THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Wow, it was a really heavy work week last week.  I was under the gun all week and just barely managed to squeak out my assigned Acts both Act 1 AND Act 3. I was even given a last minute fix on Act 1 that I had to finish before my wife (whom I carpool with)  and I had to leave to pick up the kids. I was sweating it to the end.

Compare that to this week where I started revising a different episode. I’ve been assigned Act 2 and the rewrite is VERY lite. So lite in fact, that I’m almost finish revising it, and we only have a three day work week.

Can’t say this job doesn’t keep me on my toes.

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.)

This is taking a long time and I apologize if you’re getting tired of basically seeing the same drawing over and over. That said, this IS the process. Granted, only doing this in 30 minute chunks everyday, does make the process go at crawl. Believe me, I’m feeling it.  I want it to be over so I can get to the next step. Which leads me to think that I’m being too precious about all this and I might be going about it all wrong.  Perhaps I should just be rougher with the final product. That way I can finish it sooner than later.  I’ll really have to think about it this.

Okay, so here’s what I’ve done this week:

I’ve added shadows to all the drawings and began changing up the edges on them a bit.  I’ve also added some core shadows to parts of the drawings.  My plan is to continue adding core shadows where needed and then I’m going to add a few slight highlights or lighter areas to places that might need it.  I hope to have that all done by next week. Once I do, it will basically be done.  The tricky part once I’m done doing it though, is figuring out a way to show you what the finished product looks like. I’ll figure that out, once I get there.

FAMILY

Okay, so, we had quite an interesting start to our week.  Sunday night, my 4 year old daughter and my two and a half year old son, were playing together (as they normally do). At some point (as it sometimes happens) they began bickering over who can play with what toy. Well, we didn’t really see what happened exactly but somehow the attempt to either hold on to the toy or take the toy away, led to Dante getting poked, scratch, or swiped on his unprotected eye ball.  So began a really tough rest of the night.

Dante came crying into the living room, screaming in pain.  It was obvious that there was some serious hurt in his eye.  I became very upset with Elizabeth and reprimanded her.  She went to her room and cried.  I took Dante in my arms and held him, hoping that he’d quiet down soon.  When he didn’t I really started getting worried. He wouldn’t let us see his eye and refused to open it.  He just cried and cried.  I started freaking out.  Alesha just got mad at me for it. She decided to tell Dante that if he calmed down, he’d give him a treat.  I thought it was a ridiculous notion since the boy was in some obvious excruciating pain. He wouldn’t even be THINKING about having a treat.

She took him and gave him a treat and he was fine as if nothing ever happened.  I felt like a complete moron for having freaked out.  Was he play acting? Was he just letting off steam? Did he just like being held and pampered so he decided to play it all up? I was upset with everyone after that.

I took the kids to bed, and after praying with them, I went downstairs having to deal with a headache that had been building up all day only to become a migraine after the whole eye poke thing.

I decided to go sleep early to try to get rid of it. Easier said than done since baby Ambrose, who sleeps in our room, was bothered by all the fuss and decided to be fussy too. I fed him a bottle and he fell back asleep after a while. I fell asleep for about an hour myself, when I got woken up from Dante screaming and crying. It was coming from downstairs. It seems Dante was not faking the pain in his eye.  He must have been rubbing it in bed and just irritated it more.  I had seen him rubbing it when I put him to bed.  He was crying as if he’d been hit in the eye again.  No matter what we tried, we couldn’t make him stop crying.

Every  idea of possible horrible things that might be wrong with his eye began passing through my head. It was heartbreaking.  I began to freak out again.  Do we need to take him to the hospital?! Alesha tried to be much more cool headed and went more for a, “wait and see” attitude.  After all, he was fine and had both eyes open when he went to bed.

After being with him for a while as he cried, asking him questions and holding him, he finally began to calm down.  He did NOT want to go back to bed though, nor did he want to open his eyes.  I held him for a while and then I asked him if he wanted to lay down with me in my bed. I thought perhaps he would feel more comfortable knowing one of us was there.  My headache was still there and hadn’t gone away.  I was also really tired.

I took him to our bedroom and lay him down, but he started crying again as if he’s eye hurt.  I thought perhaps being prone actually hurt his eye more so I sat him up and he calmed down. I picked him up and took him back downstairs.  Baby Ambrose was woken up by the whole thing and was crying as well at this point.  Alesha went upstairs to take care of him.

I took Dante and sat with him on the couch.  I took the blankets that we have by the couch and covered us both with them.  I told Dante that I’d sit and sleep with him there on the couch, sitting up.  He seemed fine with that idea and we began to try to go to sleep. Except he kept trying to rub his eye, and I would tell him not too.  He’d keep trying or pretending not too and then go for it.  I tried holding his hands down but then he’d whined.  I wanted him to go to sleep, only he kept being really fidgety with this hands and try to rub his eyes with the blanket.  This must have gone on for a good half hour (or at least if felt like that) when  I finally just got mad at him and said,

“Stop it. JUST stop it!” He did. Suddenly it was as if he was just tired and he didn’t move his hands again. Ten minutes later, he was asleep.

I fell asleep for a bit too but woke up because I was really uncomfortable. Dante was half on my lap and half on a cushion. I slowly extricated myself from under him, making sure he was sitting up and comfortable and made my way to the other side of the couch where I made myself as small as possible.  There, I attempted to be fall asleep.  Which I did, because I was sooo darn tired.

The rest of the night I spent, what seemed to me like, every ten or fifteen minutes, waking up, making sure Dante didn’t fall of the couch, making sure he was sitting up, keeping  him from rubbing his eye, making sure he didn’t sleep on his eye and generally not getting any good rest at all. The next morning Alesha woke me up and I just felt awful. Alesha hadn’t had a very good night either because, baby Ambrose, sensing the tension in the house, had been fussy all night.

We soon discovered that Dante refused to open his eyes still.  The problem now was, what to do.  It was Monday and if Dante was seriously injured, we needed to do something about it. We didn’t know if he was just sleepy, so we couldn’t just take him to daycare.  Alesha decided she would stay home with him and observe him.  If he didn’t recover as the day went by, she would take him to the doctor’s office.

I took the other kids to daycare and  went to work, worrying my head off about the boy.  By mid morning I was calling Alesha to check up on him. Turns out that Dante was fine.  He seemed back to normal and was watching cartoons with BOTH eyes open, asking about when his sister would come home. I was very relieved to hear it. I spent the rest of the day worrying whether or not I would be able to stay awake, on the way home.

We did make it home safe, but even though I was drinking coffee, it was actually starting NOT to work.

COMIC BOOKS

So I saw this video earlier this week and it got me thinking about digital comics on the iPad (or similar touch tablet device).

What if you did something like this with digital comics? What if, when you open a comic page on a touch tablet device, the page would look normal and you can read it like any other comic book page. Only, if you were to touch one of the panels, you could interact with it in some way.  It wouldn’t change the panel layout but  you can cause some motion to happen in the panel. For example, if there is a person walking in the panel, you can see the person’s walk cycle or in case of a close up, he would bob up and down and the background would pan by. Maybe in a panel there’s a spaceship flying through space, and you can pass your finger through the panel to have the background pan at a speed you want and have the ship’s thrusters animated appropriately. If a person is sad and you touch the screen, he could hunch over a bit more. Nothing extreme, just subtle little changes just to make it more interactive if you choose. What do you think?

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