John wastes paper

STREAMLINING DEPT:  I've been playing around with simplified head shapes lately. Detail above and full frame ( unflipped ) below. Digital sketch in TVPaint @ 2048 x 1080 pixels

DOODLING AROUND DEPT: Just playing around with some different brushes and settings in Photoshop.

Enthusiastically  Naive Dept:   Our water safety mascots, Albert & Einstein, were fairly popular characters with our educational staff and the community they distributed their items to; coloring books, stickers, etc. So they asked us if we could make a short cartoon featuring them; something cute and fun to explain water safety rules to small children.  Ha! We knew it wouldn't be easy. We'd done small animation projects before and we knew how much work they could be. But still, we had no idea, not really, and quickly said "Yes, you bet!" Our enthusiasm made us dumb to reality. We thought that making a 5 minute cartoon would be a fun, moderately challenging side project to our regular assignments. That we would chip away at it in between our real work. Boy were we wrong!   My normal workload was never modified enough to allow any real progress on the project. I did find time to storyboard the whole thing (some sequences several times), and I also modeled most o

FINALLY GETTING TO IT, DEPT: After stalling all year, our group finally found the time for a field trip to our local zoo. What started out as a cold and blustery day turned out to be fabulous sketching weather . The low temperature kept the bus loads of kids away, and kept the animals in sight and active. Almost too much so. The drawings below are, by necessity, 1-2 minute gestures. The animals kept moving around; especially the birds. So, that's my excuse for the poor quality. But, it was lots of fun and we're going to do it again real soon! All sketches with black china marker @ 8.5" x 11"

GREATEST HITS OF THE 60s & 70s DEPT: Lately I've been mooning over a lot of Bob Oksner and Nick Cardy comics covers from the late 60s and early 70s. Boy, could these guys draw! Great, punchy compositions. And a nice, easy handling of figures – especially their female characters. I guess that's why this little girl popped up in my drawing. 'Not as good as theirs, but definitely inspired by. When I was 11 years old and had just started reading and collecting comic books, these two dominated the covers for DC's titles. Thinking of comics from these years, theirs is the work that I picture. Bob Oksner had a great run of Supergirl covers for Adventure Comics, and later for her own title. Check his stuff out here . In the 60s and 70s, Nick Cardy handled almost the entire run of Aquaman's covers. And his Action Comics always depicted Superman and Lois Lane at moments of great emotional conflict. Check out some excellent examples of Nick's covers here .

OVER-PLANNING-MAKES-DELINQUENT DEPT:  Here are some more planning sketches for a personal test I've been thinking about doing. I've always wanted to do a parody of the sugar plum fairy sequence from Fantasia. Instead of waif thin, delicate sprites, I would substitute large, bouncy, bumbling  fairies . There's potentially lots of entertainment possibilities in this, and it should be a lot of fun to do. Now I just need to find the time to sit down and begin :-) (Update: here's another doodle from last night. I just can't help myself :-) All sketches done in TV Paint at 2K resolution with various pencil brushes.

DRAWING TOOL FETISH DEPT:  Browsing the TVPaint user forum I ran across an impressive  pencil brush posted by CartoonMonkey (you can download it  here ). It does a pretty good job of mimicking a real world soft lead pencil. It takes good advantage of the tilt sensitivity of your tablet's pen. Hold it straight up and you get a thin line. Then, the further you lean it on its side, the wider the stroke it makes. And of course, it's pressure sensitive so you can go from a very light gray to a very dark shade. Here's a few scribbles I made while testing it out.

DOODLE 'TILL SOMETHING SHOWS UP DEPT: I downloaded a cool set of pencil presets for TV Paint from this site here . They're pretty great. You should try them :-) 1920 x 1080 pixels

LUNCHTIME ANI-DOODLE DEPT:   A 30 minute scribble test :-)

LUNCHTIME ANI-DOODLES DEPT: So, I treated myself to an early birthday present of a Surface Pro 3, and installed TVPaint so that I can scratch out doodle tests during breaks and lunchtime. Nothing special about this one. Just taking everything for a test drive - 32 fames of scribbles :-)

DISPARATE DOODLES DEPT:  So, I decided I wanted to do a test scene with the Dad character (a.k.a. "Skip") from "Family Dog," but I quickly ran into a funny issue: "Which 'Skip' do I use?" It seems not having the same animator draw a character throughout an entire show can have its consequences. Scanning through the episode looking for "on-model" examples to follow, I was amazed to see how much fluctuation there was in his likeness. He really can look very different from sequence to sequence. In my doodles above there are at least three different Skips taken from different sections of the show. They're all clearly the same character, but variations are there. Some were drawn with more Disney-type three dimensionality, some with less detail and more cartooniness, and others were somewhere in-between the two. My favorite version is the one at the top of this post; it's a kind of "Fred Flintstone"

UNSOLICITED ENDORSEMENT DEPT: I found this little animation extension for Photoshop, AnimDessin , and it's really pretty nice. I made this little scribbled test to try it out. As far as I can see, this plugin lets me do everything that I can do with Sketchbook Pro's flipbook, but inside of Photoshop. I can add frames, delete them, retime them, add unlimited layers, flip on  onion skinning with control over its opacity, add multiple audio tracks, etc. And best of all–– I can use all the cool brushes that I've collected for Photoshop. Not bad for a free piece of software :-) Here's a screenshot showing the AnimDessin toolbar above Photoshop's video timeline. I've closed a lot of the usual menu windows to make the workspace very spare, like I like. Animation: 1920 x 1080 @ 24 fps

KICKING THE TIRES AGAIN, DEPT:  Recently, I've spent some quality time checking out the 2D animation application TV Paint because it seems to be the application of choice for a lot of former Disney animators, such as Aaron Blaise and Nik Ranieri. I respect both of these gentlemen and so I downloaded the trial version and spent a few days playing with it. No wait– first I spent a few days viewing on-line tutorials trying to grok it's strange and dense interface, and then I spent another couple of days recreating the tutorials by myself. It was all pretty great and I was impressed with TV Paint. And probably some day, when I have more discretionary cash, I'll buy it and be very happy.  But after having spent time playing with this obviously more sophisticated program, I realized that 90% of what I want to do now with drawn animation I can do in Autodesk's Sketchbook 7 Pro with its flipbook feature. And I'm pretty happy about that. So, to sort of

MORE FLIPBOOK FUN DEPT: Boy has it been blustery here these last few days – and C-O-L-D! So, I just had to add a little animated scarf to this doodle with Sketchbook Pro's flipbook feature :-) SIDE NOTE DEPT:  On the subject of animating flowing items, Eric Goldberg's excellent book "Character Animation Crash Course" is full of great examples of secondary animation and overlap. This one below, that I've copied badly, shows that even a simple movement can have a surprising amount of sophistication. This head turn is a great opportunity to add drag and follow through on the character's large nose and goatee.  Voilà!