Reposting this… I’d taken it down because of the bandwidth issues in the early phase of my Fame, but I’ve been asked to put it back up and it seems safe enough now. Demonstrates my strange habit of creating imaginary stories, by which I mean, not fiction, but fictional fiction. “Bess of the North and Her Wonder Dog Yukon Prince” I hope has a place in Borges’ library, anyways.
In the midst of showreel-editing misery, this brought up some fond memories:
“The Golden Compass”, copyright New Line Cinema
Yes, I know they look exactly like real dogs. Thank you! Yes, we could possibly could have just used real dogs. Next question…
Inspiration was provided by hours and hours of old “Challenge of the Yukon” radio shows….
….which in combination with lengthy rendering times might have made me go a little nutty. I gave all the dogs names. They were.. let’s see.. I think Nanuk was the left-hand dog, Snowball the right-hand one, and of course Yukon Prince in the lead. In my daily dailies drawings I had him starring in an action-packed series of adventure novels circa 1933 (I have a thing for period book covers.. title fonts are some of the great freebies on Blambot):
It’s a good thing I work in the animation industry otherwise people might think drawing imaginary covers for imaginary books was a really strange thing to do.
I also was working on a heron for a while, but his series (more around the mid-1910s I’d say) was less successful:
Whew! Sorry it’s a bit late, but just finished crunch last week, and this comic kind of ran away with me a little bit.. my Ada Lovelace Day contribution:
To spare your bandwith, the rest is at the link below: Continue Reading »
As usual I’m a bit overcommitted at the moment with Things That Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time.. my drinking buddy Suw came up with some cockamamie scheme for Ada Lovelace Day, and next thing I know I’m doing this (click on the image if, god help you, you want to see it larger):
The goal of this worthy enterprise is to celebrate women in technology… corrupted by myself to the goal of fooling around. Ada Lovleace, as I’m sure you all know, came up with the first theoretical program for the first imaginary computer, thus ushering in the Age of Steampunk making her an inspiration for all us girls messing around on computers in later centuries!
Insanely I actually have a few pages of this but to get in under the wire of The Day Itself I’m posting that up for now.
I got back from the Annecy festival a few weeks ago.. don’t have any Deep Thoughts but a couple of film recommendations and some sketches.
On the whole I found the films kind of a let down (I’ll never brag about having film in Annecy again.. ) but it was worth it for one film, I think the best short film I’ve ever seen: Skhizein, which won the audience award. Very funny for 10 minutes, then turned suddenly incredibly sad; on a rare subject, and I’m still thinking about it weeks later. Catch in on the festival circuit if you possibly can; I suppose it will come out on the ‘net when it’s done touring. Also excellent was the feature Peurs du Noir. Not normally much of a horror fan but really inventive graphics in this one:
Anyways we all really go to Annecy to drink and socialize and stock up on graphic novels at the fabulous comic shops, all of which activities I thoroughly covered. Having a glass of wine or ten with fellow-Narnian Caroline, I couldn’t help noticing how ideal her features are for fast drawing; and then there was a random guy sitting behind her with classic French-comic-book-hero chiseled cheekbones, so I drew this:
And then I thought, obviously, HOW MUCH COOLER, not to mention more French-comic-booky it would be, if Caroline was a fairy:
and Mr Brooding noir hero could solve crimes featuring ogres and witches, but dark! and French! and brooding! It looked pretty fantastic on a bottle and a half of cheap red and a week’s all-graphic-novel-and-animation diet.
I promised Caroline I’d put it up so here it is… I was kind of fancying mocking a cover up in colour, because that’s the sort of thing I waste my time on, but I’m shockingly paralyzed by the death of my Toshiba tablet. I’m a lot more dependent on Photoshop than I’d really like for polishing stuff. No one seems to make tablet PCs with decent graphics cards anymore so I’m ogling Cintiqs now, which I can’t really justify as I’d mostly use it for doing things like covers for imaginary comic books.
