“You’re a good egg just a little cracked…..” ~ my grandfather
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Posts Tagged ‘cartoon’
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“We’ve got to risk implosion. We may explode into the biggest fireball this part of the galaxy has seen, but we’ve got to take that one in a million chance.” ~ Captain Kirk in ‘The Naked Time’
In the year 2010, Space Travel was possible. . . . But not very far.
Boldly going where no man has gone before was just a dream. There was no Mars. . . . no Jupiter moons. . . . . no the wannabe planet Pluto.. . . .
Who thought we’d have flying cars by now? Raise your hand. . . . . I know I did.
(Shakes a clenched hand up at an imaginary comic book thought bubble. This jittery phantom of a thought balloon lingered like an electric smoke cloud above my head, with a bit of static like an old lit television, bleed through from an ancient dead channel in a parallel Universe. It was the opening credits of the Jetson’s. . . . .
Starts singing the theme song like a kid again, “Jetson’s meet the Jetson’s” . . . . Coughs…… clears throat . . . . “ pauses….. Quickly looks around to see if anyone is watching while imaginary bubble disappears like a phantom.)
Anyways….. What’s really important is I have a new post to show you today. Something retro. Something new. Something 2010.
It’s my take on a Captain Kirk-like character design. Not exactly Kirk, but I think it has the feeling of that type of character.
Let me know what you think and Tell me how you imagined 2010 as a kid? How did you see your heroes? Any heroes that maybe you came up with when you were kid? Any sketches you wanna share????
Anyways I hope you enjoy. Until next time. . .
Beam me up Scotty!!!
“So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea of green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine”
~ The Beatles
Sometimes 960 pixels is just not enough to tell the story of my sketch. To tell my tale today, I am trying something brand new. I am going to narrate portions of zoomed and cropped pieces of my layout which may necessitate you clicking on the images for an enlarged version to get the full effect. Anyway, off we go.
Under the sea lies a fast food “dive” thru for submarines. It is called the Frog Shaq and is operated by a trio of frogs who are sure to give your food the extra special attention it deserves. There secret is a distinctive lick of the tongue to add that aquatic flavor, but shhhh don’t tell anybody.
Their customers today are manning a two man submersible complete with robotic arms. The eager captain can not wait to get his fast food fix and his stoner lackey and second mate looks on intently to get his munchie groove on. While designing these two characters, I was contemplating a Skipper and Gilligan like duo.
When drawing the submarine itself, I was also thinking a little bit of the vehicle James Cameron used in his various underwater documentaries with a little bit of a cartoony spin.
A school of fish, a hammerhead shark, and an opportunistic eel help create the underwater scene, but my favorite addition is the little crab brandishing it claws in the direction of the larger sub as if to mock its mechanical analog. The fancy shmancy servo motor powered manipulating arms have nothing on him or at least that’s what he thinks.
The layout sketch is still a bit rough and I am going to give it another pass before I consider it complete. So, now in addition to a final pirates layout you now have an undersea drive thru layout sketch hopefully to look forward to. Keep your eyes peeled as they will be coming soon.
I was getting ready to go to bed when my brother said, “Hey, you aren’t going to do a Saint Patrick’s Day post.” I was tired, but I said I would give it one try and see how my quick and dirty skills are holding up. I was happy with my quick draw skills and the rest is history.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day everbody. Don’t drink and drive. You know even my Leprachaun has a designated driver and he is a legendary magical creature.
“Ours is not a perfect world, and therefore the old must die in order that the young, that which is more perfect or at any rate capable of greater perfection, may live. Thus death becomes a thing necessary and useful in the evolution of the whole; the destruction of one celestial body contributes to the progress of the rest of the universe.” ~ Max Wilhelm Meyer
The last thing you might have been expecting from the colorful cartoony scene above is that it was really depicting the end of the world. It is not a realistic interpretation of the apocalypse, but is rather more of a symbolic and dream-like view of those end of days in which a father explains to his son how the world fell apart and how even in these most dire hours things aren’t so bad
I often wonder myself whether the end of the world is but a dream and the act of finding something uplifting is necessary to begin anew.
This sassy little sketch was inspired by the work of Chris Sanders whose character designs were featured in the Disney film Lilo & Stitch (2002). There is a curvaceous quality to his characters which is very distinctive and a treat to emulate.
I find it funny how character design for women often includes buxom breasts, but childlike features. This is often reinforced with the size of the head, but can also be reinforced by the size of the shoes. If you carefully examine such characters, you will often notice that younger characters have bigger feet and that older character have proportional feet.
My Lil’ Sassy gal has big feet. I guess I have continued in this ironic tradition of character design.
“You may not believe that Loch Ness is Jurassic Park, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something in Loch Ness that is yet to be explained.” ~ BBC News on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Nessie
This is a digital painting that I began for a children’s story a while back and never quite finished. My girlfriend to a liking to it and wanted me to put it up. She thought that it represented some of the diversity in my work. I know that it is a departure in style for me, but I would be curious to know what you think.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ~ Lao-tzu
I have decided to turn my piece entitled “Aloha, Welcome to Big Kahuna’s Kite Shop” into a digital painting. When I begin this process, I first try to create the foundation that serves as the basis of an overall effect. I tend to keep things at this stage very simple and graphic. It is important not to noodle away and render every little detail. There is time for that ahead.
There are several other Photoshop tricks I employ at this stage of my digital painting process. One of my favorites and most useful is to put my drawing on the top layer and to toggle on multiply mode on that layer. I then proceed to paint underneath that layer so that the drawing stays intact while color and value will come through the sketch from underneath.
If I want the piece to be line-driven, I paint below the original sketch layer. If it is shape driven, I’ll paint above it. This might not make sense if you’d never used Photoshop, but for those who are interested, give it a try.
In the next step, I give the painting a medium value base layer underneath the drawing. Then with the lasso tool, I select certain areas in the foreground, middle ground, and background and copy from that medium value layer and paste them above the medium value, but below the drawing. I use the brightness and contrast tool and play with the slider to find the right value on the different layers. It is quick and easy. It all depends on what mood or type of peice your going for.
So far in this piece the only tools I’ve used are the lasso tool, a little bit of the the brush, the masking tool and gaussian blur. I use the masking tool and gaussian blur to create a gradient effect in the sky. Using the gaussian blur with masking tool is far superior to the gradient tool and it affords much more control.
I always create a tonal study before I venture into color. It is easier for my eye to see the right values that way.
I thought it would be interesting for you to see some of this step by step work I do in my digital painting. You should see more steps in the following weeks so stay tuned.
“You may go, I’ll let you go, may god bless you
You’ll be mine, wherever you may be
It’s a warning, to say Aloha
’cause you’ll never find another Hawaiian like me
Oh no you’ll never find another Kane’ka like me
Oh no you’ll never find another people like us”
Iz from “Hawaiian Like Me”
I went to Big Island of Hawaii to bring my Nana’s ashes to their final resting place. At sunset, we scattered her ashes in the warm waters of the land she loved.
It seemed like Hawaii, the land, its traditions, and its people were always on my Nana’s mind. She would travel there whenever she could and considered herself a true Hawaiian.
My Nana was one of the people who inspired me to become an artist. She tirelessly sought to bring the beauty of the world to light and gloried in the places she found it and often in the ways she could create it through her art. Beauty was not just a word to her, it was a worldview.
My Nana went to Hawaii for the first time on her honeymoon when the only way to get there was by boat. She set foot on every continent including Antarctica. She even went to the North Pole on a Russian ice breaker, but no matter how far she traveled or what new exotic land she uncovered she always returned to Hawaii.
This sketch of the day was in part inspired by my recent trip to Hawaii. I only say in part because I was also given a prompt by my art teacher Will Westin which served as the underlying basis for the drawing too. The prompt read, “Kat’s father is a kite-maker, the best in her town. She went into his workshop today and saw the most beautiful kite she had ever seen.”
Having just got back from Hawaii when I read the prompt, I was able to summon the island spirit and bang out a thumbnail sketch with ease.
I had the tune of Hawaii 78 strumming through my mind as the final sketch took shape. It surprised me how fast it came together. In the end, I hope I have done my Nana proud.
