Salamander

I want to post some recent work. Here is a salamander image. I was inspired to draw this based on the idea of salamanders being mentioned in mythology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamander
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamander_%28legendary_creature%29

Salamanders are associated with fire. Affiliated with fire elements I included a volcano at the top and a crucible held by tongs in the middle.

Here is a version of ring of fire sung by June Carter.

2012 New Year New Comics

I am working on comic books these days(aka Graphic Novels)

I love comics and graphic novels and I have narrative work beside my story "Mt Auburn Night" in my sketchbooks. I have work that is scanned and ready for polish. Then it will be presented as comics.

Although I have read tons of comics I am a newbie to writing and drawing them. I have found that most of the comics that I have worked on have little or no words. Thinking about this I realize that I feel self-conscious writing dialog. Now I am working on using dialog and text for story telling. Most of the stories I have made I preferred to use only pictures to tell the story. However, I find it not enough to not use pictures without words. I am still working on my process writing and drawing narratives. I tend to draw lots of pages only to return to them later for edit after edit in order to make the story more clear. This is frustrating when the final edit stage happens and there are drawings that do not get used. I need to concern myself with story first. It seems the visual narrative has a flow that reads well when edited. When I write down the story with pictures and words there is usually more than is needed. During the editing phase I ask myself why didn't I think of that in the first place.

In reference to graphic storytelling Here are some things I have been recently reading:
Stephen King: On Writing a Memoir of the Craft
Grant Morrison: Supergods What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

Here are two samples of comics I am working on.

Darth Vader vs Abe Lincoln. (Hopefully I won't get an angry note for this one from Lucas Arts...) I just intended this as a parody. Before now I have not ever made an attempt at fan art.

The Adventures of Jack Maggot

Jack Maggot is a deviant who lives in a world with zombies,underground chambers and vampires. I want to create a supernatural world for him to live in. The story is based on a dream I had. Now I am putting work in to fill in more of the story for the characters.

None of the artwork is ready to post yet. I am still editing the pages that I have.
Here is the thumbnail sketch of the story. I have 6 pages inked and ready for cleanup on the computer.

Happy 2012

Wishing you a healthy 2012. 2011 was a good year. Saying goodbye to 2011 and I hope 2012 will be healthy and fortuitous.

The Fall 2011 semester at Harvard is over for me now. The students worked hard for the intro to maya course. Teaching was challenging and fun. I received good feedback and I am going to implement the student's comments into my next class. I will be submitting a course proposal for another intro to Maya Course at Harvard Extension school for Fall 2012. The next intro class will be a refined version based on feedback and experiences from 2011.

http://www.extension.harvard.edu/courses

Intro to Maya 2011 Syllabus

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic950985.files/CSCIE21_SylabusFall_2011.pdf

Our class stayed on track with the focus areas of work. I deviated from the original plan when it felt needed. I needed to add lecture time for constraints,joint orientation,skinning,connection editor,and graph editor. A difficult issue with Autodesk's Maya software is learning the interface. We ended with a 4 week final project where the students were asked to design a robot and animate the robot's function. I focused a lot of my feedback on animation related issues, since that is my specialty.

Some of the students posted their work online. So with their permission I have included links to there work in this blog post

Larry Kyrala
Larry's YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/coldnebo?feature=watch
Larry's Final on vimeo
http://vimeo.com/33486895
Here is a link to Larry's Blog
http://coldnebo.tumblr.com/

Ben Guild
Ben's Final
http://vimeo.com/33557825

Onem
Onem's Final project
http://onemboreal.com/archives/3236

Every student ended up editing their storylines to be shorter. Which I feel is part of the process of creating your first story for animation.

It was my honor to be the instructor in this course. Thank you students and thank you Harvard.