Animations… and more!

Another dimwitted dinosaur. Inked on vellum, scanned, then colored in Painter…

I wonder what this one would look like if I wore some 3-D glasses. Have to check it out sometime…

Happy Three-D Thursday, and a Happy New Year!!!!

My New Year’s resolutions for 2008 did not go so swimmingly. Let’s recap them, shall we?

1. Finish at least two movies

Ouch! Yeah, umm, that one crashed and burned… and how! Started out promising enough, but before I knew it Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog was gimping towards month seven of production with nary an end in sight. Meanwhile, the first movie of my robot series was meeting its demise at the hands of a poorly-written story, and without episode 1 there’s no point in episodes 2 through 4. Quite the crap-tacular mess, I must say. Today both movies function in a zombie mode — very undead, shuffling around the house moaning, every now and then trying to sneak up on me to eat my brain. Jerks. My plans for them consist of embalming them with napalm and “accidentally” dropping a Zippo lighter…

2. Play more guitar

Well, technically I’ve met this goal, but the playing time has been so sporadic and laughably bad I wouldn’t call it a success if you paid me (well, maybe if you paid me…) Whenever I do play, I find myself rummaging over the same old stale unfinished riffs from ten years ago, coming to the exact same stopping points, without the first clue on how to finally turn these little “gems” into something resembling a song. Not even Garage Band helps, and you know it’s a hopeless case when Garage Band throws up its hands and says, “You’re on your own, loser.” Depressing…

I’m making a rude gesture towards the old 2008 calendar…

Any hope for 2009??? Yeah, I think so. Three-eyed Larry has progressed far more smoothly than I had dared to dream, which gives me hope for some of the other projects up my sleeve. I have some interesting design ideas for my films I can’t wait to try out. And our little zombie children are not total lost causes. After I torch their rotting corpses I have every intention of Supergluing the cinders back together, then using a ball-peen hammer and a loud mix tape of old Rush albums to shape them into something… well, less zombie-ish. At least then I won’t have to peer cautiously around corners to avoid zombie ambush at 3 a.m. when making a trip to the little boy’s room…

As far as resolutions go… well, I’ve always held that New Year’s resolutions were stupid ideas, and this year I’m going to stay true to that belief. Just say “no” to resolutions, dammit!

These little green dudes are constantly getting into all sorts of mischief. Not sure what’s chasing this one, but I would bet my paycheck he did something to piss the other guy off…

Inked and colored with Sharpies and Prismacolor markers on Graphics 360 marker paper…

The last frames have been inked, scanned, and laid out in Painter. I made another test reel, and the inked lines look pretty darn good. Please pardon me while I collapse in relief…

WooHOO!!

Now… since inking is finally behind us, we can turn our attention to coloring. At one point I was planning on doing the inking and coloring at the same time, with Sharpies for the line art and Prismacolor markers for the color, then scanning the results. Figured it might save a step or two. Unfortunately, I did some test images and found I couldn’t get a consistent color tone with the markers. I’m sure there’s something I could do when scanning that would let me even the tones out, but my knowledge of Photoshop and GIMP leaves a lot to be desired. Fixing it after the fact would be just another tedious, manual process, which I’m not interested in doing. So, we’re using the Wacom and Painter. I’ve modified my coloring methodology from the last time I painted Larry, made it a lot simpler, so I’m thinking this should go smoothly…

We’re on the downhill slope. After coloring, we do audio, editing, and mastering — easy fun stuff! Still looking good for a February 4th release. Won’t be long now!