Daily Sexy 80's Lady

If you're not wearing a teal headband, what's the point really? I think this was inspired by Julie's sexy 80's high school tennis pic. Anyhow, this was done straight up in Photoshoppe, but who the hell cares??? I'll keep drawing until our new Xbox 360 arrives later this week. . . As per this recent run of figure drawings. . . Robert Conrad.

Summer Folk Daily

I did some little figure sketches whilst coffee and baglin' at Key of C the other day. I did the top drawing in 40-shoppe by working from the pencil thumbnail below. I don't know if Robert Conrad ever drew, but if he did, I like to think these are the drawings he would make. That guy carrying the flag just might be me. But is he surrendering. . . or leadin' the charge???? You can click 'pon the damn things to make them bigger. Computers is like that.

Le Thumbnail

Le Robert Conrad

Daily Girls

 Working with femme faces and proportions. Baby steps.

Daily Head Studies

A couple of sketch book pages of heads and skulls. I've been looking at oldie but goodie Burne Hogarth's Drawing the Human Head. I've never really cared for BH's work aesthetically, but the guy could draw til the cows came home and lays out some extremely good stuff about simplified forms and conceptualizing the head from a variety of angles. I'm finding that my biggest problem with drawing seems to be not having a solid enough conception of the basic forms in space. . . and sad things like proportion. I's trying to git in shape.

Daily Dinosaur Heads

 Gods. If you have ever felt the heart-rending truth that you will never see a living dinosaur, if you have ever fantasized about chucking it all to live in a natural history museum reading and doing studies of skeletons, or just wandering the desert looking for fossils, track this DVD down now: Dinosaur Drawing: Anatomy and Sketching. It almost brought tears to my eyes. Part of the Gnomon Workshop series, taught by the epically awesome David Krentz. Lovely stuff.

A daily - an infestation

These things are all over my studio and in my office down at school. They're robust little suckers. I think they feed on squirrels and fungus. They're kind of nasty, but they're fun to snuggle up with at night when it's cold.

A Couple of Interactive Items

I've been playing around with ideas for doing some "interactive" drawings. Here are a couple of small tests. I'm trying to beat some programming logic (Flash ActionScript 3.0) into my fuzzy brain. Ow. It hurts. I've been learning the code for this stuff from Foundation Game Design With Flash, by Rex van der Spuy.

Click on the image below and cruise around with Steak using the cursor keys.
Wow, it's parallax scrolling.

Steak appears courtesy of Sam D. Inada.


This is just an idiotic game where the computer guesses a number that you input. Hours of fun. See if you can fool the machine!

Concept for conceptual art

version 7

version 3

 

version 1

Not really.
One quick observation. I think I like the earlier versions a bit better than the more "finished" one.

Arms and Ether is a bit late, but

. . . in the meantime, celebrate the free lovin' with an image from a Digital Media Foundations demo I did today! A new Arms and Ether should be up tomorrow, so plan your day accordingly.

Hommage to An Obscure Japanese Picture Book

Working through some Flash stuff for my Art 351 class next quarter so I made a cat. I envy that cat.

Megaleos Sketchbook Thrills

I'm doing lots of other junk (video demos for my classes over at the Comics and Animation blog) but here's some sketch-funk just the same. Trying to internalize the fundamental aspects of Megaleos via short crappy sketches.

Chugging Around

A beautiful, beautiful day in Ashland town. Still haven't hit my full stride, but things are going in a good direction. I can live happily with all of that, thanks for asking. Here's David Simon on The Wire in the London Times. (below) And, here's something out of the daily pile. (above)
p.s. From the "Why 42-year old men (almost 43!) shouldn't play console games" file. I got spanked by Meta Ridley (???) last night after a ludicrous 30 minutes of pushing a little button in front of a television set. If I'm going to dick around on the Wii, I should at least be able to beat up on some bosses. Spiritual poverty.

Ludicrousness

Things have been busy on the school front, so the Comics & Animation Blog I keep for my classes has been a bustlin' -- so has the Digital Media Foundations Wiki I work on with Dennis & Warren. Clap clap. So to show I haven't been a complete failure in doing some of my own work, here are some sketchbook scans from last Thursday's Drink n' Draw. Yay. Then to bed with me. Right. Sure.

UPDATE: Actually, it's 3:30 now, but I just finished the Hateball toy. I'm going to have the first three toys to download over at Arms and Ether by the end of the week.

Sketchinesse -- Papercraft Charles Burns-Style! -- Hignite's In The Studio

Above are some sketches I did at the opening campus meetings last week. Exciting stuff! It is nice to draw from observation, though. Must do more.

More inspirational TNT from Charles Burns, courtesy of Todd Hignite's outstanding book, In The Studio which features extensive interviews with Brunetti, Burns, Clowes, Crumb, Jaime Hernandez, Panter, Seth, Spiegelman, and Ware. For anyone interested in these artists, In The Studio is a must read.

Charles Burns, Paper Theater, c 1990
from In The Studio, by Todd Hignite, 2006 Yale University Press

The book gives fantastic insight on the creative process and how each artists' work is formed by specific influences. It's nice to see how varied and wacky artists' inspirational sources are. Check out Clowes' response to Basil Gogos' cover for Screen Thrills Illustrated below. If you click on the image you can read Clowes' description of the massive impact Gogos' illustration had on his creative psyche. Buy Hignite's book, you won't be sorry.

Page from, In The Studio, by Todd Hignite, 2006 Yale University Press

Punk-assed Perspective Procrastination

Miles Inada, Portrait d'un Punkass de Perspective, c 1763

Because I'm not Piranesi or Jack Kirby, perspective can get me down--especially when I'm not in proper fighting trim. It's called being a perspective punk-ass. So, I'm still not done with the latest Arms and Ether. I have to draw a. . . table. . . and . . . a computer. . . impossible! Weak. Fail. Etc.
Oh, and I also don't want to pay the @#$%ing bills which I've been putting off. !@#$%

Saw Derf on a documentary about Jeffery Dahmer with whom Derf went to Jr. High and High School. Crazy. I'm going to check out the comic he did on his experience with Dahmer, My Friend Dahmer. You should probably check it out too.

Bad Ratio

Okay, drew on Arms & Ether for 8 minutes, then spent 21 minutes scanning and writing followed by a one hour break to take coffee to my lady and play Freecell. Work to GoofOff ratio = 29/60 or about 1:2. Well, you have to start someplace.

And let's not get into the "work" vs. hard-core work distinction.

On the up side, though, feel a new project coming on. . .

Through The Leaden Atmosphere

It's slow, painful going getting back to makin' stuff. Ugh. I'm very quick to give up, no clear focus, and my concentration is way, way down. Boo hoo. Whinge. I've put in a grand total of 36 minutes (over the last 2 days) on the latest Arms and Ether. Yes!

Got to get with it

Another Kind of Day

Lovin'!

me make picture now--DMF scratch primitivism