March 26, 2006

Cartoons

So, I adore cartoons and I always have. The summer before seventh grade, The Secret of Nimh came out. I gleefully watched the "defectors" from the Disney studios and begged my mom to take us. One of the first days of classes, one of my friends was complaining that her mom had wanted to take her to The Secret of Nimh that summer and she'd turned up her nose, telling her mom that she was in seventh grade now and far too old for cartoons.

I laughed and gleefully announced that I'd seen it and thought it was one of the best movies I'd seen in quite a while.

I was a bit of a rebel that way.

Today, I love Klasky/Csupo productions, a ton of Nickelodeon shows, and the Cartoon Network! Oh man, I need little else in life besides Nick and Cartoon Network.

So, I got this book a couple of weeks ago, to practice some of the current "retro" styles of cartooning.

Here's a couple of the sketches I've done in the last couple of days ... all based on illustrations in Cool Cartooning.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:27 PM | Comments (11) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

March 24, 2006

Young Mr. Grayson

Here's a little side project I've been working on. This is young Dick Grayson from Batman: The Animated Series.

Cute kid, no doubt. And, since Robin is my favourite comic book character ever, I loved this episode of the cartoon, Robin's Reckoning.

So, because I make action figures, I put this little guy together (the original figure that I sliced up to make Young Master Grayson is the small blue thing on the right).

I've been playing around with creating vector graphics lately. So, I thought I'd start with this favourite character ... I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:53 PM | Comments (9) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

December 31, 2005

Tat

So, I have a tattoo on my right arm ... an armband. Here it is, broken into two pictures:

And the artist is Raven at Tattoos by Raven.

So, the intention has always been to add some colour to this tattoo ... the original plan was to make the surrounding area look like sandstone ... but the tattoo artist couldn't figure out a way to do it that she felt comfortable would not turn out muddy. So, we decided to just ink the symbols and decide on the rest later on. Now the fact that it's unfinished is bugging the crap out of me.

NOTE: I have already updated the image ... the traditional turquoise border is gone now ... I agree with several of the comments ... it may be a traditional pattern ... but it looked like caca here.
I've turned this into an extended entry as the animated gif that runs through several options is over 100kb now ... and I didn't want to slow down the load of the main page with that. So ... if you want to take a look at the further ideas... click below! :D

5 seconds of the plain tattoo ... 5 seconds with some colouring ... 5 with an orange/black border ... 5 seconds with a plain black border.

I like the Hopi sunface kachina colouring. I like the green in the gecko. Have yet to decide what to do with that spiral sun ... leaning toward leaving it alone.

Comments? Ideas?

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:45 PM | Comments (19) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

December 9, 2005

Ghost & Faery

So, big chunks of my non-blogging time are generally spent - to the dismay of my better half - at BlogExplosion. They've run a couple of design contests lately and I've done quite crappily in them ... largely through trying to hurry through a submission to make the deadline. And somehow, I'm usually coming in at the last second.

So, for the Shoutbox Frenzy game, the idea was to make two cards. Today is the last day for entering ... so I decided to work on these this morning. Here's my submission:

If you got here through BE ... voting should be opening soon ... check it out!

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:43 AM | Comments (11) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

December 7, 2005

More Sketching

Here are a few sketches I've done over the last year. The first is the earliest and was done while looking at one of the photographs I had taken of Caelum Moor park. It has some distinct issues, particularly with the sculpture standing up about like the leaning tower of pisa, but it's the first landscape I've done since I was a kid and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out overall. (Click the sketch to see a larger version)

This next sketch is one that I found at a wonderful blog (now in my sidebar) RohDESIGN. Mike Rohde is, in my opinion a wonderful artist. As I was noodling around on the internet one night, I discovered one of his "sketchtoons" and immediately knew this was the type of drawing that I like best and should be practicing myself. Here's Mike's sketchtoon of his cafe-bag:

And then, here's the sketch I completed today at lunch. Again, click on the graphic for a larger rendition of it.

Hope you enjoy them as much as I have had sketching them!

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:46 PM | Comments (5) | Sketches | TrackBack | Stumble

November 13, 2005

Light Creativity

My creativity goes in spurts. Sometimes it's writing, sometimes it's sketching, sometimes playing guitar. About two years ago it was sculpting things out of polymer clays. Given that we're heading into the holiday season, I thought I'd post a few of them.

Click the thumbnail to see a larger picture.

These were both from some idea book about using Sculpey, as is this little nativity.

These last two were sculpted in a more freehand style. The first one was a present for one of my cousins ... if you've ever been to the Homestarrunner website, you'll recognize Trogdor the Burninator right away.
The second one is a blending of colors to mimic stone ... this is a blending of the Navajo and Hopi totem figure of Bear. One of my absolute favourite pieces, it sits by my computer at work.

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:45 PM | Comments (3) | Sketches | Stumble