Fizzle & Pop | "Art" and other crap.

Illustration Friday: "Sprouts"

February 8, 2007 by Collin

I came very close to not doing this one. Very, very close. Mainly because the word of the week – “Sprout” – didn’t resonate with my creative head goo. But then I decided to make something, anything, no matter how lame or (and this is the key) strange. Done without sketching, entirely in Photoshop in about a half hour.

And no, I don’t know what corner of my head this idea came from. For what it’s worth the original plan was “Cow Sprouts” but a pig was easier to make. The bowl and the fork came close to the end of the process and the original text was going to be “Finish your piggy sprouts and you can have a cookie!” but I decided it was too wordy.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Category Art | Tags: | 6 Comments
Artsy-Fartsy stuff

February 7, 2007 by Collin

This idea has been rattling around in my brainpan for the last two weeks, so I finally had to do something with it. I hope you like it.

If you really, really like it you can buy a journal with it printed on the cover from this link: Manic Monkey Journal. And if you find anything else that you would like to purchase that would be great. I just recently found out that CafePress forgot to resume charging me for my store back in August of last year when my billing information was changed and I know as soon as they figure it out, they’ll be wanting all those months paid up immediately.

“In the pipe” I have a tattoo to design for my brother, Trevor, and I have a logo design to develop for my newly discovered half-sister, Jamie. Also there’s one more thing like “Manic Monkey” that is beating against my grey matter, trying to find a way out. I’m on vacation next week, so I should be able to find the time to at least get those three things well and truly started if not done.

I’ve also uploaded the “IF: Super Hero – color 2″ movie to my Mac account. Because it was made with the “follow-the-cursor” option, I decided this time not to condense it and speed it up due to the crazy amount of motion that makes some people want to vomit. Un-condensed it’s 19.5 minutes long and since I don’t have a director’s account with YouTube that means it won’t be uploaded there. If you really want to see it, you can find it for download HERE and if you would rather watch it and not download it you can do that HERE. Well, technically you will still download it. You’ll just also be able to watch it as it downloads. I hope to have the final part up next week, even if it takes me an hour of talking to get seven usable minutes for the audio.

There may or may not be a new Illustration Friday drawing tomorrow, depending on how tonight goes.

Category Art | Tags: | 4 Comments
Tagged again, naturally.

February 5, 2007 by Collin

ValGalArt has tagged me with the task of sharing six weird things about me with the world at large. Now, you would think that me being me, six things that are weird about me should just spring to mind like monkeys from a Trojan banana, but alas it’s not the case. I’m having to struggle with this one. Especially after reading hers . My life hasn’t been nearly as interesting. Still, I’ll try.

—
When I was four years old we lived in Oklahoma. Being so young with nothing better to do, I decided at some point that I needed a hobby. I was still too young to build plastic models or cruise the strip looking for loose women, and stamps didn’t interest me at all. However something else that was sticky did. There were these insects that appeared in the Spring or Summer that would cling to the trees, fences, houses, the slower elderly folk, etc. and then crawl out of their skins and wander off somewhere else leaving behind a shell of a bug. They might have been locusts. I don’t know. I was four. I do remember thinking their skins were mighty cool looking and they were just there for the taking so I would spend my time hunting for locust skins. I learned to be real careful because they were fragile. If you just snatched them from a tree or whatever they would at the very least lose their legs if not cave in altogether. By the end of the season I must have had at least fifty skins – a few still occupied with dead bugs that didn’t make it out – and I stored them in a cardboard box that I kept under my bed. Then my mom cleaned my room one day and found the box. As she tells it she saw the box, wondered what was inside, pulled it out, shook it a bit and then opened it. I’m sure there was screaming shortly after and then it was time to find a new hobby.
—
I wrote about this before, but I feel it counts as weird so I’m writing about it again. I came to the conclusion when I was five that school was for suckers. My mom was working and I was staying with a babysitter who had a dog that bit through my ear… but that’s not the point. The point is this sitter allowed me to walk alone to kindergarden after the first couple weeks. She only lived a few blocks away from the school and it was still the early 70s. For whatever reason I decided I’d had enough of school and would be better off spending my time playing in a nearby drainage ditch than allowing myself to be educated. It was an awesome drainage ditch. The school playground had nothing on it. There were all kinds of concrete blocks to climb around on, sand to play in, and I could hear the school bell from where I was so I would know when to head back to the sitter’s house. It was a wonderful three days that ended with my mom storming my over the blocks and sand, dressed in her business clothes and yelling bloody murder. Who knew the school would miss me? They had all those other kids who certainly were still attending and…ohmygod!hereshecomes! RUN!
—
After those two, this is probably a bit boring, but I have a freckle right in the middle of my lower lip. And a small mole centered right under my belly button. And another freckle that I won’t talk about other than to say it’s down the middle of me too. Also I made the discovery, after they shaved my head at Basic Training, that there was a circular spot about half the size of a dime on my forehead that didn’t grow any hair except for one strand right in the middle. The spot has since vanished due to a receding hairline, so you’ll have to take my word on it. And on that other freckle. And so far I have never broken a bone that I know of, although I have cut my eyelid open, impaled my knee on a nail in a fence I was climbing and cut the tip of my thumb off at work.
—
I didn’t have any interest in the Super Bowl this year. Or last year. Or any year with the exception of when the Broncos have played, and then it was more of a matter of state pride than a desire to watch football. Or any other televised sport. I’m not a “sports” guy. I can enjoy watching sports, but pretty much only when there isn’t something else I’d rather be doing. Make that “some sports.” I never enjoy watching baseball or basketball. Or soccer. Or golf. And on the rare occasion when I’ve bowled, I was playing a game and not participating in a sport. Bowling against me is sporting almost as much as putting a “kick me!” sign on a blind paraplegic’s wheeled cart. If I break 90 it’s a woo-hoo moment. I can’t just watch bowling. I’m totally lacking whatever gene it is that most men and a surprising number of women seem to have that drives them to watch sports. I feel that professional athletes are horribly, grossly overpaid for what they do. I feel that any athlete that makes over $1Meeeeelion dollars in a year should donate the excess to the public school districts they attended while growing up, rather than spend it on mansions, cars, jewelry, drugs, guns and hookers. But hey, that’s me.
—
This one is Heather’s suggestion. She says I’m weird because I’m not ticklish. When I was a kid I was horribly ticklish. If you approached me and just made your fingers do the tickle gesture I would roll up into a ball and giggle uncontrollably. That’s faded over the years to the point where about the only way I can be tickled is if I’m not expecting it and then only for about a second or two. In a way it’s like nails on a chalkboard. That was a noise that I couldn’t stand as a child. Until… One day in 5th or 6th grade I happened to have one of those plastic balls that vending machine toys come in and the teacher had left the room for some reason. All of the kids were talking or tossing things back and forth and I got the idea that my contribution to the chaos would be to take the clear hard half of that ball and scrape it down the length of the chalkboard. You should have heard it. EVERYONE stopped talking. And the odd thing was even though I expected to cringe as well it was as if seeing how everyone else reacted to the noise cured me of being bothered by it. So I did it again with the same results. The power was mine! It got to the point where it became a weapon I would use against kids who annoyed me. One kid thought I was pretty tough with my half-a-plastic egg thingie, so he dared me to use only my fingernails figuring that would topple me from my throne as “that kid who makes the chalkboard scream all the damned time.” Hah! Instead I learned that using my nails didn’t bother me either. It did at first, but I powered through and took all five fingers from as high as I could reach on the board down to the chalk tray. He may have been crying when I finished. I don’t really remember.
—
And, finally, the last weird thing about me – there’s nothing else so don’t bother looking or pointing anything out – is that usually, if I find a spider in my house I don’t kill it. I catch it and release it outside a good distance from the house. “A good distance” usually translates to “as far as it’ll fly from my back door” depending on if I have my shoes on. It also depends on the type of spider, of course. If I don’t recognize what type it is, or I do and it’s poisonous, it dies. Otherwise it’s catch and release. Why? I don’t know. I’ll kill a fly and I’ve gassed ants by the dozens, but spiders usually get treated better. Except for one that Jordyn found during one of our blizzards a few weeks ago. It was a wolf spider and I caught it in a cup as usual, but then I took it to the back door and looked out at the snow. Jordyn was with me. She expressed concern that it was too cold for it to be tossed outside. But what could I do? I couldn’t keep it. So I opened the door and tossed it out onto the snow on the steps while assuring her that it would be fine. It landed, took maybe one step and then curled up. Oops. She said. “Are you sure he’ll be okay? He looks dead.” Fortunately I was able to fall back on my Monty Python training and I said, “No. No. He’s not dead. He’s just resting.” Luckily she hasn’t seen the dead parrot sketch yet. And I don’t know, perhaps it was just reacting to the cold by hibernating after a fashion and later it would have been fine. If another five inches of snow hadn’t fallen on top of it.
—

There you go. I’m supposed to tag 6 other people with this, however I’m not sure if I even have six regular readers anymore. So I’ll just suggest a few people and if you see this post and want to do it, great. If not that’s fine too.

Heather
Derek
Justin C.
Pat Angello
Trashman
Mark Maynard

And here are the “rules”:

“Each person that gets tagged needs to write a blog post of their own 6 weird things as well as clearly stating this rule. After you state your 6 weird things, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says “you’re tagged” in their comments and tell them to read your blog for info as to what it means.”

Category Adrift | Tags: | 3 Comments
The thoughts in my head go round and round.

February 2, 2007 by Collin

Okay, I have two thoughts to share with you today. More like questions really. Ponderings. One occurred to me in the car and the other while at work. Both may have answers, but as usual I’m too lazy to look them up. Google be damned.

Ready or not, here they are (well, I guess if you aren’t ready you could pause for a few seconds before reading on):

When it comes to writing out US currency, why is it that we put dollar signs at the front of the amount – $25 – and cent signs in the back – 25¢ – ? Are we the only country that does this? I notice that other countries (Nigeria is the first to spring to mind) put the dollar sign after the amount – 25035423US$ – which if you are reading it out loud kinda makes sense:

“I have twenty-five million, thirty-five thousand, four-hundred-twenty-three U.S. dollars just waiting for me in a bank in Nigeria.”

Not “I have U.S. dollars twenty-five million, thirty-five thousand, four-hundred-twenty-three just waiting for me in a bank in Nigeria.”

Derek figured that the cent sign follows the amount because cents come after the decimal in a dollar amount – $25.35¢ – but that doesn’t sound likely to me. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an Account Executive give me a disclaimer that stated something to the effect of the cost per mile over the lease allowable was .21¢ per mile. So… what? about 1/5th of a penny? That doesn’t sound too bad. Oh! You mean twenty-one cents! I see. That’s not as good.

—

The other thought I had delves into religion, an area I’m really unqualified to be delving in, but what the heck. That hasn’t stopped me in the past.

I was thinking about how the Christian religions believe that Jesus Christ will return to earth and usher in the end times. Now, the thought was this: Would the returned Jesus be a Christian? Or would he be non-denominational? When he left earth the first time he was Jewish, correct? Is the supposition that in the past couple of thousand years he’s had time to change his mind? And how would that work, exactly?

“This is Bill Jibbowanski reporting to you live from the second coming of Jesus Christ, taking place at this non-descript IHOP in Boise, Idaho where for the past two weeks His image has been appearing on all of the pancakes along with the slogans “coming soon” and “be seeing you”. Crepes too, I’ve just been told. There’s quite a crowd gathered here, as you might well imagine, however I hope to be able to ask Jesus a tough question that I’m sure you – the viewers at home – want asked. I think I see Him. Yes. The crowd is parting and there He is! Jesus! JESUS! Yo! JESUS! Bill Jibbowanski; Channel 5 news! Can you please tell me: Do you consider yourself a born-again Christian, or do you still cling to your Jewish beliefs?”

“Hi Bill! That’s a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. I think I still identify with the Jewish faith, however Christianity does bring up a valid point. I believe strongly in Me and My Second Coming because, hey, here I am! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a host of angels to organize, flight plans to arrange for the near simultaneous upward exodus of millions of true believers and then I have to kick some evil ass. Be seeing you.”

“Thank you Jesus, and godspeed. Well there you have it folks. Jesus has returned and He’s a man on a mission with little time for chit-chat. Back to you Cynthia.”

—

Have a great weekend everyone.

Category Adrift | Tags: | 2 Comments
Oh shi™! It’s Thursday!

February 1, 2007 by Collin

I’ve been too busy to draw anything for Illustration Friday this week, even though I had an idea I liked. Nuts. I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

Category Adrift | Tags: | 3 Comments
The first of the three videos:

January 28, 2007 by Collin

Normally I’ll try to have the videos available from my .Mac account, however the 640×480 version of this one is 343MB. The 320×240 video is only 20.5MB though, and the quality is still somewhat better than it looks on YouTube. You can get it here: Video 1

Normally I’ll try to have the higher quality videos available from my .Mac account, however the 640×480 version of this one is 343MB, which is over a third of my allowable storage space. Fortunately the 320×240 video is only 20.5MB and the quality is still somewhat better than the YouTube video. You can get it here: Video 1 link.

I’ve found that even worse than the export time is coming up with something to say for five minutes. It seems that when I’m not actually recording I can think of plenty of things to say, but when the mic is on it all flitters away. Last night after about 20 takes and false starts I reached the point where I felt like I was a mumbling moron and stopped a bit earlier than planned. And that was only on the audio for the first movie. As a result I had to extend the end music quite a bit longer than The Coconut Monkeyrocket intended.

The remaining two videos will be posted later later today if I find myself amazingly eloquent, or as the week goes by. If I do this week’s theme – “Red” – I won’t be recording it.

Category Adrift | Tags: | 4 Comments
About those movies…

January 28, 2007 by Collin

They are coming. I’m working on them now. However I got a later start than I had intended and it’s not looking like they will be done by today at this rate. Exporting takes a stupidly long time, which I somehow forgot. So I will work until they are done and posted, or until I drop. Whichever comes first. Sorry for the delay.

Category Adrift | Tags: | No Comments
IF: "Super Hero" – final

January 25, 2007 by Collin

Due to both the time it takes to export the movies, and the fact that I would rather spend the day celebrating Heather’s birthday with her than dinking around any more on the computer, the videos won’t be up until Saturday at the earliest. As for the videos, I’ll be honest, they’re a wee bit crappy. First I lost the audio on the movie #1, then on movie #2 I was more focused on getting it done than on talking so the audio was useless, and finally I decided for the last movie to change how it was fillmed. On the first two there was way too much motion with the recoder is set to follow the cursor, so I tried a set stage. You can’t see the tools that I select, or how I manipulate the layers as easily so they may be useless for learning from, but you also shouldn’t feel the need to barf. I hope.

So, by saturday, I have to make three 9-minute audio tracks to synch the movies to – which will also speed them up… a good thing – and I have to make title credits as well. Fun fun. But I am learning and they should get better and more useful the more of them I make.

So. That said, here’s my final illustration for the Illustration Friday topic “Super Hero” (all images are clickable):

Here’s a link to where I posted the initial sketch and the YouTube movie of the same being made: Sketch

And, lastly, here’s my 7-year-old daughter Jordyn’s take on the topic… Streg the Fatman!:

And a cat that she also drew, because I like it:

Have a great week everyone, and be sure to check back sometime later on Saturday if you want to see the “making of” movies. Myooo!

Category Art | Tags: | 9 Comments
IF: “Super Hero” – Sketch

January 21, 2007 by Collin

Well, that was nothing if not time consuming. Going into this week’s illustration friday topic, I had no idea what I was going to do. Knowing that I wanted to record it made it even more difficult to come up with anything. I recorded and trashed two earlier ideas before settling on this one. I would show you how much worse the other two ideas were, but… well… they don’t exist anymore, except as rapidly fading memories.

Through it all I realized that I’m just not a super hero kinda guy, I guess.

So, here’s the sketch, and please keep in mind that it’s only a sketch. It will look better when it’s finished. At least it should. I hope it does. They usually do.

If you would like to see how I made it you have a couple of options. You can either watch the cut 320×240 YouTube video that I uploaded (now with music!), or you can download the uncut 640×480 video from this link. Or you can do both. Who am I to limit your choices?

Sketch Video:

Edit: ~~Wow. After viewing how the YouTube video turned out, all I can say is that’s horrible. Simply horrible. I think I’m going to have to figure out something else.~~

Edit2: Okay, I figured out something else. It shouldn’t be as bad and it’s also a little under 6 minutes long now for reasons that are silly. And there’s music. And dancing bears. Okay, no bears. But there is music, so that may help the time pass faster. This is also probably my most edited post ever.

(end edit 2, resuming edit 1)

Oh, and I started filming the finalizing of the drawing last night. Just the head took 27 minutes, although there was going to be audio with it as well. I say “was going to be” because something went wrong and there was no audio when it was all done. And the raw file was 9.7GB. Even after I compressed and resized it to the same settings as the better quality sketch movie it was still 300 MB. I’m looking into how to fix that without making it look as horrible as the YouTube video does. Needless to say, the final video won’t be available before Thursday.

After I’d finished the sketch and looked at it, I realized why I had the thought that I’d done this drawing before… well, not THIS one, but one like it:

I guess I have a “thing” for capes and mohawk-ie stuff.

So now the plan is for me to record the finishing steps at some point between now and Thursday. I may have a couple hours to work on it in the morning, and that might be enough. I guess we’ll see. I’m also considering recording a voice over with it as well, although that adds considerably to the file size.

Take care all.

Sometime soon: The story about the half-sisters I never knew I had by way of the father I never knew.*

—

*It’s not that I think the silly IF stuff is more important. I just found out about them a couple days ago and I’m still getting to know them. I’ll tell you more in due time.

Category Projects | Tags: , illustration friday | 4 Comments
One crucial step closer to fulfilling my evil plan.

January 17, 2007 by Collin

I started this year by dedicating a set amount of money toward getting my home computer upgraded and buying the software I need so that I can start recording tutorials that will hopefully be found useful to you, my readers. Obviously, the usefulness will depend on whether or not you want to learn anything about Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, Art Rage 2, or how I go about drawing the crap that I draw.

Getting the stuff I needed turned out to be a rocky affair.

On the hardware side of things I decided to get a smaller Wacom Intuos 3 tablet that would be easier to use while at my tiny home desk, as well as upping my system’s RAM by 4 GB and getting a new video card. The tablet arrived without hassle, and works great. However I ordered the video card and memory from one online dealer. An hour before I placed my order back in the last week of December the video card was in stock. After I placed my order it changed to “Ships in 9 days”. I hoped that I’d gotten the last one. Not so lucky. 10 days later after the status of my order hadn’t changed I contacted the company’s support department by email and was informed the next day that the card is backordered and it will be another 35 days before it’s expected to arrive. So, rather than be like Amazon who will break up your order and ship what they have in stock, they were just keeping my RAM waiting for that sunny, far off day when the card showed up. Oh, and not bother letting me know.

So I called the support, cancelled the card and added another 2GB of RAM since the price had dropped while I had been waiting. All seemed roses, and I got a shipping confirmation, a tracking number and an invoice. My order would be arriving on the 16th of January. Well… some of my order would, as it turns out.

When I opened the package at lunch yesterday I was a “bit distressed” to find only 2GB of the 6GB arrived. Then the follow up call to their support led to me being on hold for 30 minutes and then told their database just went down and they would have to call me back. I was stressing a tinch. That’s a mild way of putting it.

After 4pm I got a call back and was told the person who had changed my order made a mistake and that they would be sending the RAM that night. I asked if I could have it by tomorrow (today) and he said he could have it here by Thursday for me.

It actually arrived today. I’m now less stressed. I’ll be finally relaxed when I get it home and put it into my G5 and everything runs perfectly. I’m not expecting that, but I am hoping for it.

I also got my iMac account set up for hosting the higher resolution movies. I’ll still post them to youTube as well for those who would like to view them without the hassle and pain of downloading them. A link to where they will be found is in my sidebar where it says “Tutorials & More”.

On the software side of things, everything should be done. I’ll try to put a movie of some sort together by Monday. With luck not having the video card upgrade won’t be too much of a problem. There will certainly still be some rough spots to work out, like the fact that I know nothing about iMovie or iDVD and will likely be posting raw, unedited stuff until I get it figured out.

So. That’s what’s new with me. Anyone have any suggestions for what the topic of the first movie should be? I have a few ideas of my own, obviously, but I’m curious what you guys might like to see.

Category Adrift | Tags: | 7 Comments

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