Shockobabble

I'm back!

Ready to stir things up again. One of which will be resurrecting the old shockobabble.com, including all those wonderful blog posts that everyone seemed to "love" so much. Until then, peace out.

Man, I was almost ready to give up hope on my old Aiptek tablet, but it might still have some life left in it. In connection with downloading a new driver, I also put in a fresh non-rechargeable battery in the pen. And now it seems like's it might be up to the task of sketching my comics directly into Inkscape.

Here's a fist study I copied from George B. Bridgeman's "Constructive Anatomy" using myAiptek tablet, I'd have to say that's it a lot better than any other time:

So I've been playing around a lot with Inkscape, it's a very impressive piece of software. At this point it's looking like the tool I'll be using to digitize my comics. From what I've been reading it has benefited from having developers that are also cartoonists, so while I haven't gotten very deep into some of the more sophisticated features it's comforting to know that someone has developed features that I'll come to rely on.

I've been through all of the basic tutorials that come with Inkscape, so now I've moved on to what I can find on the Internet. One of the first I came across was Slime to Start! by David Shaw. It was a really nice first step towards actually creating something comic book like. Overall, the tutorial was pretty good. It's a little old, so I think there might be some version creep between the version I'm using and the one used to create the tutorial, but it's good enough for me to reproduce the slime shown in the tutorial.

After realizing that I was getting lost in the Internet early today, I'm glad I took the time to finish this tutorial. It's been a real eye opener. I'm getting closer and closer to actually visualizing the images in my head coming out of Inkscape. So with out further adieu, say hello to Sammy Slime or maybe he's Jimmy Jello, I guess which ever you see slime or Jello:

A while back I participated in my first mail art project. Over the holidays I drew up a couple of pieces and sent them in. I just remembered to check and see if they arrived on time. So I'm happy to see that, at least one of them did make it in. You can see all of the submissions for 1rst International Art Mail Exhibition of Puerto Rico 2010 here. You can see one of the pieces I did here, under Iggy Kantoo.

Here's the other piece that I did:

I usually pay attention to a website that I end up landing on through a set of random links. For me, it's like the whole "law of attraction" or whatever, for me it's like the universe is shoving something in front of your face and saying, "uhum." Then it rolls it's eyes over to point at the site and then winks. Or hell, maybe I'm just rationalizing it in order for it to be something other than just a coincidence. Anyway...

A site I've discovered seems to be a real gold mine. As I've mentioned before, I've been pretty obsessed with doing my homework before launching some of my publishing projects, especially those which involve me having to draw, such as my comic books. While I'm still sort of torn between the idea that I'm "paying my dues" by gaining skills I currently don't have, or merely disguising my studies and practicing as a way to avoid from actually having to ship out any finished product. Again, it may be more rationalization, but I'm just not happy with my drawing skills. I've greatly improved my ability to draw faces, but have recently detected, that another troublesome area, hands, are still weak. So I'm drawing daily, copying examples, and I know that I'm getting much better.

So through a couple of unrelated links at Boing Boing, except that they were both about cartooning and caricature, I found the wonderful site for the Animation Archive of the International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood. Really, I'm simply overwhelmed with the depth of instructional material available on this site. They have archives of legendary animators like the Grim Natwick's Scrapbook as well as an odd collection of Mexican Lobby Cards. With a mountain of other other instructional material, any aspiring cartoonist would do well to research this site closely and time permitting, study as many of the tutorials as possible.

Sure a lot of the material is old, but as an avid book reader and collector, I've found that some material is simply timeless. Most modern books are merely just rehashing material presented 50 years ago by the masters. This includes not only cartooning, but topics such as self-help, leadership, and motivation. For my money anything written after Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie is just a rewrite of their timeless advice, but I digress. The bulk of the tutorials listed on the Animation Archive can be found on this page, which is a massive collection of links for "The Top Ten Reasons To Contribute To A-HAA." Enjoy, and may your cartoons become reality soon!

While I had been really gearing up to make this a visual journaling year, I've been tempted to try something else. Smashing Magazine challenged everyone by posting "Design Something Every Day!"

As stated in the post: "I challenge you today to design something daily. Take fifteen to twenty minutes that you would normally use to surf the Web today and devote it to designing something." The post offers some valuable suggestion, to keep you hooked an producing. So far I'm two for two. Wow, right!

My biggest challenge I think will be keeping the design to under 20 minutes. I tend to obsess on the details of my drawings and that can end up sucking an hour from life, easy. So I've got to keep the drawing fluid and rapid. Regardless, I'm stoked and ready for this challenge, I think it's going to be greate exercise practing my cartooning. I'll be launching a new blog to capture my daily images, so stay tuned for that.

I'm not sure what bug crawled up my ass New years Eve, but I suddenly want to engage in more activities. I know I still have pending projects, but somehow, I think I'll be able to make progress on multiple fronts.  I also want to get back involved in open source, which is a nice surprise. It's taken me 3 and half years to recover from my fall from grace, but I've got some ideas to do something a little different that might be appreciated.

Once again, I thank KathySierra of Creating Passionate Users and Head First fame for the inspiration.

Recently I've become captivated by artists who make moving sculptures, or should I say movable sculptures? The artist I first discovered was presented in episode 5 of MakeZine television. The motorized wave sculptures, created by visionary maker Reuben Margolin, are elegant and hypnotic. Make magazine has been a real hit for O'Reilly Publishing, and the extension of the magazine into video has been very inspiring. I really appreciate O'Reilly making a version of the video available for download. This is an important concept a lot of content producers haven't yet figured out. If you're going to go through the trouble of producing content, it makes little sense to throw up obstacles to obstruct people from consuming that content, of course, this is at the heart of the entire debate raging in the publishing world.

The other artist is Theo Jansen, which I learned of from the fantastic Boing Boing. According to his own description, Theo is building new life forms, which he aims for them to survive on their own.  In this short video from the TED Talks, Theo gives a brief overview of some of the inner working of his creations. He also describes his driving motivation in attempting to make his creations self-sufficient.

These two artists have inspired me to make some moving or movable art. The first form that comes to mind is the mobile.  I made one a while back out of used aluminum racing horse shoes. My daughter and I worked on it for a cousin of mine who loves and owns a bunch of horses. I thought it turned out pretty cool, but I visited her place last year when my brother died, and the mobile has still hanging on the wall of her stable where she put it several years before. Boy everybody is a critic, right?

The other form that comes to mind is the weather vane type of sculptures made for the movie Twister, remember those? A little googling turned up that the artist commissioned for the movie was Evan Lewis. Another related artist I found was Lyman Whitaker, who makes Outdoor Kinetic Sculptures.

All of this is totally overwhelming, but fascinating, truly fascinating.