Page 4 Mt Auburn Night

Here is a page 4 preview for my graphic novel.

Pre-School Presentation/Coloring Book Pages

Today I gave an presentation to my 3 yr old's pre-school class about "professional artists". The theme at pre-school for this month was careers.

Synopsis:
Three-year-olds need to touch things, they could not contain themselves from touching brushes and objects in the demo. I was planning on this being the case,obviously.

My own daughter was so excited she kept interrupting the entire talk. I had to keep warning her to stop. She eventually did pretty well.

I did not try to explain animation to them. This led one smart girl to asking me what it was I did for my career. Since I am an animator I told her how animators need to draw to show our ideas. Then we can make the pictures look like they move.

I focused on explaining that by looking at objects you can describe it using pencil/pen.I showed them some simple objects like a box and a ball, and I drew them.
I felt a little like Rene Magritte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Magritte when I explained that a picture of a ball is not a ball. Of course it made total sense to their uncluttered minds.

I have been working on a Alphabet coloring book with Mayari at home. So I used some of those images as examples of objects drawn from life. We colored some printouts of these images.
We worked with different size brushes to see different size brush strokes. We colored the printouts I made, and drew with pencils.

I had a blast.

Some Stained Glass

Some stained glass painting. I created this, to celebrate spring. Hopefully we will have a healthy early spring this year.

updated Non sequitur

I updated the movie into a GIF. I am considering this a Work in Progress. Though Im not sure where it will go. I am thinking of neon signage.

Here is the link to the Photobucket source.

http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c101/fliptail7/AnimatedGifs/CatClock.gif

Non sequitur

Here is a Non sequitur in Terms of Comics. This is a little crayon drawing I tweaked in Photoshop. I took the black lines and printed them out for Mayari to color. After She colored it I took pics of the colored paper with a pair of Taxidermy Cougar eyes moving them around. I put the movie together in After effects. Not all together a great success,but a bit fun experimental animation.

Norway Presentation.

Here is a reference Photo of the Sphinx in Mt Auburn Cemetery. This is one of the main influences of the graphic novel. I learned of this fella while working at Dan Maher's Studio. We we removing and restoring stained glass from the chapel of Mt Auburn Cemetery.


Steve Ford an instructor of mine from CDIA has invited me to speak at HINT in Norway. The talk at HINT is going to cover animation workflow for video games. HINT is a training college for students learning skills for professional development. http://www.hint.no/english I am thrilled to be going there for four days in March. HINT is in Steinkjer Norway is about Two hours North of Trondheim.http://maps.google.com/maps?q=NO-7729+STEINKJER&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wlThe work for the presentation is taking up a bit of my time now. 

Page 3 Mt Auburn Night

Here is the updated Page 3 for the Graphic novel. I redrew the hat on the top panel for hours. I'm sticking with this version for now.

http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/gifflips-turns-your-favorite-gifs-into-flipbooks

I love animated gifs. I havent made many(only one) I just love the format.

Intro Page Pencil

When I started the comic it was all on loose leaf lined paper. Ill upload some of those also. This is a pencil version of the above page. The entire top panel ended up being its own two pages. This rough pencil is divided into three and a half pages in the final version. I spent the last year reworking my original ideas into a more cohesive narrative. I sought out feedback from friends and showed the first draft to Joe Quiones at a Graphic novel workshop. I also talked a lot with my former co worker Mike Bear about storytelling,etc... I have a Blog link to his work on the side bar to the right.

First Post

I am starting this blog to get some of the work I have stashed away seen.

Graphic Novel

Right now I am working on a Graphic Novel/ Short story.  I have about 19 pages of layout. Most are completed,but I am pushing to get the last few pages finished. The setting of the story is Mt Auburn Cemetery in Watertown MA. I don't want to say to much about the details and spoil the end.