Halloween!!

Ah, my favourite day of the year.  This year I was Professor Layton.  I printed off a bunch of puzzles and handed them out to people.  It was great.  Here is an awesome Max Fleischer you can watch for some Halloween fun:



If the YouTube title is to be believed, this cartoon is "banned". Banned from what? By who? What did Max do to deserve this banishment? Are his cartoons just too awesome?  Are there grave councils to determine which obscure 1930's cartoons should be banned from some unspecified kind of exhibition?  Could you imagine what would happen if CHILDREN were to stumble upon cartoons from 80 years ago while channel surfing on TV?

They might discover that there is a bigger world with amazing stuff in it!

First year

I think this is the anniversary of my first post on this blog.  I think it's gone pretty well in the past year.  I've put up a lot of pictures and featured some good music.  I hope everyone who has read this blog in the past year has enjoyed it.  I plan to continue posting on this blog and to continue showing everyone my crappy drawings and maybe an album here and there.

That said, here is another picture.  Forgive the bad resolution, it was scanned at work on our crappy scanner.  It's fine for text, but not so great for pictures.

An expensive hobby

I've been wanting to show off my expensive and ridiculous hobby of collecting CDs. It's a lot of fun to listen to them, but the problem is that it becomes very difficult to give enough time to all the great music I have when I have such a crazy huge amount of it.  I went through some sorting today to bring in the new purchases and I took the following pictures so that everyone can be all like: "He's crazy, why does he have so many CDs?  Why not just buy MP3s from iTunes like normal people?"

Election 2010!

Yesterday, Calgary voted...

This is the new mayor of the City of Calgary.  Congratulations Naheed Nenshi, I wish you the best of luck!

SCIENCE!

I've always found the name "Science Fiction" a little confusing.  Probably because science is kind of the opposite of fiction.  It's a bit like having a Taco Salad, I guess.

Anyway, I just vomited a bunch of Sci-Fi stuff onto the page there.  If you want some real science, check THIS out:

Mariano moves

Watch out!  Mariano moves.  Worlds bend and lives change in his wake.

I was listening to some funk and drawing stupid faces, so I tried to do that 70's "bent world" perspective with the one long leg and the weird sidewalk.  I think the perspective just turned out plain awful, but oh well.  I don't think it was really effective, but I still like this picture anyway.  I think the fun is still there.

Listen to this song while you look at the picture.  It's from a disc I found at a used record store a few months back, a real great find.

Dorama! Romansu! RABU!

In the interest of learning to draw women better (something I freely confess I stink at) I borrowed some Shojo manga from you-know-who and drew a bunch of pictures (more or less) from some of the more shocking panels.  My theory was that since shojo is pictures of women drawn by women for women, it would probably capture that feminine essence that I seem to be having so much difficulty with.

Not to make everyone slap themselves in the face and say "Well...uh, yeah.  Anyone could have told you that." but here is what I've figured out.  Focusing on the eyes and mouth and putting a lot of detail into those areas seems to make things more feminine.  Shading around the teeth makes the lips look bigger and (I guess) more feminine.  Lips should always be drawn, even if they're thin.  Drawing the nostrils but not the bridge of the nose helps gloss over the face and reduce the fidelity of the parts of the face other than the mouth and eyes.  I had originally thought that a rounder face and rounder angles probably was a more feminine thing, but I don't think that's true now.  The face on the left in the picture above is quite long and horsey-faced, but still quite feminine.  You can also obscure fairly large portions of face with hair, which is pretty good for shaping a head and putting focus onto the eyes and mouth.  I figured out some other stuff; I think, but you'd have to ask my drawing hand and not my brain.  I guess that's really the important bit, so whether I knew this stuff in my brain or not...if my hand doesn't know what to tell the pencil it doesn't make much difference.

Differences in style aside, I think these are good points to note.  Now I should just try to apply this to my own stuff instead of being a copycat.  I have to admit though, a few more copies would probably teach me a lot.  I should do both.  Oh yeah, and until my next post, here is some DORAMA!  ROMANSU!  RABU!



hahahaha...sorry, couldn't resist.

Every puzzle has an answer

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile, I've been feeling a little down lately.  My productivity has fallen to near zero in pretty much everything.  It's actually pretty bad.

Anyway, one of the things that cheers me up is a good puzzle, and the master of all things puzzling is Professor Hershel Layton of Gressenheller University, London.  A gentleman of high regard, Professor Layton does battle with his mind, and occasionally his lightning reflexes (honed in the gentlemanly sport of fencing, I'm sure).  There have been some rumours lately of Layton leading a band of ne'er-do-wells on a mission to build a time machine.  I don't believe a word of it!  I'm sure Layton himself will soon put things to right!

I think there's also a half-completed ninja turtle in there too.  That's weird.  The most surprising thing about that picture is that it was *NOT* drawn using reference material.  I must play too much Prof Layton, because the one on the right is surprisingly accurate (in my humble opinion).  Well...not that Layton's design is all that complicated to begin with.  Anyway, just watch the trailer for the latest game...it's even better than the last one!