THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Well, I managed to finish my Act 1 board revisions this Tuesday. Usually I’m done by the Friday of the week before.  It all those little things really add up.  I was then assigned Act 3, which thankfully isn’t as bad. It’s also shorter.  This one I HAVE to get done by Friday.

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.)

Okay, so here’s the deal with these drawings.  I’m not convinced that these are the best drawings I could do. I kind of want to keep noodling around with them. On the other hand, I want to get this done, since it’s just a test, so I have to say, “good enough” and keep going.

I started coloring the drawings as you can see:

I started drawing shadows on the drawings above but I didn’t get to the other ones yet.   As you can see, I just colored in the “flat” colors on everything. I’m planning to find a fast way to make these drawings look more “rendered” without it taking forever to do.  My plan is to add the shadow and lighter tones using a hard edge like I’ve done above. I’ve found, trying to find the right “planes” of the figure to darken, very tricky.  Once I’m done, I’ll use the texture brushes to put in the firm, soft and lost edges. I hope that speeds things up.  This is really going to show me how long it’s going to take to do this.

I put in the correct colored sky in the drawing below, just to see how it will look.

I decided to put the drawing below here so you can see the final pull out camera move.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how long it’s taking me to do this.  I’m trying to figure out a faster way to do this so that I can work on it when I’m not on the computer.  It would speed things up, so much more.  I may have to come up with a system where I draw some of my roughs on paper, scan them in and clean them up on the computer.  That way, I can also work on this when I have some free time at home instead of just working on this during lunch time at work.  Even so, I think in the end, the coloring process might be the longest and most laborious part of this project.  I hope it doesn’t bore me. This is suppose to be fun.

BOARD GAMES

As anyone reading my blog knows, I like board games.  Well, I was surprised one day to be contacted by a priest who happens to also be game designer with at least one published board game under his belt.  Fr. Ben Dallas has just recently contacted me to let me know that his second publish game has just recently been released. It’s a party game that goes by the name WHIRLED PEAS.

Since I haven’t played it myself I’m not sure exactly how it plays just yet.  I do get the impression that it’s plays like a combination of CRANIUM and TIME’S UP!.  It comes with a spinner called THE PEA-KING spinner. It looks like this:

The official description, on Amazon, for the game goes something like this:

The Fast-Paced Party Game Where Everybody Plays Every Time! – 5 Kinds of Challenges for All Kinds of “PEA”ple! – Fast-Paced for Short Attention Spans! – Everybody Plays Every Turn! The object of the game is to earn and steal peas and be the winning team to fill its “PeaPod©”. At the center of the game is the “PeaKing©” Spinner. He is the brand ambassador and symbolizes the fun party game atmosphere inherent in Whirled Peas. The best part about Whirled Peas® is that sales will support our giving-based business model and help us build and grow our foundation, “The Peas Project©” (www.peasproject.org).

Fr. Ben told me that half the profits of the game goes to charity while the other half goes to paying off their publishing debt. If you wish to purchase a copy, you can buy it at Amazon. Not only will you have fun playing this game, but it’s for a good cause.

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