Kids and Robots, Robot One: T.O.D

So here's the first in the kids and robots thing I'm drawing. This first robot is T.O.D. Time of Day Robot. Of course, the robot only reads 12:00, his TOM (Time of manufacture).

I wanted to try something a little different in terms of coloring-a little more graphic style.

It actually takes longer to color this way then with the VM coloring way. Maybe when I hit a groove, it'll be a little easier.

New VM page

Yay!!! Weekend!!!!

And with it comes the latest page in VM. yeah, I got a little lazy toward the bottom. I actually do color panel from panel-so sometimes you can tell when you go thru my stuff the panels that look a bit unfinished tend to be the ones I do last-and those tend to be the bottom panels. I'm kind of weird OCD about it. I for some reason cannot do everything at once and then layer and layer at one time. I actually go panel by panel. Panel 1, fill, color, layers, then to panel two, and so on. It's a really weird thing. And I letter the same way when it goes into Illustrator. Panel one-balloon, text, panel two, and so on. And it has to go clockwise or left to right. Left panel-then upper right, and onwards down in a clockwise manner. Oh my, I'm making myself sound all freakish here.

I think I broke my computer chair-so I'm using a dining room chair and sitting all japanese style on it to make myself tall enough to work and see things effectively. i keep having to get up whenever my toes start tingling. It's a little annoying. And now we have to find a chair that fits in with our black, red, and white decor that doesn't "look" like an office chair. Internet shopping-here I come!

I'm working on a new thing-kids with robots. I'll put one up as soon as it's done. So far, I've drawn three-but I want to see how many I come up with before getting completely bored with it. New style of coloring on these ones too.

And lah de daa-random comment. My new favorite show-the Sarah Silverman Show. She is hilarious!!! Sometimes I recite lines that are just so wrong from it-just because she delivers them so deadpan-and it's so funny. From the last episode (and she's telling this to a ten year old girl she's trained for a beauty paegeant,"You want to give up? Well, let me tell you a story about giving up. Ten years ago, I got pregnant. And everyone wanted me to give up and go ahead with the preganancy. And I almost gave in not having an abortion until eight and a half months in, I went to the doctor and told him to get this baby out of me. And I had to push and push and then the fetus came out and it was crying and covered in all of this gooky stuff. I didn't have any money, so I climbed out the hospital window." It's along those lines, I don't think I have it verbatim-but it's the general idea. She's so wrong.

Middle of the week...blah....and HDV cameras.

I've come to dread and love the Wednesday. It's the middle of the week, so it's halfway done, but then you still half of it to go. Today I resent, because it's a beautiful day, and I keep wandering outside to enjoy the beautiful weather, and I am resenting that I am now an adult and must work. I keep thinking about wandering off to a bookstore or somewhere to enjoy, and then I have to reign myself back in with the big "responsibility" leash.

Since I'm at work-I'll gush on some of the new cameras in the market right now. I have the fun job of working with cameras-so sometimes I like to try out brand new stuff. The HDV consumer cameras are really great still cameras as well. So you get a double dose of both a video camera of higher quality-with the ability to take high resolution stills. The cheapest one of broadcast quality you can get is the Canon HV-10. The camera is really cool-it fits in the palm of your hand-and has pretty good image stabilization. Like most consumer grade cameras, the focus is pretty weak-so don't expect it to blow your mind with some amazing zoom ins and outs. In fact-put it too close to an object and the auto focus wobbles and is unable to focus direct. The problem with the camera-is no manual focus, and no infrared-so low light is pretty weak. But it does have the added bonus of having a little interview light to cast on your subjects.

Second fun one is the HVR-A1U by Sony. Sony rocks my world, seriously. I love walking into Sony stores and looking at all their new stuff. (I'm a mac lover, but when I saw the new Sony Vaios-and they're so small and cute, I was drooling). I took a picture of some roses with the A1U, and honestly-the camera function on that camera is just awesome. Beautiful, really. And then it has the added bonus of nightvision-so you can take it into complete darkness and it'll illuminate with infrared light. Drawbacks-poor low light performance and zoom function. But-you can buy a wide angle lens for it, and it actually has a beechtek addition-with XLR inputs so you can buy high quality microphones and get good directional sound. In fact-the camera actually comes with a ECM mic-which is not a bad standard mic that Sony makes.

So what does this all mean? Well-think about this. Let's say you buy one of the best digital cameras out there-those would be a Nikon or Canon SLR (Nikon D-70 or Canon Rebel). That's going to set you back anywhere from $800-$1000. Now, what if you can get a high quality video camera-that shoots high definition video (this is not true HD-by the way), but that ALSO works as a still camera? Canon HV-10 $1100, the A1U $3000. Pretty neat, if you ask me, and it'll still get better as it goes along, and technology gets better.

Ahhhh. I freaking love technology. I swear, I'll probably faint when I see the new I-phone.

More Illustrator...dark japanese girl!

Another Illustrator piece I just finished working on. This one was a lot of fun. I just grabbed a piece of cardboard, drew on it, then added textures and vectors in Photoshop and Illustrator. Ahhh-I love weekends. Too bad work has to come tomorrow. *Sigh*. I envy all those in school who get president's day off. The only holidays that exist in television production are Christmas Day and Thanksgiving Day. Unless you are on shoot. Then you don't.

Another cover page

I'm still not hip to the blog thing. I know it's something you're supposed to update daily-or at least a couple times a week, but what can I say? Anyways, here's the latest update to the Voyage Moyen webcomic-it's a splash page-a cover page! I like doing splash pages. I am in the midst of recoloring page 13 that I lost when my hardrive crashed, and it's taking me forever because, well, I keep thinking "man, I already did this page! This sucks!". So I keep focusing on other pages, other art pieces, and I just get so bored with that stupid page. I mean-what if there's a huge systemic crash-and all the pages go down? Or what if I want to mirror the comic on another site? (I'm actually working on that one there).

Well-I get a couple questions every so often about how I color. I'm definitely not the most organized or technically proficient color person out there-and in fact-I took on the comic to make myself better at digital coloring. Coloring was actually my least favorite thing to do-and I've actually grown to love it. (Especially since I don't have to bust out paints or markers anymore). As each page goes along, I change processes, I change techniques-the number of layers vary, the effects vary (I'm relying on those far less-you can spot a photoshop effect from a mile away), and the way I work varies. I color as the page feels. For me-Voyage Moyen is supposed to be strange-disjointed, dreamlike. For example- the whole first part was supposed to be at night. But-I didn't want it to be 30 some pages of purple or gray tinged pages. I wanted each page-each panel to feel like a piece. So that's how I color. It isn't scientific, it isn't even "comic book" straight out coloring (like Image or something-where everything glows blue and purple), but screw that. I don't want it to look like everything else out there. I wanted it to look a little different from the norm. Hopefully I've succeeded-and it doesn't throw people off. I think if I do another comic-it might be a little more straight forward-or maybe even in just plain old black and white. I don't know. But, I do VM this way, because VM feels this way.

Wakata? Sweet.

Comic update

So here's the final page in the beginning of the Voyage Moyen introduction-which doesn't include the fact that really-I should've thought twice about doing a webcomic in full color. Especially when you look at some of the earlier pages and the emphasis on lens flares....uhh, I shudder. I hope at some point I can go back and redo some of those pages. And some of the lettering and such. Ah, well. This page is kind of dialogue heavy too. If you want to read the comic-click on the Girlamatic link on the right. I'm a-going to a-bed.

More Illustrator...school girl!

I don't know why, but all of a sudden-I want to do everything in illustrator, and the more colorful the better~! It's weird, I had this awesome hatred of the program. I basically used to use it to create balloons in my comic, drop text onto christmas cards, or whatever! But now...now, I'm starting to love the freaky little vector program that likes straightening all your lines for you, and smoothing out all your curves. You throw something in there, trace it, convert it into cute little mini symbols that you can throw all over layers, create som pretty curvy lines...ah, no wonder graphic designers swear by it. Now, I want to master that sucker. And I shall try... until I get bored. So...here's a school girl.

Pirate Girl!

So, I've been fooling around with Illustrator a bit-to make some pieces that are so sugary colored. I wanted to make it really colorful and pretty-so here is Pirate Girl. I don't know, I wanted to do something fun and I really enjoyed playing around with Illustrator. It has a lot of limitations artistically-in terms of using it as a painter like program, but it is all vectors, and fills, and graphics...eee! When you print out your CMYK stuff in Illustrator-even on a semi-pro printer, it looks so bright and punchy.

Anyways, I said she's a pirate, but she doesn't look much like one, does she?

And henceforth, it is updated

Latest page for my webcomic is up...and this page probably took the longest conceptually to come up with. I redid this page over, and over, but I'm relatively pleased with the results. Voyage Moyen is on the Girlamatic site under the links column.

I wish I could say that coloring pages is easy-but it's not for me. I sometimes will color a whole layer, only to end up dumping it later. I may put up the processes of how a page is colored-but in general-I tend to color as I feel-and I think that's why it changes so rapidly. I may put up some examples at some point-some base things that I do consistently between pages-but a lot of it is still trial and error. I'm still figuring it out. Yes, it's all done in Photoshop.

On another note, I saw the movie Pan's Labyrinth this weekend. I have to say, I wasn't wholly prepared for how utterly devestatingly sad and depressing the movie turned out to be. I was kind of torn about it, because I was really prepared to see something amazing, and I felt a little let down by it. I could see what Guillermo Del Toro was trying to do-and it's beautifully acted throughout, just there was a certain something about it that just didn't flow for me. It seemed to push everything at you-like here's this dark fantasy intertwined with the brutality of war-that just made it slightly theatrical-like a stage play or something. I honestly wish it were a little more fantasy than war. But, it is a beautiful looking movie, and it paces rather well.

In any event, I can understand the idea of life being cruel. That the cruelest act can never halt the freedom of fantasy and imagination. That the beauty of a fantastical world within the mind can be the only thing beautiful in the world. Sometimes fantasy is an escape from reality. And whether that's healthy, or not, who would be the judge?

The Number 23

I just saw this trailer for a new movie starring Jim Carrey of all people about the number 23. Some feel that number's not a good thing-as it's obviously the number of the devil. (2 divided by 3 is.666666, so the first three digits are 666-whatever). It's also cosidered to be the number of the illuminati. But most feel that the number has "mystical" qualities. Each parent passes on 23 chromosones to each child. Earth's axis is at a 23 degree angle. It takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate in the human body. The human biorhythm clock is 23 days. The sum of the first 6 digits of pi is 23. (3+1+4+1+5+9=23). Of course, you could probably pick any number and find some sort of natural coincidences. The number 13. The number 3. The number 7. The number 4. The number 37. The number 47. But who knows. Maybe it isn't a coincidence that my birthday falls on the 23rd. Bwahahaha.