Scribner Face is next!

COMING SOON.... No, we really mean it this time!

Happy Father's Day!

My dad loves Bogey, and I love my dad!

Peter Thompson is the reason I'm a cartoonist. When I was six, my father, who through no fault of his own is English, went across the pond on a business trip and returned to American soil with a book. You may have heard of it.




He couldn't have picked a better book. And what's more? I owe my love of Warner Bros. Cartoons, the best cartoons ever made, and Monty Python, the best sketch comedy ever made, to my father.






We should all be so lucky to have a father like mine. The man gave so much to me and my sister, and hasn't stopped. Look what a happy family he made!





When I was little, my creative endeavors were, let's be fair, unrealistic for a first grader. I wanted to make movies and cartoons, and as difficult as it must have been in the early 80's my father managed to find a way to create an environment that I could do so in. The value of that is immeasurable and neither words, funny drawings or years and years of thanks would ever accurately get that across. But it's sure worth trying.




Also, today is the first Father's Day for Booo Tooon Marooon M.G. Nunnery. Matthew is going to be a great father, as proven by the fact that he already is.

We need more good dads out there, and I'm delighted that I've gotten to know two of the best.

Another Reason To Love Bill Watterson

I've been very busy lately working on the Secret Manx and Itchy Project, as have the other Booo Tooon Marooons. Our latest member to the family, by the way, is Lili, who is making Manx and Itchy into puppets, and rocking everywhere else she can be utilized. Say hi to Lili everybody!




But, to keep inspired, I've started re-reading all my old Calvin and Hobbes books, one of which included the obligatory Tenth Anniversary Treasury.




In it, Watterson talks about the two sabbaticals he took from the strip and his fights with Universal Press Syndicate, partly about licensing rights and also about graphic freedom ( though that was more of a fight with newspaper editors in general ).

The stuff about licensing is worth a read. It makes you realize how non-artistic executives exist in almost every form of entertainment. Bill lectured about this once at Ohio State University and made cartoons to accent his points.

Here they are. Enjoy!







COMING UP NEXT: THE SCRIBNER FACE

Coming up... The Scribner Face

COMING SOON.... No, we really mean it this time!

Slab N Ernie Construction Lessons

I did this today at work during lunch very quickly, but it gave me a chance to break the drawing down.




I'm doing a few more now that I'm home, and I'll post the best one later on.

STAY TUNED!!!

UPDATE!!!

I haven't gotten a chance to hook the scanner up since the move, so wait. I'll have to upload the finished drawing which is much better.... but I'll get to it later. I have green screen testing to do. Sue me.

Latest Construction Attempts...

Besides the obvious problems, I can't understand what I was doing with the crow's beak.

The shape of the beak is right, but the construction is all wrong. The lines on it suggest that you'd be able to see his other eye. If I wasn't copying, that might've been a problem.




The thing that is most wrong with this drawing, though, is the fact that Mickey's line of action is completely wrong. This leads to everything else being wrong.

I'm positive that if I had gotten it right, this drawing would've been much better.

I suck at construction

UPDATES BELOW!!!
JohnK says:

So far none of your drawings show that you use construction to draw with.




I'm not going to argue this point that John made yesterday. I know that I draw circles and lines before attempting details, but that doesn't mean I'm doing construction right. As John says, there's only one way to tell if it's right or not. But what am I doing wrong?

I looked at some older copies I did and the one recurring issue is that when I put the transparency over the original drawing ( I'm using PhotoStudio, not Photoshop ) one part will be more or less correct, and then everything else is off, but mathematically by about the same amount and in a different direction.

CLICK HERE TO SEE TREVOR'S COPIES
I figure this means that I'm not getting the distances from one form to another right. And if there's one mistake made, there are several because they all bloom out of the original.

So I decided I would start a drawing and not finish it until I KNOW the forms are in the right place. As you can see below, I've started breaking down the Porky comic cover, and once again, one character has roughly the right forms, but the others are off.

Counting the space with my pencil only seems to work when I'm making the drawing physically the same size, but the ones copied from the DVD player or these sized down comic pages....




The above drawing is ridiculously huge in file size compared to the comic cover. Scaling it down, this is how it compares:




I'm going to dedicate a few hours every night this week to getting this right, and then I'll move on to adding the larger forms. As you can clearly see, I need work and comments.

Maybe I'll join that Cartoon Critique blog.

UPDATES AS OF 01/09/09:
So, I took the drawing above and studied the transparency and made my changes in red. This is what I came up with:



And here's how it looks when resized over the original comic.



I had to resize this differently because the first scan of the drawing ( and first crack at it, pictured above ) had the paper favoring the top of the bed, the second the latter. I'm worried I may not have actually gotten the shapes right, but I'm going to start fresh rather than improve the same drawing. Hopefully, I've learned something. Be back tomorrow with more drawings!

Check back!

UPDATES AS OF 01/12/09:

New changes in blue.



Here's how it looks over the comic:



And now I'm going to do the remaining levels of construction. Hopefully, my theory that if I get the first level right then others will follow will soon be proved, right or wrong.

Please come back.

UPDATES AS OF 01/15/09:

Final changes in blue.



Black outline.



And the final check:



What do you think?

I Found Nemo!

AKA... Crap!

Though it may have previously been thought impossible to degrade the Hanna-Barbera show "Help!.... It's The Hair Bear Bunch", my direct ancestors the British managed to do it.

This is from a show in the late 90's on Cartoon Network UK called 'AKA Cult Toons', and it was a desperate ploy to give editors something fun to do.

The saddest part about this is you'll see a few good cartoons ( "Draftee Daffy", "Little Hiawatha" and "Cow and Chicken" ) play second fiddle to a bunch of rubbish. Though, the blaxploitation clips are cool.

I'll give you a dollar if you can get through both of these videos and not feel like you've been violated in some way.



Oh, and Happy New Year. We're back.

- THE BOOO TOOON MAROOONS

No connection, no shit!

I have no internet connection, and due to the troubling construction of my new home, I may not have it for some time.

But don't worry! I haven't posted a thought-provoking and thorough article in seven months or more, so you should be used to this by now.

Keep checking in, we'll have more to say soon. Sweartagod.

- trevor.