I win again!

I win again! I made it past the Editor and was given these kind words by Mark.
Even though I am now represented by Stickman # 656, I have to admit that my favorite is still #17

My 2 best reasons today to like Mark Monlux:
1.) Mark told me about some good things over the years: Cartoonists Northwest and about how art pricing works (more people see the art - over time and by distribution, more the fair pay for the creator) which I find very interesting and may have to do someting about someday.
2.) Mark also is living proof that you can turn out good illustrations, and run a business without losing your mind. He is a pro and fun. I cannot imagine that this is an accident. He must be smart of sumthin'.
BTW Mark is an active member in Seattle GAG. This is the place to get the Pricing and Ethical Guidelines book for people who may someday have a product. Mark is an artists advocate, I am proud to know the Grand Poobah.
He has a great site - love the movie reviews and the Hawaii story.

Return of Stickman entry now away

Now for another StickMan adventure. Can StickMan get past the Monlux editor process.

I am a winner!

My “Sunburned Pirate” entry won for the sculpture-before-dinner activity (probably because of the salad leaf that was added to simulate seaweed?- Hat tip to Jeff Hammill and my table.)
The Toonie Awards banquet was great as usual – the best so far by my thinking. Some greats were missed – Scott, and Scott and Georgia and… plenty of other people that you cannot help but like.
I have met many talented, fine toonists over my almost 2 years of participation.
If I ever do a project with Dillon Works this recognition could come in handy.

Mark Monlux (who normally takes top sculpting honor) successfully challenged me to contribute to his Stickman webcomic – look for an entry later this week?
The Cartoonists Northwest club is going through some changes. I hope that we do not lose the old website, but I like the “yahoo groups” idea. The new ties with the Art Institute of Seattle (a CNW show is in progress since Friday) have been welcome, and more people are recognizing what a uniquely great thing CNW (Cartoonists Northwest) is. (It looks like Philadelphia has something going, but too few cities seem to have what Seattle has.)

Happy to be here.

Taproot As You Like It

I had a great time introducing “me Olives” to Shakespeare this weekend. We saw “As You Like It” directed by Karen Lund (read as a pdf at wowio). I think that the title is excellent 17th Century marketing. Taproot Theater is excellent once again.

"The result is good, good, good vibrations."
- Joe Adcock, Seattle PI

One of the devices in this play is that the banished Duke becomes a hippie in the woods (1960s music for transitions, but faithful iambic pentameter otherwise) which worked well for me.

As hoped, Olives loved the play and I found it very familiar – I had never seen this particular comedy before but if follows the formula: A woman pretends to be a man to test the true heart of the male lead. One of the characters says something amazingly profound in a brief monologue, and everybody gets married at the end.
As the Reduced Shakespeare Company has rightly observed – this never gets old.

BTW – you can always tell the difference between tragedy and comedy with Shakespeare:
Tragedy – everybody dies
Comedy – everybody gets married

“Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak.”
- ROSALIND — Daughter to the banished Duke.

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
- JAQUES — A Lord attending upon the banished Duke.

I think that Orlando Bloom should make like Kenneth Branagh and try out a film version of this play. Fittingly enough the male lead is named “Orlando”. If he does a good enough job on this he could then (when he is older) play the lead in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”… as an elf… well technically a fairy.

I toyed with the idea of traveling all the way down to Ashland Oregon to see “A Midsummer Night's Dream”. I wonder if it would have been worth the long drive, and worth missing this gem from Taproot.

Thank you to: Marianne Savell (Rosalind), Anne Kennedy (Celia) and Bob Borwick (Touchstone) for genuine enjoyment of one of my favorite things – Shakespeare.

My sketch today is a caricature of the much-used device: A woman pretends to be a man to test the true heart of the male lead.

Nintendo DS Sketch Pad

I have to give honorable mention to Jens Andersson (in Sweden?). For his excellent programming for the Nintendo DS. His application reminds me of the drawing hand screensaver software which I also like. Here are two of my sketches on the go. DS conclusively beats PSP because of this.

4 Words: Pressure sensitive drawing pad
Colors! is a simplistic digital application for Nintendo DS based on modern painting-techniques developed for drawing tablets in programs like Photoshop. By taking advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the DS touch-screen it becomes a perfect portable digital sketch-book.

Current features
——————-
Hard and soft circular brush
Pressure-sensitivity can affect opacity and brush-size
512×384 image resolution with 2 stage zoom

Donald problems in work page 3 panel 1

The move from sketchbook to artboard did not go well. Even simple things became harder so I am focusing on one panel for the moment. Looking back at the script - the car is all wrong and what was intended to be a final pencil did not look as good (composition) as the thumbnail that I started with. To top it all off, Donald looked a lot like Daffy. I was doing fine Donald drawings (with audience) without reference - but the panel 1 Donald... just ugg. But before hitting these problems I went to the font size problem using my math brain.

The Comic book dimensions are 6 ¾ x 10 inches. From there I determined that 300 pixels per inch figures a panel of 2025 (half 2025 is 1012 1/2) pixels by 3000.
So each panel (assuming 8 panels per page) can be worked on in a single image of a little over 1000 pixels

I was able to get a pretty good match with a 11 point comic book like font (hair larger than sample page) at 300 pixels per inch. (I used a scan of a Donald Duck like comic for comparison).

For people using prepped artboard the dimensions are: 10x15 drawing area on drawing board with bleed of ½ inch all around (1 ¼ bleed on the bottom margin)

Math brain off.

Merry Christmas

I hope that everyone enjoyed "Talk Like a Time Traveler Day". I am now going back to a Donald Duck project that interests me.

A great 11 page script was written by Jeff Hamill about Donald and nephews in Hawaii. Jeff met with me and explained how a Donald Duck comic is created and provided me with some good resources if I wanted to play Disney artist. Jeff is a very good writer and deserves to have his stories published, and buckets of money dropped his way by movies, tv, and European distributors for his great stuff.

I hit a perfectionist-block almost immediately, so today's post is a sample of some of what I consider hideous (some say it looks fine... I don't), and I will post soon some of my efforts to finish some pages worth showing.

The current strategy: draw may variations - overcome bad starts with many retries. It seems to me to be a legitimate way to attack a block. We shall test this today.