John wastes paper

THINKING I'M BEING CLEVER DEPT: Part of a longer piece, this is a first scribble pass at working out a spastic run for this goofy dog character. I wanted to be clever and throw off the usual rotary run pattern by having the back feet land and push-off together while the left and right front leg contacts are offset from each other. 'Not sure this is working yet, but it's late and I'll look at it with fresh eyes in the morning :-)

LEARNING NEW TRICKS DEPT: So, the client said "Reprint." and I heard "Take this opportunity to redo those crappy, half thought out illustrations you fostered on me last time around." And so... These are my roughs. I scanned these and then did something completely new to me: I inked them digitally in Photoshop using  Kyle Webster's ULTIMATE Megapack Photoshop brush set.  I love these brushes. Definitely give them a try. Anyway, the quality of my inking is certainly debatable, but the superiority of working this way is undeniable. Inking on multiple layers meant I was free to play with different brushes and effects, and move things around before merging everything down into the final inked drawing. It totally took the stress out of the process for me. I mean, why hadn't I done this before?   I freehanded these little guys directly in Photoshop and was very loose with the inking. I knew that they were going to be repr

TAKING IT FOR A TEST DRIVE DEPT:  Nothing special here. 'Just a crappy, random scribble test I did to try out Sketchbook 7's new flipbook features. So far, it's feeling like a good fit for me – of course, your mileage may vary depending on your expectations of a 2D animation package. However, at only $24.95 a year for the subscription, it's hard to go too wrong. First impressions? All the essentials are here: a timeline and real-time playback controls; layers, ghosting, and plenty of real-media style drawing tools. It's easy to add, remove, and duplicate frames. There are presets for the common screen formats and sizes (720 and 1080 HD, etc.) and the choice to customize them. Frame rates are also customizable. Drawing keys and timing them is very intuitive, especially if you are familiar with Maya's timeline – which Sketchbook's is very similar to. Even its keyboard shortcuts are the same: hitting the coma and period keys advances you forwards an