Xeno

I'll just leave this here.

Haven't posted in a bit, been busy with course work. Hopefully I'll be getting more in the habit of drawing more and more as I learn better practices.

School's been good so far. Loads of new information right off the bat that we're now learning to apply. All fascinating stuff of course, and it's getting me more interested in animation itself than I used to be. Up to now my focus has been more on comics, but honestly I'm getting really into this whole animation concept.

But then, maybe I'm seduced by the fact that several of my classes revolve around watching cartoons and drawing stuff like what I've got below. Although it'll be a long time before I'm animating anything nearly that complex. For now it's the classic bouncing ball, and working our way up to doing the flour sack exercise developed by the early Disney guys by the end of the term.

Today's art is a couple of studies from Jean-David Morvan and Jose-Luis Munuera's fantastic adventure series, Navis. The characters and poses aren't mine, but rather they're exercises in learning how to do solid drawing with underlying construction, and a careful look should reveal a lot of the latter. Our Animation Drawing instructor really stresses this stuff, so it's to my best interest to practice it a lot.

Giving it a miss

One of the problems with not getting a summer job is having to tighten your belt, so away go a lot of perks you already had. In my case, that meant giving up two things that had been mainstays, comics and quality cheese. Sure, it's a shame to miss out on those things, but I've been poor before and no stranger to sacrificing when I need to.

Well, school is about to start up again, my loan papers (hopefully) will be here next week, and with the low-income grant on top I should be in decent shape financially between now and April. Which means cheese now and again.

But not comics.

Seriously, it's time I took a break from them. I'm gonna have enough to do without getting sidetracked by that stuff, and without spending the money it takes. I'd pretty much pulled back to just getting a handful of manga in any case, and given the price of those volumes I'm better off.

Still gonna miss them all the same, but they're a frill. They can wait until I'm earning money of my own.

For art, the usual Preston Blair studies today, plus a page of trying to apply the concepts to some pics from Cute Overload. Mixed results, but not totally negative. I am heartened.

Running up that hill

Continuing to slowly work through Cartoon Animation. It's amazing how tough just doing these simple forms is, but there you have it. And if I intend to get to where I want to be, this is a necessary step. So I fumble my way along, doing these studies and practicing what I can, trying to get better. Art is a cumulative process, and while this doesn't really look like much at this stage, as I build upon what I learn today, tomorrow, the next day and so on, it'll develop into some pretty wild stuff.




Probably rude just to leave it at shop talk. So I'll toss in a couple of recommendations.

Evan Dahm, who finished his short, surreal epic Rice Boy a while back (it's all on his site, definitely read it) has been working on another story in the world of Overside, Order of Tales. There's enough of it now to give a coherent storyline with hints of a rich world and well developed characters.

If you're interested in something a bit less surreal, you can't go wrong with Ursula Vernon's Digger. Hyenas, wombats and dead gods, what's not to like? The archives went free not long ago, so you can read the whole, fascinating epic from the start and fall in love with the characters like the rest of us.

For a third option, I'll give extremely high marks to an entry from France, Maliki. A wonderful variety of art, and a mix of everyday adventures, supernatural creatures, random meanderings and cats, with occasional visits by Skeletor. The artist is one of the designers for the wonderful Wakfu TV series, which I really, really wish they'd release an english subtitle of. The series, and the Maliki comic, are both in French, of course, but it's easy to tell what's going on regardless of whether you speak the language.

More later.