Poor Mans Cintiq

I've been looking for a way of doing paperless animation and have settled on a software.  Now, the difficulty has been drawing with a Wacom Tablet which is okay for a lot of things but not precises enough to do good in-betweens and clean-up.  Everyone uses the 21" Cintiq for this which allows you to draw directly on the screen.  They also make a 12" but the expense has been too much to justify.  After checking into tablet PCs I found the LE1600 by Motion Computing but the cost was still pretty high.  Now after a few years I found a used one on Amazon and  got it for almost nothing!  It has Wacom technology like the Cintiq and is also another computer as opposed to just being a drawing screen!  I've got just the project to run through it!

Hunting Weasels...

Doing some design work for a personal project.

Click on images to enlarge

Animators, Bookmark This Site!

Péter Nagy's new website the Living Lines Library has compiled pencil tests, model sheets, and other things hand drawn related and placed them on an organized site for your enjoyment. The way things are laid out you can easily find what you are looking for.

Click on the title or past this link to find it: http://livlily.blogspot.com/

Retouching Family #2

A friend of the family saw my restoration of our kids done with Photoshop, (it's an earlier posting on this site somewhere), and asked if I could lighten a picture of their grandmother? All they had was a copy of an old newspaper clipping. It was pretty streaky with a herringbone caused by the Benday dot patterns newspapers use to get halftones. There was something that looked like a feather in her hair but it maybe part of that herringbone effect so I downplayed it and left it out. The whole thing should have been repainted but I didn't have the time and the end result is a little ghostly. It's not my best work and I haven't heard back from them yet but it was free so they can't complain too much.

Click on image to enlarge

Balaam and His Donkey

I wanted to do a contemporary retelling of Bible stories to make them relevant today. Something layered that could be enjoyed by a wide range of ages like "Bullwinkle" which worked as satire for the adults and entertainment for youngsters. The style could be easy to replicate using Flash and driven by dialogue allowing the reuse of artwork. I thought it was something I could do alone without help

I can't say this was successful, and I think the poor production qualities like sound and music, plus the recycling of artwork, and the length of the story worked against me.

Anyway here it is for better or worse. And yes, I did all the voices too.