THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Finished with the last show I’m going to be doing Story Reel work on. I have now officially been moved to doing layout.  I was so rusty I didn’t really know where to start and how to do it. Fortunately I started remembering it all and things started moving faster as I went.  Now I just have to be able to get the scenes out on time.

ART

So before I had created my blog, but after I had done the Trip to Italy sketch diary, hired to draw some pages for a small The Krusty Book.  The best thing about one of the assignments I had gotten was that I was asked to draw a comic strip of Krusty the Clown only small called Li’l Krusty (ala. Peanuts or Little Lulu). I couldn’t believe it. I was going to get paid to draw Krusty cute. I jumped on the opportunity to draw Krusty in the cute style I like to use.  Which is the style I use on my blog and in my Italy trip journal.

I don’t have a copy of the finished pages, just the roughs.  So here are my rough pages of the strips I did. Oh, and I didn’t actually write the gags for these cartoons. I just drew them.

Lot’s of tracing back drawings in these.

Had fun drawing does big eyes.

In the final pass, they had me round out the eyes more when Krusty was in profile and they had me take off the clown shoes.

Chibi Sideshow Bobby was fun.

There came a point with the Sideshow Bobby strips, where the set up no longer needed new artwork so I just photo copied the first few panels and drew the punchline as new art.

In the final art, they also had me shrink Krusty’s ears.

As you can see below, the last panel on the strip above, was changed a bit to end with the monkey more centered:

I never received an actual copy of the book so I don’t even know how the comics turned out.  I DID look in Amazon and found that their preview of the book actually featured a strip.

VIDEOS

Growing up, in order to get my brother and I from spending all our time in front of the TV, my parents only allowed us one hour of TV a day. This meant that I had  to make the difficult decision of choosing a show to watch.  I wasn’t allowed to watch G.I. Joe because, even though my mom never watched it, she thought it was too violent.  So I watched another show, Robotech.  A show that appealed to me much more anyway and ironically, was far more violent than G.I. Joe ever was.

In G.I. Joe the Joes and Cobra used to shoot at each other with laser guns and never actually hit each other, EVER. In Robotech the protagonists where at war with an alien race and quite a few of them died horrible on screen deaths. One of the main characters even bled to death after a battle.  It was a very powerful very dramatic show. It influenced me quite a bit. As a kid, it actually forced me to deal with death and loss. It also showed by example, the difference between infatuation and sacrificial  romantic love. I grew up with and matured with Rick Hunter/Hikaru. It was one of the four Japanese shows I watched in my early years that ruined me to the watered down preachy cartoon shows of the 80s.  Shows I found annoying because I felt talked down to.

Hulu has recently released Super Dimension Fortress Macross (a.k.a. Robotech). Macross is the original version of Robotech as it was shown on Japanese TV.  The version on Hulu is a new dubbed version of the show. It’s great to see the show this way. The new dub is pretty good and actually makes it less cheesy than the original dub.

I highly recommend this show. Though I remember that the art quality starts getting worse as the show goes along. I’m not sure why.

PODCASTS

The Cartoonistas have a podcast now.  Cartoonista Radio.  Find out the inside scoop on all the Cartoonistas.

Visit:  Cartoonista Radio

MY WEB COMIC

I’ve started inking my comic finally.  I really screwed up page 4 the other day. I had to do a patch job on some panels and on a character.  I’ve also decided that I’m going to use computer fonts since my writing and sound effects came out looking really awful.I’m learning a lot and enjoying myself though.  I’ve learned that I’m NOT good at drawing with a brush. It’s much better to have a drawing better worked out before I start inking it.  Maybe someday I’ll be able to, but not yet.  I’ve also learned that I should be watching anything new on a monitor or on DVD while I work.  I get too distracted and I don’t pay enough attention to my inking and it all comes out looking lousy.

Once I’m done inking the pages I’ll scan them all in, re-letter them all and begin coloring it.

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