THE SIMPSONS NEWS

I’ve been working late hours this week.  Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I had twelve hour days.  Two days of overtime, and one day of making up hours because I’m going to be coming in to work late on Friday.  Today (Thursday) is the first day I have a regular eight hour day and I’m looking forward to it.  So far, the show I’m working on, looks like it’s on track. Still, I feel sooo tired.

ART

Last Friday, I was invited to my friend Raul‘s house.  He was having a “Sketch Party”.  The sketch party was described as a party where we would bring our favorite or current sketch book, show it off, as well as draw some. But this was not  just any sketch party, it was a Cartoonista sketch party.

What’s a Cartoonista? The Cartoonistas describe themselves like this:

We are a loose collective formed between friends to promote their arts and events in the San Gabriel Valley areas.

I was invited to come to the party because I was asked to join the group, sponsored by Raul.  I’m at a place in my life right now artistically, and socially, that I thought this would be exactly what I needed in order to develop as a person and as an artist.  My social skills are lacking terribly, so I figured, if I join a very social, self motivated, group of artists, not only would it be motivating, but through my art, I could learn to be more social.  Especially in an environment where we can all talk about things we have in common.

Well, the party was a blast.  Raul‘s wife Hortencia made the yummiest food.  She really went all out.  I also drank tons of her horchata. It was really yummy. Thing about being in the room with bunch of Cartoonistas is that the jokes don’t stop coming. It’s as if everyone has to come up with as many ways to make other people laugh as frequently as possible.  It was darn funny and fun being around these guys.

We had an “initiation ceremony”.  Raul suddenly ran upstairs to get “something”.  It’s funny because everyone got nervous that he was going to bring down something crazy for the “ceremony”.  When he came back down, we saw he held three books. A fancy Frank Miller hard cover book, an Essential Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 2 trade paperback which contained Ditko and Romita Sr. stories in them, and The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. We were to pick  a book to be “sworn in” on. That was pretty funny (I chose the Spider-man comic).  But our swearing in was pretty darn silly too.  I was going to pick that moment to do a cartoon, but it turns out the whole thing was caught on video, so I’d just put that up instead:

It’s very overwhelming to be a Cartoonista. The amount of art these guys produce is ridiculous. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the link of to all the Cartoonista‘s sites:

• JAVIER HERNANDEZ
• JIM LUJAN
• GRASIELA RODRIGUEZ
• RAUL AGUIRRE
• TED SEKO
• WILL CAULFIELD
• STEVE ROMO
• MICHAEL AUSHENKER
• JOSE CABRERA
• ROXANA JAVADI-KASHANI
• BERNICE TALLEY
• GEO BRAWN IV

Thanks for inviting me to join in guys.

ART

I’m taking a break from the Disneyland story again.  To be honest, I was hoping to have gotten it done already.  I kinda want to do something else and it’s starting to feel like work.  I don’t want it to feel like work, I want to have fun doing it, so I’m hoping to get back to it after I take a short break.

Having joined the Cartoonistas, has really put a lot of pressure on me to want to, “earn my keep”.  To this end, I have resolved to, at the very least, finish a comic strip or two, and maybe actually get a small irregular webcomic up and going.

Before I had joined them, I had also resolved to draw, a minimum, of one (non work related) drawing a day. With one very important rule: I must have fun drawing it. For years, I have not been having any fun drawing outside of work.  For the first time in a long time, I drew something that I truly had fun doing when I was drawing  the Superhero Versus Superhero drawings, earlier this year (click on the numbers to see what I’m taking about: 1,2,3,4,5,6).

Now I go home and draw  something at home and it’s actually fun.  I will occasionally put up one of these sketchbook drawing on this site.  Like I’m doing today, but most of the time, if I’m happy with something I drew, I will put it up on my Deviant Art page.  I invite you to wander over there once in a while to see if I’ve put up something new.  Here’s my latest drawing:

I’m in the process of teaching myself to paint again.   My current goal is to build a “development art” portfolio.  With the industry going to mostly digital, most of the drawing jobs are behind the scenes in the development process. In order for me to continue drawing for a living, I need to step up my skill set to be able to do  development art as well. To this end, I need to just produce as much art in that vain as I can.

PODCASTS

More Podcast for you to try listening to. This time, it’s some Cartoonista podcasts:

• Javiland Podcast: Javier Hernadez‘s podcast where he discusses drawing indy comics.
• Ghettomation: Jim Lujan and Kevin Cross discuss making homemade animated films.

Check them out.

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