2009 has arrived

I should speed paint more.

Hands are difficult to draw - tutorial

Hands are difficult. Even if I had drawn a perfectly realistic hand like this photo of Jeremy, it would not look right. The pose doesn't look like a person would expect, and if you are like me- if you drew it you would not be satisfied.
The pressure is to make a hand that reflects the anatomy work you did (didn't you?). That looks like a hand that people would expect to see. And that does not look exactly like the way your favorite artist draws hands.

So here is my idea. If you draw a hand, and it looks pretty much ok:
1.Scan it in
2.Print out a lightened version of your almost-ok hand in a different size (usually bigger) and redraw over your original.

Writers do this all the time. You never see an author's actual writing, you are seeing the author's re-write of the stuff he or she thought was almost-ok on the initial draft.

Here is my example and a photo of Jeremy using arcane powers while on the road:

Girls have cooties - Alien Containment

Science has concluded what 6 year old boys have known all along.

Women have more diverse hand bacteria than men

"A new University of Colorado at Boulder study indicates that not
only do human hands harbor far higher numbers of bacteria species
than previously believed, women have a significantly greater
diversity of microbes on their palms than men."

Cooties don't wash off, which goes against the 6 year old boy
conventional wisdom:

"Although hand washing altered community composition, overall levels
of bacterial diversity were unrelated to the time since the last hand
washing," wrote the researchers in PNAS. "Either the bacterial
colonies rapidly re-establish after hand washing, or washing (as
practiced by the students included in this study) does not remove the
majority of bacteria taxa found on the skin surface."

More UFO Wally Wood

Wally Wood continued.

22 UFO Panels

My PC is back. It was dead for a while there, but is reloaded and feeling much better.

I have decided to put the UFO back into Acme UFO Defence. Wally Wood's 22 Panel exercise is "in work" - Alien vs Space Marine style.

The point of the exercise is to stretch artistically and improve storytelling. It takes about 2 1/2 weeks doing 3 panels a day.

“Never draw what you can copy; never copy what you can trace; and never trace what you can cut out and paste up.” Wally Wood

You can see the original Wally Wood collection in hi res from the owner here.

Alex and Paddington

Mr. Sava has not put out a request for quest strips in a while, but I have been toying around with a short "young Alex" story anyway.
I really like where the Dreamland Chronicles have been going - especially with the dwarves. Scott seems like a genuine good guy.

Comic Book movie wait ahead

Long wait for Marvel movies: Iron Man 2 (May 7, 2010), Thor (July 16, 2010), The First Avenger: Captain America (May 6, 2011), and The Avengers (July 15, 2011). The distribution agreement also includes Iron Man 3.

"Coming off of 'Iron Man's' incredible success this summer, we could not be more excited about extending our relationship with Marvel," - Rob Moore, Vice Chairman of Paramount Pictures