The Great War

As part of my birthday gift from my brother and the fiancée, my brother drew on the box.

Since I have delcared myself his biggest fan, I share with you four of five sides he drew on. Be sure to click to see better detail, and pardon the changes in shadows and color, I'm not much of a photographer.

Also, it reads from left to right, top to bottom all the way around the box.

This Family Artist

My brother has a new art website.

Yes, that is a self-portrait on the home page. And if any of you out there were a comic nerd, like I am, you'd totally see the pencilers and inkers who have influenced his style.

I have some quibbles over his site, but it's a great start and it's nice to be able to look at his work whenever I want.

Sound and Shadow

About five and a half months ago, I wrote, "I'd like to be a studio musician for my day job and in the evening I paint and draw what ever I want and occasionally sell something."

A few of months later, Rude Cactus asked, "If money was no object, what's your ideal gig?"

After some thought I put my reply up and said, "It's not money that keeps me from doing what, for the moment, I would like to do, it's the fact that that I can't sight-read music, or draw." (Although, honestly, the money would stop me, too. I just don't have to think about the money, at all.)

He wrote back, "Those are luckily things - mostly - you can learn."

The "mostly" is what stopped me from snarking back. Still his comment has stuck with me since first reading it. (Almost as much as a comment my Uncle mad to me at Easter. Cripes.)

On the sight-reading front, I did marching band for three years in high school. Trumpet. I was a competent player. Nothing spectacular. My range went from several bars below the staff to just above the top. On the trumpet, though, the higher, the better. Still, I was very solid backup for the first chair. Give me a third or second part and I could harmonize and support the difficult work the first part played as well as anyone.

I liked being a second or third chair player. We may not have always played the full melody, but the parts were always interesting.

And then one day, in my third year, I was asked by the teacher to try out for the advanced jazz band. (I think it mostly happened because my best friend was the A1, top of the heap, best soprano sax player we had, not because I was really that good, but I was still flattered.) The only thing was that I'd have to try out along with the other possible trumpets. We all showed up one afternoon. He handed us each a piece of music then one at a time told us to stand up and play what we saw.

To say I screwed up insults all the people who screw things up. I was horrible. What I played hardly sounded like music. Oh, sure, there were changes in pitch and tempo and there was some sort of rhythm, but nothing like what appeared on sheet in front of me. The teacher was so embarrassed, or ashamed, at my performance that he hardly spoke to me for the next two weeks. (Which was really a blessing. He was often a creep once you grew out of enjoying his childish behavior.) I wasn't surprised, though, because I knew I couldn't sight-read.

For those who don't know, sight-reading is the act of looking at a piece of music and being able to hear it in your head and then play the tune as you're first looking at it. (Also called sight playing or sight singing.) These people see the note and hear the rhythm they make and pitches they represent and then recreate it. I couldn't, and can't, do either of those things.

I can look at a new piece of music and say, out loud, what the note's called. I can point and say, "That's a quarter note. It's a G flat. Then there's another quarter note, C, followed by a half note tied into a whole note in the next measure, an E." I can't clap the rhythm. I can't hum or sing the correct pitch for any of the notes named. I can read the marks on the sheet, it's not gibberish to me, but I can't tell what it's supposed to sound like.

In college, I took a semester of piano. I worked around my sight-reading problem by having the teacher or her TA play the piece for me before I started practicing the music. That way I'd hear it and when I looked at the sheet, I could hear the music as well as just read it. And I had a lot of fun playing music again. So, when the semester was over, I bought my self a decent keyboard so I could keep practicing.

It didn't work out so well. I could practice and get better at the stuff I already knew, but I couldn't play anything new. I'd leaf through my beginner/intermediate book and look at all the things we didn't play and try my damnedest, but I wasn't playing music. It was just sound.

Eventually, I just stopped. It wasn't fun playing the same things over and over again. I didn't know how to do something new and noodling around got boring.

Other than the ceramics stuff I bought and mixed in with my mother's ceramics stuff, I think that keyboard is the only thing I left at my parent's house after I moved out the last time.

The drawing thing, well, I'll do my best to explain.

I can sketch and doodle and cartoon a little. My people look like people. My faces tend to turn out masculine. And the houses I draw are the simple kind with a big square, a triangle, a rectangle, and a couple of little squares for windows.

One of my problems, when I draw or paint or anything, is that I don't have a steady, consistent hand. I can't consistently duplicate anything. Even when I want to draw the same person, the second drawing looks totally different from the first. Of course, anyone who's seen my hand writing can tell stories about that. The first "a" I write looks similar but distinctly different from the second, from the third, from the last. I suppose that means I have very little control over my hand.

The biggest problem I've found, since I started looking more closely at art and trying to understand it and do it, are shadows.

In most really great drawings and paintings, the artist works like a sculptor. The artist uses the blacks and grays of shadows to carve away the white of the paper and bring out a form. With charcoal or water color they start with the shadow light and then add layer after layer to darken gradually so it shows the curve of the person or object. They see shadows as gradual shifts from white to black.

I see shadows as shapes. After I draw the shape, I have a hard time figuring out how to shade the interior to add depth. Even with art classes, I haven't been able to get past this.

Photo Phuesday

The so-called art in the lobby of the building I work in:

From the entrance.

Near the elevator. (Sorry about the skylight. Who knew it was going to be so sunny that morning?)

From the third floor.

I think it's supposed to represent birds.

Photo Phursday

Jesus blessing the cars.

This part of the church was build in 1900. It was closed to the public in the mid seventies because it's not earthquake safe. Regular people still aren't allowed inside.

I am my brother's biggest fan.

This was a project for his English class in 12th grade. Guess what they were reading...

I swiped this from my parents the last time I moved away from their house.

Grin-bell

Tomorrow is Hourly Comic Day. Last year I did it and I'm pretty sure I'll be doing it this year, too. Not sure if I'll be make four panels per hour or the more common two. I guess we'll see.

There are two houses, on the block where I live, that have been for sale since Christmas. Yesterday, on my way to the apartment, I walked by them and grabbed one of the fliers that the realtors (There are two of them, but for some reason the fucking spell check keeps insisting I write "realtor's." Stupid spell checker.) posted to see what's going on. Well, they're each listed for $429,000. Sure they've been refurbished, but they're not very big and only sort of have a yard. Besides, it's not like I'm going to buy a house here, I really don't want to live here for a long chunk of my life, I'm just tired of paying rent. I'd feel better if the money I spend each month went toward making something mine rather than paying people for the privilege of living in a building that they own. While I probably wouldn't feel great paying a mortgage and insurance each month and proper taxes each year, I think I'd like that better than rent.

South Park is what's been on my TV a lot in the past two weeks. I bought the seasons I was missing, so I went back and started it from the first so I could see everything, including the movie.

Should have mentioned this earlier, but a couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me a bootleg copy of the first three episodes of Pushing Daisies. That show is great. I really liked the first episode, but when it got to the point in the second episode where Olive sings to herself, and sort of to Digby, "Hopelessly Devoted" and keeps getting interrupted by people and then singing again, I knew it was a show created for me, or at least people like me. I also liked, from the second episode, when Jim Dale, the narrator, says that "when the scientist got home he remembered the girl's sweater a little tighter and her hair a more vibrant shade of red, but the smile he got just right" (I'm paraphrasing here. I couldn't find the actual quote online, so here's hoping I remember it correctly.) I go all squishy inside. Yeah, the show's a keeper and since I didn't get to start watching it from the beginning, like I did with Wonderfalls, it'll probably get picked up for a second season, if it hasn't already.

In other news, lots of Eustace Tilleys. The ones that I like include:
Dorian Gray
News Print
Heavy Metal (At least it makes me think of something that may have come out of Heavy Metal magazine, back in the day, probably really before my day, even.)
Subway
Card
Hoody

It Has Returned

From July through the beginning of September, there was a turquoise Plymouth Belvedere parked along the road on my walk to and from work. Every day as I walked past it, I'd slow down a little to enjoy it. Sometime's I'd reach for it, but I wouldn't touch it, I'd just trace the lines around it, trying to get a sense of the shape.

And then it disappeared.

At first, I just assumed that the owner's work schedule had shifted and that's why I didn't see it anymore. But it wasn't there on weekends, either. One day I ran back to my apartment on my lunch hour and it wasn't there. I figured it was gone for good.

Saturday, walking to the post office, it was back. Parked right where it had sat before, as if it had never left. (Here's a picture I found of one online for those of you who can't picture what a mid-50s Belvedere looks like. It looks a lot like the one I see.)

I've never been much of a car guy. I don't car about power and torque and the rest of the crap that goes on under the hood. I'm not a fan of muscle cars or massive trucks. I have, however, always liked the way that American cars looked in the mid 1950s. They're the cars that make me stop and stare.

There's something about the basic design so many of the cars had that just tickles me. Especially the hood.

So, until it disappears, again, I'll be taking a pause on my walk to and from work to stare at a car. I hope you don't mind.

(And for my mom, here's a 1957 Nash Metropolitan, another beautiful car design. These things were works of art, I tell you.)

Ape-stract Art

Cheeta, the true star of the '30s Tarzan movies, paints.

Here's how to buy them.

And this is someone who did.

Because My Brother is Brilliant (Sometimes)

I had to share these.



This last gets pretty big, if you click it.

Go and see some (but not enough) of his art on his MySpace page.

Comic Book Tuesday

Solo

The last issue of this wonderful series came out last week. It featured Brendan McCarthy. I'm not going to write about the single issue, though. I want to write about the series.

The day I picked up the first issue, Tim Sale, I knew I was holding something really great. Every issue was set to spotlight a different penciler who, if he (since they were all guys) wanted, could do everything else in the issue. Some did write and ink and letter and color, some didn't. Each creator had the entire DC universe to explore in anyway he wanted as well as create new things.

What other series would have a story about Robin and Batgirl in the future in one book and the story of a creature who steps out of his bones every night in another and a story about how Sergio Aragonés killed Marty Feldman? None that I can think of.

This series varied wildly from issue to issue in both art and story. It existed only to give artists a chance to do whatever they wanted and, hopefully, bring their work to a larger audience.

Before issue 12, I never knew about Brendan McCarthy. Same goes for Damion Scott in issue 10. These are two artists that I'll try to watch out for because they're something different from just about anything else out there.

It's really hard for me to write about this series because I liked it so much. I liked how each issue was different from the last. I liked how different each of the stories within an issue could be from each other. I never knew what to expect, even from artist I've seen before, like Tim Sale, Darwyn Cooke, and Mike Allred. Each issue was exciting for all those reasons and more.

My only problem with the series was knowing it was doomed from the moment I picked up issue one. I read it, saw who the next artist was, and figured I'd be lucky to get a year's worth of books out of this series. The average fan doesn't want anthologies. The average fan doesn't want to experience shifting styles of art. The average fan is content sticking with what they know. The average fan may have picked up an issue for an artist they know, but there weren't many of those in Solo. Maybe if there had been a Bryan Hitch, Frank Quietly, or *shudder* Michael Turner issue that spike would have been enough for another issue or two, but we'll never know and I'm happy with the ones I got.

In an alternate universe, Solo is still coming out and the next two year's worth of artists are Dave McKean, Kyle Baker, Sam Kieth, Robert Crumb, James Kochalka, Mike Wieringo, Lauren Weinstein, Moebius, Stan Sakai, Bill Sienkiewicz, Al Jaffee, and Chuck Wojtkiewicz and my alternate self is thrilled. It's too bad we can't cross the universal divide so I can read the new issues, too.

A Green Lantern Problem

I went back and re-read Green Lantern: Rebirth last night. (I couldn't find issue 1, though. But I remember the important stuff: Coast City reappears, Hal whines, John gets mad at Batman, Guy explodes, Kyle crashes.) While I'm still not a fan of the whole idea that it was a giant bug that infected Hal, that's not what I'm here to write about.

The Yellow Impurity is.

After Rebirth, yellow is the color of fear and green is the color of willpower. The Green Lantern's power is a mixture light and willpower collected from the universe.

Ever since Rebirth, I've read and heard that it's really cool that yellow is fear and that the color yellow is part of the color green because to get to willpower, people have to push through their fears. So, it makes sense to have that color scheme. But it doesn't.

White light, like pigments, is composed of three primary colors: Red, Green, and Blue. From these three primary colors of light, all other colors are derived. The primary pigment colors are made by mixing the primary light colors. Magenta comes from mixing Red and Blue. Cyan comes from Blue and Green. And Yellow, on the RGB scale, comes from Red and Green. (Feel free to learn more from the Wikipedia article.)

Anyone who has done enough editing in HTML to change the colors of a blog page and anyone who has used Photoshop to play with a picture should be familiar with this. They've all seen the hexadecimal scale that shows #000000 for black and #FFFFFF for white... I'm not going to get into the science of RBG color, although I'd like to.

I'll admit, the fear being part of willpower theory is a nice one, but it doesn't hold up. Fans have known for years that the Green Lantern energy is light based. Light doesn't work like the pigments we learned when we were little. It's science, sorry.

And if Geoff Johns came up with the fear/willpower thing thinking it'd be cool for fans to discover, then maybe instead of taking a flight in an F16 he should have looked up some basic color theory.

Gas Prices Have Hit $3.159 In Cowtown

Monday was up too early and sitting on my ass too long. I actually showed up at the airport two hours early, 4:30 in the morning, just in case. I spent over an hour waiting to board the plane. That sucked.

There was a layover in Houston. I had quite a march from one terminal to the other. On the way I counted four(!) ‘Bucks and saw a goofy statue of Bush the first, made of bronze, with a flutter tie and a jacket sticking straight out behind him. Crazy.

I sat near a guy who was scared of flying on the way into Pittsburgh. I know how lucky I was to have his wife sitting between us. When we got further east and flew over a huge cloudbank, he started to freak out a little. “Can you see the land?” he asked me. (I sat by the window on all my flights.) The clouds stretched out as far as I could see and when I answered, he paled. When we stared to make our landing run, his eyes were glued on the window and he was squeezing his wife’s hand.

I got off the plane on time and didn’t see Heels. So I went to where I thought she might been. She wasn’t there. Ten or fifteen minutes later, I went back into the building and walked to the escalator I came down and heard my name called. And there she was, looking pregnant, but not quite finished, we’ll know when the baby’s done when her belly button pops like a turkey timer. That’s my theory, at least.

We headed back to her and Johnny Logic’s place for pizza (I requested no mushrooms and was informed that in Pittsburgh all pizza places put canned(!) mushrooms on their pizzas.) and much talking.

Let me say, I had three goals for my weekend with them: 1. Spend time with Johnny Logic and Heels. 2. Give them my baby gift. 3. Visit the Warhol Museum.

Saturday, I woke up early, which surprised me. (Maybe everyone else?) Heels was already awake, we sat at the table and talked, then read, then talked some more. (It seems to me that most of the talking was about the past. Which makes sense, since I’ve know both of them for a long time and I spend a lot of time thinking about my past, over analyzing it and imagining how things could have been better and such.) After Mr. Logic got up a discussion of the day’s events was had. It was decided that we should go to the French bakery for breakfast and a movie after and then the Warhol.

We saw Broken Flowers, with Bill Murray. It’s the story of an aging Don Juan who has never faked his own death to see all the women who had loved him. I like it a lot. Bill Murray is spectacular, but the guy who played his friend stole the show. The movie was very bitter sweet, which is my favorite way to take sweet movies.

As we walked out, Heels and I dropped Johnny Logic off at the bathroom, we heard a lady say, “That movie was awful. Bill Murray from Scrooged, that’s the Bill Murray I like. Why doesn’t he make more movies like that?” Heels looked at me and I looked at her, we both smiled and started to laugh. One of us, I’m not sure who, pointed out how strange it is to go see the same movie with so many other people and to have seen a completely different movie. When Mr. Logic came out, we heard her sharing her love of the movie with the guy who takes the tickets. “That movie,” she said, “was the worst movie I have ever seen. That was the worst movie ever made.” I’m sure the ticket guy was going to tell everyone he saw what she thought.

By that time, we were all hungry, so we went to a bird named restaurant and ate. By then, it was too late to see the Warhol. So, we did a drive through tour of Mr. Logic’s school, it was raining, and the downtown. Then we went back to their place. Heels was very, very tired, and took a nap. Johnny and I watched one of their movies, The Borne Identity. I enjoyed it quite a bit; it was a surprisingly smart action film. So, we popped in the sequel.

After the movie, we stayed up even later than the night before talking.

Sunday, The Andy Warhol Museum! (And, later, a baby shower.)

The museum started on the top floor with a John Waters (the director) exhibit. It was mostly photographs he’d taken at his films and strange comparisons of actors and actress to Divine. The best part was the John Waters Curates Andy Warhol’s Porn. Watching old people with very serious expressions watch three girls going down on a guy made me giggle. It was like they were looking for hidden meaning in a blowjob, as opposed to the visceral reaction porn is for.

The rest of the museum was pretty much devoted to Warhol’s stuff. Lots of prints, since that was his thing, but there were other things too. Some painting and sketches. I love looking at quick sketches. They all look so free. Unrushed. Like the artist had no other thought about the work but to get it out. My favorite piece, however, was a self portrait print which is a profile in red, but only a little bit of color for an outline, the rest is white. I’m not sure why I like it so much, but I do.

We moved through the museum a little faster than I would have liked, but we had a baby shower to get for and we had to be on time, since it was for Heels and (to a lesser extent) Johnny Logic.

One word can describe how it was for me: boring. But I was there for my friends, so I did my best to hide my thoughts. The decorations were awful; although it was funny when the hostess asked if the baby was a boy like all her decorations said. (It is a boy, for those who don’t know.) The food was pretty good, though. I was warned early on that the people at the party would be more on the conservative side, so I decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to wear my “Republicans for Voldemort” shirt. I also had to hold my tongue a lot. One time, I started to say something, three words had escaped my lips before I stopped myself and said, “I’m sorry.” One lady looked at me like she would have liked to hear what I was going to say, but there was no way Heels would have forgiven me if I had said it; many bruises would I have had to live with on the flight back if I had.

Watching Heels open presents was fun. Lots of clothes, a diaper sausage maker, a rocking chair, bibs, and a couple of books. The books were from me; my two favorite Dr. Seuss works, McElligots Pool and Fox in Socks. It was funny that whenever something was unwrapped that had a bear on it the person giving the gift would say, “I know you said you don’t like Teddy Bears, but it was just so cute.” And Heels would say, “Oh, that’s okay, he has a bear sitting in his crib waiting for him. I gave it to my grandmother when I was a kid and now she’s given it back for the baby.” She wasn’t thrilled with the bears, though.

After the party it was back to the house for more jibber jabber, mostly about family, if I remember correctly, and then bed for another early flight. (The only reason it was so early was because originally my parent’s were going to drop me off and pick me up and I didn’t think they’d like to pick me up at 11PM and then have to go to work the next day. It didn’t work out, though.)

The flight back was fine. Katrina didn’t make landfall until a few hours into it and didn’t effect the weather in Houston. The drive back was long and hot and on the hills, my car started to make troubling chugging sounds. I haven’t driven it since.

Strange, isn’t it, how people can spend a weekend together and experience it so differently?

More Renders

Since I'm not going to be posting any comics this week, (DAMN!) here are thumbnails of the other renders I turned in to my teacher, click 'em to see 'em. Hope you like 'em.



The last one here was the last one I did, and it was more for me than for the class.

A Render

I did four others.



Wanna see 'em?

Problem with Music

I finished my animation on Sunday afternoon, before work. There's something up with the music, it wouldn't sync the way it's supposed to, as in, let's say, I have a scene that 158 frames long, when I cut the music to be 158 frames, it would be too short, so I figured out a way to make it run through the whole thing then fade out a little bit before the whole thing ends. I wanted to be able to edit the music better, but I don't know how to. Oh well. It's due tonight, and I think I did a pretty good job.

Flash

How important is it to have moving clouds in every outdoor scene of my animation? Probably not very, but I just added them to each one. Why? Because I'm anal, that's why. This must be what real animators go through. They must constantly ask themselves how much detail to add. Everyone wants these things to be as close to reality as possible, but no one wants to do extra work if they don't have to. So, how important are the damn clouds? To me? Very important. I have to have them to prove that I can do it. It's like all the movement in the first chunk of animation, do I need it? A moving roller coaster, a moving Ferris Wheel, a moving flag, then they all get larger so I can do a zoom. Will anyone out there really notice these things on the first or second viewing? Do I need to stay consistent with the positioning? Should blueberry pie vomit have bobbing chunks of blueberries? Will I go mad trying to answer all of these questions?

I didn't go to work today, but I've been workin' hard.

Except for the two hour sanity break this afternoon (and a couple of trips to the potty room), I've been working on the next Flash project for my class since ten AM. So, that's like ten hours of work. Thats a lot. I'm almost finished. I know what my problem is, I made it too complicated for me. Lots of things moving and not enough repitition.

Tomorrow, before work, I have to complete one more scene then add the music, then I'm done. Hooray! Only two more projects and summer school is done! Hooray!

Waltzing with Hedwig

With my recent obsession with Harry Potter (see the June 21st entry for further details), I watched the first movie today. (I think I would have started reading the books again, but I only have my copy of the fifth book with me, and that's not the right place to start rereading the series, is it? I'd be like starting to reread the Dragonlance books with Legends book 2: War of the Twins, wouldn't it?) Just finished the movie in fact. And, as with any pretty good movie, I noticed something new. No, it's not something that's missing, I think I noticed all of those things by the second time I watched the movie. What I noticed was that the main musical phrase, I guess is what it could be called, entitled Hedwig's Theme is a waltz. It's got that definite 1, 2, 3, 4 idea that's always underneath what the music is doing.

A waltz.

Huh.

It's given me an idea of what to do with my slowly growing Flash skills. I think I want to do a sort of Fantasia thing with Hedwig's Theme. Strange shapes waltzing with each other across the screen. Twirling, changing, multiplying with the music. Hopefully very strange. I've got to start sketching this out.

If I ever complete it (although really starting on it will be an enormous move for me), that'll be the day that I will guarantee that I'll get my own website. Before that day, you'll have to live with my blogs.

HellBrown

Now this is a movie I'd go and see.

Link

View some art from one of my favorite comic artists, you philistines.