. If you've not seen these, there's an example at the bottom of this post. (Hopefully by the time you've finished reading this post, it'll have loaded through youtube.)

The nice thing about these is that they employ a particular style of animating which minimizes some of the movements. This allows them to utilize the creative time to come up with some really nice plots for 30 second commercials and also spend some time creating kick-ass characters. These have been done by the Ghostbot team for Wildbrain. What I love about these is they're beautifully done. The style is distinct, the Flash animation is nicely done for the time and budget constraints of a 30 second commercial. I really love the way the characters flow and the animations flow.

*sigh* I've GOT to finish working up my character sketches and start moving the pieces into Flash if I'm going to make the next Nicktoons and/or Cartoon Network contest. It stinks when you've got a great black and white sketch done ... and really don't know what colour palette is going to best work ... at the moment, I'm ignoring colour palette and going to get the major character into Flash, then experiment with colour in the library.

I have just realized that unless you like Flash animation, I have TOTALLY lost my entire audience with this post. Oops. I'll try to get some scans uploaded in the next day or so so you can at least look at the somewhat budding cartoon.

And now, one of the Esurance commercials:

Oh, for good measure ... check out more drawing goodness at the Drawing Board.

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:34 AM | Comments (1) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

September 20, 2006

Bits and Pieces

Just a couple of random pieces I've been working on lately.

The first one was a relatively simple cut out placed over a background. If I hadn't been so danged preoccupied and short on time the last few days I would have made the "Hate Me" look much more like a tattoo. I will probably continue working on that next week when I have some time (I hope).

The second one was a bit more work. I had already found a nice blue butterfly some time back, but the site I wanted to advertise had a bit of a connection to red, so I wanted to change the moth/butterfly to a red hue to match (even though there's a blue butterfly on her blog ). I worked with the butterfly first since that would be the central piece of this ad block and used the adjust hue function in each colour channel to change the overall colour. Once I had the hues adjusted, I decided I wanted to toy with making this block look a bit more like a painting than just a photo. So, I copied that layer and began experimenting with the sketch filters. (NEVER, EVER apply filters without first making a copy of that layer ... maybe you'll have redundant layers that you can delete later ... but chances are at some point you'll have need for that unaltered layer!) I believe I finally settled on a nice dry brush, but then I faded the filter a bit to bring back some more of the detail to the image.

Next, I highjacked the sunflower from the person's blog and again used adjust hue to colourize the sunflower since the original was in black and white. A much more faded version of the dry brush filter was used here.

The clouds were cut out and inserted ... but depending on which monitor I'm using ... well, on some monitors the clouds work ... on others I'm not so sure that they do. I think they may simply confuse the issue of the flower ... why do the clouds which appear so distant also appear in front of a section of the flower? Ah well ... not bad for about 45 minutes playing.

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:21 PM | Comments (2) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble