Sign your Art!

Intresting article.
http://www.artbusiness.com/signart.html

Via http://britnibrault.com/
(via http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/)

Chuck Jones documentary

Sometimes Google and/or YouTube suggest content I'm actually interested in, like this very nice documentary about Animation master Chuck Jones.

Also, check out this post from Andreas Deja's blog.

Rough animation

I always had feelings for the art of animation.
I remeber understanding the mechanics of it since an early age and I always read avidly anything I could find about the process of animating a picture .

Surprisingly though, I never really gave a thought to becoming an animator. It seemed something way too complicated and expensive to triuy it on my own.

Of course things changed drastically since de advent of digital technology and affordable personal computers.
I wonder if I would have give it a shot it back in the day if I had the tools available now.

Take these GIFs: created from simple photos of sketches taken with a mobile phone, edited with photoshop or MS Office and and later fed to an online gif maker.
It took no longer than 30 minutes per animation.

They are pretty crude, but they were a lot of fun to do.

And this below is the first animation bit done by my son Adam, age 4:

Charlie Schultz documentary

Not much to add.
He was one of the greatest cartoonists to ever grace the medium.

No school like the old school.

No school like the old school, I know, but if it wasn't for the availability of the information made possible by modern media, I would not know a thing about Old School.

Thanks to DVD documentary and extra's I have been able to know a bit about the history of animation and its great talents like Bill Tiyla, Woolie Reitherman, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, Milt Khal, Ken Anderson and so on.

Thanks to the internet I've been able to find more information, documentaries, pencil tests from old Disney calssics than I could ever dream.

The internet also started this trend of "sharing". I'm really terrible at it, but  a lot of talented people have made a habit of sharing stories and materials (for free) to such an extent that today is possible to get (almost) an education at certain crafts without leaving home.

One of these talents is Andreas Deja, a great Animator who worked on virtually all great Disney movies from the eighties through the nieneties.

He keeps a wonderful BLOG, updated almost daily which is a goldmine.

---
 

Nostalgia

Marvel Comic: The Untold Story

Praised by critics and industry people alike (except, maybe, some of those talked about in the book itself), Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is possibly the best account available out there the famous publishing house's history.

The books puts together in fine prose and chronological order a lot of facts, stories and anecdotes, (some well known in the community, some less) providing context and making it a very fun read.

You can read excerpts fom it on Google Books (also here) on Amazon and on author Sean Howe's own site.

 Excelsior!

muddycolors.blogspot.com

muddycolors.blogspot.com

got to be the best blog I have found so far for budding artists and I’ve got the feeling it’s going to be steady at the top of my list for a very, very long time

Curated by a group of illustrators, painters, teachers, sculptors, comic artists specialized in several areas of commercial arts, the site offers an abundance of interdisciplinary tips, reports, tutorials, experiences like no other I’ve found.

The community of authors is mostly active within the "fantasy" genre, but this is absolutely irrelevant with regard to the quality of the posts.

What Cinephilia & Beyond is to movie buffs and aspiring filmmakers, and the Stan Winston School is to horror/sci-fi /fx/make-up aficionados, Muddy Colors should be for people seriously determined to become commercial artists.