THE SIMPSONS NEWS

For the second time in a row, we’ve receive, as a gift, the latest DvD box set of the newly released Simpson’s season.  I like this quite a bit.  Especially since I haven’t been able to afford buying some of the past ones.  The nicest thing about the gift though, was not that it was given to us by the studio,  Fox or even Gracie Films, but in fact, it was given to us by Matt Groening himself.  Each box set came with a thank you note signed by him.  That was REALLY nice of him. Especially since he didn’t HAVE to do anything of the kind.

Thank you Matt Groening!

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 more time than  I thought. The one hour a day I get, in order to draw my stuff, is not enough time to work on this drawing.

I blew up my thumbnail about 200% on a 11×17 sheet of paper. I took a sheet of tracing paper and began cleaning up the drawing, as well as adjusting the poses.    I adjusted the position of the Sorcerers by moving them over a bit to the right.  I also changed the pose of one of the Sorcerers to make him a little more dynamic.

I’d drawn Rob first and after I drew the Sorcerers in, I discovered their feet and Robs feet where not quite in the right place. Rob’s feet were in front of the Sorcerer’s feet, so I had to erase Rob and redraw him higher up.  I also ended up redrawing him three more times because I didn’t like his proportions at first and then I tried a different angle for his head, but it didn’t look right.

Rob is also bigger in this final drawing than he is in the thumbnail.  I wanted to be able to see him more.

The winged apes are not even in the drawing yet because I was having trouble finding good poses for them.  Poses that look threatening and at the same time, place their wings in such a way, that they didn’t cover each other up. In order to figure out exactly what poses I was going to put them in, I need to do some sketches.

Even looking at the drawing as it is now, I kinda want to move the Sorcerers over a bit more to give Rob a little bit of “breathing room”:

Drawing a finished piece is far trickier than a sketch. Mainly because you actually want your drawing to be well drafted. With a sketch, you can live with things being a bit off.

Usually, once I’ve done a thumbnail or a general sketch as to where the characters are going to be placed in a drawing, I find the horizon line.   When doing so, the most important thing, is to make sure that characters  have the horizon line cross them in the same part of their body a it would, if they were standing side by side. In the drawing above, the horizon line (which is drawn in red) crosses everyone mid-foot. The exception being the closest Sorcerer, whose feet go slightly below the Horizon Line to give the ground a bit of a curving feel. Once I have the Horizon Line in place, I draw a perspective grid all over the page. That way, I see the 3 dimensional space the characters are suppose to inhabit at a glance. I’ve only drawn one perceptive point so far, only because I don’t absolutely need the other point just yet, I will draw it in in once I start with the details of the background.

I then start adding a bit more construction and form on the drawings of the characters.  I also try to improve everyone’s poses and gestures. In the case above, I’m still not completely satisfied with Rob’s pose and drawing, so it still needs a bit of work.

I need to make sure I get the drawing above right for a couple of reasons. 1) I plan to do different finished versions of the drawing using different styles, in order to figure out what I want the final look of the cartoon to look like.  2) I plan to animate it.  It will become the experimental piece that I will use to figure out how I’m going to approach the animation in the cartoon. I’m thinking of a few programs I can use, and I might want to see which ones works the best.

What do you think so far?

MY WEEK

Met my friend Paul in the hallway at work and asked him how he was. This lead to a looong talk about art, drawing, pushing one’s self, discovering new ways to work, and many other things.  I ended up showing him some of what I was working on, and Paul showed me what he was working on.

What the was working on blew me away.  He’d been doing some concept art on a project for a mutual friend of ours.  The art was done using Storyboard Pro and I couldn’t believe it was done using that program. He’d managed to make Storyboard Pro do things, I didn’t know it could. It was very inspiring and it’s go me thinking very hard about the potential of the program.

VIDEOS

I saw this video of John Cleese talking about the creative process, and I found it to be very infotaining:

VIDEOS

Paul Nowak of Eternal Revolution, enlightens us on the rising importance of e-books:

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