Coming Along

Progress has slipped a bit the past week or so, as I turned my attention to doing some study sketching and firing them off into the cyberspace void, but I'm getting back to the process of rebirthing this thing, and hoping it will come together by Fall. The problem always being that as I get better at this, I keep wanting to go back and do more to each scene.

The above is a test of background elements to get an idea of how it's looking. The specific backgrounds have yet to be done. Click it to enlarge.

Another big question is the music. The previous one, or "color animatic", had various HB cues and Raymond Scott snippets. I now have access to even more familiar cartoon music I might like to try, but there's still the rights issues. Of course, I'd ideally like to score it myself, and think I might be able to, but that would require learning how to compose that kind of music, and would add more time to the process. I may do another one with "placeholder music" until I have that together.

A Little Advice From Rag Dog

Oh well...

Business as usual...

Sample Sketches

Here's a few recent studies, meant to show the drawing process, but I always find mine tend to have fewer sketch and construction lines evident. I tend to apply them very lightly, and many times just "see" them as I sketch. I always used to think it was because I wasn't really doing the work, but it came from wanting my sketches to look clean. I sort of trained myself to see the foundations and go right to the intended line. I still start with shapes and proportions, but go to details faster than normally recommended. I also have a long running habit of erasing as I go. Once I get line where I want it, I'll "erase and replace" the area to clean up as I go.

Here's a Daffy image. I partly chose it for the small challenge of finishing the drawing, since the top is cut off in the actual scene:

Here's a couple done just sitting on the couch sketching freeze frames. (just picked up the Sat Morning Cartoons 1960s vol. 1 set):
I only partially penciled in details on this pose to show the sketch lines underneath, but the weak blue pencil doesn't show up well in these scans. There's a certain stiffness to these, which comes from an initial copying. Once I learn a character's construction that loosens up.

I wanted to try some Spumco characters as well. I'd heard George Liquor was hard to do. I actually found his construction pretty easy to understand. Only one of these was from a sample (and the middle one didn't really work). They're far from perfect, but for first attempts I think I could get a feel for it:

Jimmy is trickier. Of course, it would have been easier to finish the walking pose if I hadn't placed it too low on the page to begin with. And the one on top definitely went off course:

I wanted to get more study sketching done last night, but my wonderful day job made quick work of that by giving my a cut straight up the tip of my index finger, making holding a pencil like trying to draw with a stinging bee. Thanks, great big drag of a necessary evil-type job! Wasn't enough to just stiffen up my back and limit the amount of time I can sit at a drawing table, I guess.

I started this Bugs last night, but fighting my throbbing fingertip was putting me off. I continued and added more detail to this, the the proportions are badly off (big damn head) so I'm just including the first scan to show some more of the work behind. The red pencil certainly shows better. Is that the purpose of using red, to show the work? I've always known about non-repro blue, but never heard why red was used.

find 'em bigger on flicker:

here

The Whole Magilla

click to view

Here's the second show portrait. Although I was never as big a fan personally, I was only 3 when it premiered so he's been around as long as I can remember. I had set up a background that included an interior in the shop, but after watching the opening theme again I had to go back and redo it to reflect that version. It features a Peeble's pet shop that has no back wall, as if it were no more than a big window display on the street corner, further proving that Magilla had no business putting on a graduation cap if he couldn't even figure out he could just walk out at anytime.

And I had to include the show's biggest loophole; in most episodes, a central theme is Peebles being desperate to sell off Magilla, but every week in the theme he has a interested customer who can not only afford the 2 cents he's marked down to, but has the strength of an ant and happily carries him off. Did she regularly return him?

Top Cat crew

click to view

I wanted to start doing "cast portraits" of various cartoon shows. It's something I've done since I was a kid, but I never took them this far before, just sketchbook stuff. I actually started out by inking and coloring a sketch by John K of the Jetsons (which you'll also find in the photostream), but then wanted to do my own design. I picked the Top Cat characters to start with because I hadn't seen them done by anyone else, so I would be less influenced by what they did. Maybe the fact that the show ran the year I was born played a part too, but less consciously. It's actually been a while since I've watched any, and I think I may have misrepresented a couple of the character's personalities a little. What I'll do next I haven't decided yet. I'm not limiting it to just HB shows by any means, either.

The idea will be to bend the style and look of the show to my default cartoon style, and 60s HB blends well with it (since it was very influenced by it to begin with). I don't have any timetable for this though, it'll be taking a back seat to getting "Cheezums" finished, but I'll need to take occasional breaks anyway.

"Shake Your Betty"

Well, that's classy...

This trifle quickly became my most viewed clip on YouTube. I frequently got notices about new comments during it's run, the most popular one being "WTF?". I wasn't surprised.

It was just making the most out of unused scraps. My clip "Flintstones Forgery " has a moment where Wilma leaves the room by flipping her butt at Fred, and the first take on it seemed too much, so I changed it to a subdued version for that, but had this Wilma body left as a series of symbols in the project file. It was easy enough to flip the image, change the dress color to blue and swap in Betty's head, a few more frames and they were doing the bump.

I took that cycle, as well as ones of each alone, and just repeated them over different backgrounds for a minute or two. It didn't take long enough for me to stop myself and ask "what's the point of this?", so I then had this clip that amounted to nothing more than Betty & Wilma shaking their asses and doing the bump. I named it "Shake Your Betty", added the disco-era song you'd expect with a title like that and threw it up to see if I attracted a different audience than my other clips by being able to add "booty" to the tags.

It zipped past the others in views, easily 10 times whatever they were getting just being tagged "Cartoon", "Animation", and "Flash". More folks are searchin' for those booty clips out there! It held on for a while until early this year I received an email telling me there were music rights issues with using the song.

And that was enough of a sign that it was time to retire it. My claim to fame and bane of shame was deleted by user. It ain't going in any portfolio, either. I'm not looking to be known as the "Wilma's ass guy" any more than I am to be sued by a music publisher. I guess it would be hard to know if someone copied it and posted their own version of it somewhere, since that's what happened with Flintstones Forgery. I stumbled across someone's reedited version of it, and they never let me know they did it, so who knows? They're welcome to take credit for it. Let's just say every now and then Alan Smithee does a cartoon, too.