Paint Guys Begin, Part 3

Here's the last batch.

If I could make video games, I'd make one with these guys. Just saying.

...If you couldn't tell, I've ran out of things to say.

Values from Elders

The Creative Child

Peer Pressure

Leisure Time

Handicapped Children

Dry Hands

If this were animation, the third panel would have a fog horn sound effect.



I seriously do have chapped hands most of the time. Probably cuz I wash them too much. I'm a borderline germophobe. I'm this close to shaving my head bald, growing a goatee, and hosting Deal or No Deal.

Paint Guys Begin, Part 2

Let's continue, shall we?

In a lot of the art projects you have to do in college there's that point where it gets grueling, no matter how much you like art. You hafta stay up late, or just not sleep at all, to get it done and you can't wait for it to get over with. With this project, I can genuinely say I enjoyed every minute of it. It was my first project in one of my first classes, so a lot of that could of been the excitement, where you're all like, "OH BOY, OH BOY, OH BOY, MY FIRST HIGHER LEARNING ART THINGY!"

...No? Just me? Alright...

Anyway, I sure the biggest factor of the enjoyment was making these guys. Power to them.

Family Time

Emergence of Identity

Education

Crisis in Values

Children without Prejudice

Scary School Sketch

Scary school is scary. Zombies don't help either.



This is a sketch I've been working on with plans to make it a pretty detailed CG image, to take a break from the comics and to make and illustration with these weird group of characters that I've messed around with for a couple of years. I was taking my sweet time to get a good composition, and it'll take me even longer to put it through it's paces in Photoshop, so this will be something I'll be working on for a good few weeks. In fact, seeing as I've just started a comic for next week, it'll take even longer to finish since I'll do other things if they come to mind. It must be nice to do this kind of stuff for a living to have harsh deadlines and promise of pay as "motivation" to get it done quicker. That, and not working at a bowling alley as a day job.

I ain't hatin' on bowling alleys though. Nice job to have while working to get a more relevant one.

Anyway, on this image, I'm gonna focus a lot on the background. I'd like to make it more painterly and avoid using flat colors as I usually do for the comics. Let's see what happens. Fingers crossed!

Paint Guys Begin, Part 1

Here's what I did for my first Design project, where we had to make small designs on small panels with cut paper. The theme was some kind of a faux commission, where the designs were for some sort of child education promotion thing. I obviously don't remember the details, but for every panel we were given a title with a child theme that we had to work with.

Anyway, in this very first project I created these Paint Guys. I call them that as the original idea was they magically came to be after you make big paint drops come together to form a simple, cartoony figure (if the figure part ain't quite coming through to you, watch this animation dealie). I love these little guys. They're probably the most interesting (certainly the most original) things I ever created. I used them in other projects in almost every class I had throughout college. In other words, I'm super proud of them.

There were quite a few of these, so I'm gonna load them in a series of posts like I did with the alphabet thing. They're in no particular order except for how they came up in the upload images list.

Child Injuries

Child Development and Mass Media

Child Care

Child Advocate

Changing Families

Birthday Gift Glitch, Part Thirteen

THEND.



Well, that took forever. I liked it, though. It's easier to think of jokes when you have a story going rather than thinking of punch lines every week that aren't related to the previous one. I've got other Animal Crossing related arcs in my head, such as creating more human players that are all controlled by me which starts some crazy multiple personality stuff, and visiting the town of someone that uses an AC mod device to make their town and anything/anyone in it all weird and whatnot. Don't know if I'll get to those anytime soon, though.

And now for something completely different.

I've got a more detailed illustration in mind for my next project, and it may take me longer than a week to get it done, so next Monday might just be a progress report with some sketches and whatever I've done up to that point.

Birthday Gift Glitch, Part Twelve

Punchline! Get it?! HA!



I guess I'll just make every comic end with a punch.

I've started working on the next comic, and I know it'll be the end of this arc. I don't have many Animal Crossing ideas left, so I may back off of them for a while. Or maybe not. I often don't get a new idea until the day I start working on a new one.

Birthday Gift Glitch, Part Eleven

Out of the frying pan...



Okay, I lied in the last post. It'll take me another two comics to finish this arc. Change your schedule accordingly.

And now for something completely the same.

To keep in the theme of the last panel of this comic, I probably shoulda put this drawing of Resetti in there somewhere:

Birthday Gift Glitch, Part Ten

The RIB telling you to reset: the epitome of irony.



I think I can milk this arc for two more comics. But this'll be the last comic where I'm (more) crazy and disheveled.

When I started doing this arc, I originally planned to give myself a beard in the later strips, but then the 20 minute joke wouldn't have made sense. So it became a five o'clock shadow instead.

I guess it doesn't make sense either way since you can't grow facial hair in the game.

Maverick Deke

Why's everybody gotta smack my laptop?



Deke McClelland is a graphics and image guru who, amongst other things, is one of the awesome teachers at lynda.com. Since college, I've been going there to improve my Photoshop and Illustrator skills, and the main series' of tutorials I've been focusing on are the One-on-One's, in which Deke is the instructor. Him and the website in general have been a tremendous help in my growth as an artist, so I can't thank them enough. But I'll try anyway.

Thank you, lynda.com and Deke!

*UPDATE*

Edit by John:

Coming Together

They sure do wave a lot.



I've been wanting to post this for a while, but iMovie 08 proved to be too sucky to easily add the credits I wanted at the end. Dad suggested reinstalling the older iMovie HD, which worked much better. Before I posted it on the interwebs, I wanted to make it quite clear that the music IS NOT MINE AND I DON'T CLAIM IT AS MINE. It's from Samurai Champloo. Anyway, those credits were added, and after going back in forth with John, I eventually got it to a format I like. It's still low quality, but the pictures I originally took when making it were low quality to begin with so I could fit most of them in a single SD card.

I used Red and Yellow and other similar... whatever they are in lots of projects in college, starting with my first design assignment. I wanted to show their animated debut first, as it's easier to figure out what the heck they're supposed to be if you see them in motion first.

Anyway, now that this is posted, I can finally start showing more of these guys. I'm quite proud of them. I'd call them my children, but that sounds creepy.

Here it is on Youtube, if you'd prefer that.

Super Senior Returns

To be in a ho-hum movie, no doubt.



Another project where I messed around in Illustrator. The paintbrush and paintbrush blob tools are great if your like me and prefer to work more with illustrations rather than design. I might have to start doing my inking in Illustrator, as the paintbrush tool's good at adjusting for human error in wobbly curves.

As for the Super Senior thing, that was a one shot thing I did for a comic, back when I was in college and still hanged out with that talking squirrel. I still stay in contact with him though. His oldest son still has one more year at UD left, apparently. And his wife sent me a very nice Christmas card last year! Good people... or rodents, or whatever.

Warhol's Mario

Perhaps screen prints of E Tanks with varying palettes would of been more appropriate.



Here's an Advance Painting project that I did really quick during the Thanksgiving break of that semester when I felt that I should be doing something rather than sleeping off my Itis. It's was done on a rather small canvas and I didn't have much paint on hand, so I had to apply carefully and thinly. It worked out okay in the end, and my teachers and classmates thought it was interesting. Some thought it was some sort of commentary on different races, but really the different colors of the Marios are based on the palettes he flashes through when you get a Starman in the original Super Mario Bros. (They aren't exact, so please waste your time telling me im doin it wrong.)

As for the idea, I just thought it'd be cool to see what Andy Warhol might make had he still been alive to do work on current icons of pop culture.

Here's some shots of the individual Marios:

Birthday Gift Glitch, Part Nine

RESETTI PUNCH!!



He actually went easy on me. He coulda used his pick axe.

Nice of Rover to keep me company while I waited for the Resettis to show up. He could of left, but that's just how nice of a guy he is.

I've always thought of Sonny and Don Resetti as stereo typical Italian Americans in the way they speak and act. Based on their temperament, Don is Tom Hagen and Sonny is Silvio Dante.

Tow Trucks: Trucks that Tow

Or so I'm told.




No comic this week, as my dad asked me to make a tow truck to put on the website he made for Drumheller's Towing and Recovery. I guess artistic ability is genetic. The truck may or may not be on the site by the time you hit that link.

I gotta feeling he was just humoring me and he'll just throw the image somewhere in there, but it still gives me a reason to try stuff in Illustrator. I made the car cartoony, as I'm not good at drawing realistic mechanical stuff. ...Actually, I'm not that great at drawing anything realistically. I see plenty of realistic stuff every day. I wanna draw stuff you won't see.

Keep in mind he made that site in Canvas. Canvas! Someone already shot that horse. He needs to move on.

Birthday Gift Glitch, Part Eight

Just so ya know, some of the animal neighbors in Animal Crossing are invertebrates.



Resetti seems to know plenty about the inner workings of Animal Crossing like I imagine Rover does, so he could probably fix this. I'm sure the procedure will involve lots of yelling and high blood pressure.

One of the best things about the latest Animal Crossing is seeing the Resetti brothers' headquarters, which I crudely drew a portion of in the last two panels. I wish you could see that kinda stuff with the other non-neighbor animals. I remember hearing that you could find Tom Nook's house in the original, Japan-only Animal Crossing on the N64. But that might of been a rumor.

Birthday Gift Glitch, Part Seven

Place it next to the first one, only slightly higher so they get the two-level effect with a little patch running down the middle.



HA! He's oblivious. And I'm an idiot.

Good Grief, MORE Girl Sketches?!

Yes, more. And more to come.



I believe the date on this sketch is 2006. I remember this one in particular cuz I finished it in one of the restaurants in Disney World's Animal Kingdom while waiting for our order to come up. Yes, I know the subject matter has nothing to do with Disney, but still...

So what. She's cute. Shut up.

Galactic Bowling

aka BOWLING IN SPAAAAAACE.



Finally, my hobby and my job have come together in a big colorful mess. On Saturday nights, the bowling alley I work at does that thing where you put on black lights and play party music. Pretty much every alley has their version of this. Ours is called "Galactic Bowling." For the image, I took the patterns on the carpet and the panels above the pin deck as a reference.

The real reason I did this was to do a more in depth Illustrator ...uh ...illustration. I usually don't do these unless I'm getting a grade for it, as I prefer Photoshop, but I've been getting a lot better at it thanks to the lynda.com lessons. Now that I'm more familiar with it, I figure I'll start doing Illustrator stuff more often.

The rainbow lane is kinda wonky, as I had to constantly adjust the curves to make it fit in the letterbox frame and make the blend of the colors look okay. I love the way the ball and pins came out though. In fact, I loved them so much, I saved them on their own:

Conan and Leno: The Oldest Story Ever Told

Jimmy Fallon is somewhere off panel.



More stuff from John, which is usually the case if the comic is based on current events. We threw a few other betrayal ideas that didn't make it in, such as Lincoln's assassination, Cypher and Neo, and when Mario jumps off of Yoshi over a bottomless pit to reach the next platform.

As for my personal take on the whole Leno and Conan thing... idano. I watch Letterman.

Makes for a funny-a$s comic, though.