THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Our Day Care decided to go on vacation Monday and Tuesday. This Monday, my wife started work. We had no one else to look after the kids for those days so I ended up having to stay home and take care of them.  This meant that I had to make up 16 hours of work.  My job only gives me two weeks to get done with the assignments I’ve been given, this means that I can’t really afford to lose any hours.  I need to work every hour I can, in order to get my work done.

The show I’m working on now is the one where Cheech and Chong guest star.  Some of us on the show had never seen a Cheech and Chong movie, so for the sake of “research”, the crew took a lunch hour and watched their first movie. It was called a “mandatory” meeting. We got free food and watched the movie along with the director.

ART

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

Do to the circumstances I wrote about in THE SIMPSONS NEWS above, I didn’t get a much of a chance to work on my things this week.  Since I had to take care of my kids Monday and Tuesday, it was very difficult to get any time to draw.  I was planning to have the drawing done by this point but it seems it will take a little longer than I planned. This is what I got done:

I roughed out the Winged Apes on a separate piece of tracing paper and once I was satisfied, I transferred them to the main drawing.  The roughs of the Apes where too big, so I had to shrink them in order to have them fit:

Lots of things I don’t like so far.  The face of the flying one was off. He wasn’t actually looking at Rob so I erased it in order to draw a better one (haven’t gotten to it yet).  I’m also  unhappy with the way the pose came out overall and I’m going to change it so that it’s a little bit more like my original thumbnail. The claws on the apes need work and I still don’t like how tight everyone is round Rob. I still think Rob’s arms need to be worked out better as well. Some of these problems I will solve once I scan the drawing in for the final pass.

One of the things I changed was the height of the buildings in the background. Since I had increased Rob’s size, he was much taller than the buildings, which meant that, if the building were going to be the darkest dark, I need them to “cover” a bit more of him.

What do you think?

FAMILY

I’ve been sending the kids early to bed lately, that way I don’t keep them up late when I read them a fairytale. I own a copy of THE ANNOTATED BROTHERS GRIMM.  It has the Brothers Grimm fairytales I grew up with. In other words, they aren’t watered down and sanitized the way modern re-telling are.

What I’ve discovered is that my kids LOVE them.  Just as it gets really scary things turn out alright. They’re great.  You should have seen the reaction I got when I read that Little Red Riding Hood got eaten by the wolf.  They screamed in delighted tension. “What will happen NOW?!” Then everything turned out alright and they wanted me to read another story.

I think HANSEL AND GRETEL left a big impression on Munchkin.  Even though she has a hard time saying “Hansel”. She was amazed at the story.  The witch really freaked her out. With the description of her keen sense of smell and red eyes but lousy eyesight. Then when Gretel tricks her, kicks her in the oven and burns her up, Munchkin was amazed and the empowerment of the act.  She sat there with her big eyes wide.  She loved the story.

My son had a very odd reaction to another part of that story. After I read about how the witch died, the story tells how the kids went back inside the Ginger Bread house and found the witches treasure. Well, when I read the part where the kids went back inside, by son (whose 2 1/2) asked me if the kids were now going to become witches. Wow, he thought they were going to take the witch’s place. What an odd thought for a 2 year old.

I love reading them the stories. They have a bigger vocabulary than anything they get exposed to.  I sometimes have a feeling that they don’t understand most of what I’m reading. I figure, the more I read, the more they’ll understand what it means as I use it in context.  It’s also just fun for me to try to get “into the parts” to make the stories come to life for them.

We all have a good time.

VIDEO

Jim Lujan has done it again. This time he’s animated an interview with himself.  It’s fantastic and great fun. Take a look:

VIDEO

I found this mini documentary of Matt Groening interesting and I thought I’d share:

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