The blog of a person....yeah that sounds good.

Monday, March 09, 2015

Won't someone tell me just how weird a weirdo's supposed to be?

It's been a while hasn't it?
Last post was before Christmas so I suppose I should start there. You'll wanna stay tuned in for this post because theres a cartoon at the end of it! Yes that's right. A whole new cartoon! Yeah I know it's shocking! And I didn't even get any dosh for it! And it has mayonnaise in it! Wow!

So for Christmas my brother managed to find a dvd of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. He also found a DVD of the original Ninja Scroll. My dad gave me some cash (something I desperately needed). I got my brother a wifi stereo system that is portable and looks like a cassette player so he can watch movies off his smartphone. I got my dad one of these babies:

It was the first time in a long time he'd actually wanted something specific for a holiday. So I was more than glad to grab it. It sat under the tree for a couple weeks since we still had a huge mess. But we popped it open and gave it a shot.

And lemme tell ya. For something that was about 200 bucks this thing is WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD. I don't understand how it works. But it heats up the special frying pan and ANY stainless steel cookware in seconds with full temperature control.

We've been making eggs on it. It has been years since I've been able to cook and enjoy an egg. But I've had more eggs in the last few weeks then I've had since I was a teen. And there's no mess to clean. The nonstick copper-looking pan thing it comes with is actually nonstick. You just spray water at it and all the food residue flies right off.

TECHNOLOGY!

Cockatoo. Kangaroo. In Malibu!

In mid January I was contacted by some ad agency I'd never heard of to make an advert for a brand of mayonnaise. It was Hellmann's which is a very popular brand here in the south. It's also by far my favorite brand and me and my family go through quite a bit of it.

I later learned that it was a contest and I'd be competing against a few people. So I brainstormed for a while and tried to come up with something happy and joyful, since that's how this condiment makes my stomach feel. (it's good shit!). So I made a animated short and tried to keep it within the same themes that they'd already been using for the promotional images for the new squeeze bottle.

Quite a few entries (over 100) appeared. Very few were animated and most were bad. But there were a few brilliant genius ones. Particularly one that featured a somewhat crappy mayonnaise themed superhero who fights an equally crappy mayonnaise themed supervillain.

At the end of the contest's run, none of the ones I liked won. None of the ones I liked even got honorable mention. And I of course, did not either. It was quite a devastating blow. It's rare I feel inspiration to animate anything of my own accord anymore. And rarer still where I finish something and actually feel confident about it.

It's been a very depressing last few weeks. But on the plus side, I retained all rights to the animated short and I already put it up on my youtube channel for others to see. I also stuck it up on my Vimeo channel as well.

Here it is:


After that fiasco ended, my boss Weebl contacted me about a job. It's a cartoon about Nicholas Cage that should be online soon. I can't say too much about it outside that I've worked harder on it then anything else I've made I think. It's going to premier on the Mashed channel sometime in the future.
Here's some imagery from it before it's converted into pixel art.
If it's not entirely obvious the film is meant to look like the old Sega Genesis game, STREETS OF RAGE.


Speaking of video games I recently grabbed a game I've had my eye on for quite some time. The new Legend of Zelda game. And no I don't mean the Majora's Mask remake. I mean Link Between Worlds which is an all-new title that takes place in the same world as Link to the Past and has charming stylized graphics and a nostalgic birds-eye viewpoint for the camera.
It's been loads of fun so far and I haven't enjoyed a Zelda game this much since Wind Waker or the first half of the Minish Cap.

I have nothing much else of interest here to write.
A few months ago I posted about a newish painting I had made.
So I figured I'd post the WIP's of the painting to show the process I used to produce it.
It's a process I rather like now, actually and I will probably use for any future paintings.
So to start off over the original sketch I did the linework. I blocked in some basic shades of grey. Then I did some light shading. Some of the greys were tinted more towards certain colors to help with any color corrections I might need to do later.
Here's the original linework for comparison. Much plainer compared to the image above it. After that it was time to add some colors.
Chunk by chunk bit by bit adding in blobs and block of color and some sparse details and lighting here and there. Starting to look almost like a painting now.
Particle effects, brightening up of certain shades, properly shading some bits and areas. Lots of layers. Lots of editing of colors and color schemes. And after doing that for every bit of the environment and for every character, we arrive at the finished product.

For whatever reason the bottom of it gets cut off on this blog but if you've been to this blog over the last few months you already know what this thing looks like. So there you go, a weird kinda glimpse thing at the process I used to make this piece. My process changes a bit every time I bother making something like this. It's a LOT of work and it's not often I feel the energy to complete something of this magnitude.

And now I'm gonna play some Zelda.




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