And I'm finally back... again!

Sorry folks (folks?! ahahaha!!)
Sorry casual reader for letting you down... hey, maybe tha'ts why it's called Down the Guts. HA!

Anyway, my original intention to dedicate my blog to comics or at most animation really limit the range of stuff I can share, so I'm going to include random finds here as well.

I'll try to keep it about various forms of storytelling anyway (meaning I'll be talking about movies), in spite of my actual disgust with this current shapeless amalgama that goes under the name of "geek culture" or even worse "pop culture".

It's not that I cosider TV or movies as opposed to comics, but I kind of miss the times when liking comics was something a lot o f people kept closeted.

No, it's not that either.

It's just that I hate seeing a lot of people juming on the band wagon.

Going to Lucca Comics has become something of an obligation for anyone who got something to sell, regardless of its pertainance with comics. I mean, I ADORE Bizzarrobazar.com for instance, I really think it's one of the best places on the web, but how does that blog has anything to do with Lucca Comics?

My brother put that brilliantly some time ago: "When I was young, there wasn't all this p***y around Star Wars".

I'm really having a hard time adapting to this trend (don't get me started about San Diego)

I guess it has something to do with what the GRAT ALAN MOORE says here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93sV5XGLmgQ&feature=youtu.be&t=14m


That said. enjoy this videos about Steven Speilberg's DUEL.

Fun with invitation cards...

Almost at the last useful minute I was able to make an invitation card for the birthday party of my soon-to-be-6-years-old son.

It was hard to settle what the "theme" of the party was going to be.
As a kid in a candy store, he wanted to have it all.
At first he choose "magic tricks", but then he preferred "arts and crafts", then Star Wars...

I soon learned you should not involve a not-6-yet kid in any open-choice decision making process.

Ultimately I decided to poke a little fun at him, and the card involves exactly his indecision about it.

(he took it well, I must say. For a kid he can be self-deprecating at times. I'll give him that)

I screwed it up anyway. The lay out is a bit off, and I should have placed the balloons better to guide the eye. Its not quite clear which panels/balloons you should read first.

But it was fun to do and I'm enjoying this loose cartoony style recently. It's not as solid as I want it to be, I guess I need more practice...

Blip

A very long time since my last post.
Very little to post, actually...

Here's some stuff I've been doing lately.

The upside down Spiday is just something I wanted to do for fun, and it's sahmelessly ripped off a wonderful Michael Lark variant cover (which I cannot link right now... to bad)

The second is instead an attempt to draw Spider-Man in a "spider-man-esque" pose without ripping it off.

These come from a work in the making... sort of.
I'm keeping this under wraps for the time being...
colors by Shanna Paulissen

Another Chuck Jones

Totally subscribing

Coming in late to this one.
Never been particularly fond of Pat Broderick, but I subscribe his words down to every comma

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/11275179/pat-broderick-facebook-cosplay-rant.html

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Also found a very funny quote on the conceptart.org website, attributed to user Flipnastywebby:

"...somebody once told me, only draw anime if you can cure cancer with it."

Word. 

R.I.P. Walt Peregoy

The sad news can be found here:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/rip/walt-peregoy-101-dalmatians-color-stylist-rip-108028.html

I wanted to make a brief post about it, but it turned in something more articulate. Hope you don't mind.

I've been unknowingly familiar (as many kids) with the work of this genius since early childhood, since his styling has essentially defined the look of many HANNA-BARBERA cartoons I used to watch.

However, I only sought out his work last year, when trying to find an interesting (and hopefully efficient and time-saving) way to color my "Werewolf" story (more on that later).

This comic was originally meant to be in black and white, but the editor of the digital magazine where the story was going to be published (in five installments) wanted it to be in color, to balance other black and white content.

Apart from the style of choice (which wouldn't suit color well) a problem was posed by the deadlines I had to meet. I had no experience in digital coloring, so I had to learn by doing it. What I needed was least a coloring approach which could speed up the process.

I don't know why but I suddenly thought of Walt Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
It was the first cartoon to apply the "sketchy" Disney style I previously (and wrongly) attributed to Wolfgang Reitherman. But that style was actually the result of solving a budget problem.
Veteran animator and Mickey Mouse co-creator Ub Ikwers had come up with a way to cut the expensive INKING process, by using the then new XEROX technology to transfer the animation pencils directly to acetated cells in solid black color
.
For the first time what would be photographed was not the "cleanup", but the actual pencil animation, which gave the characters that peculiar rough-edged feel.

But more unique to Dalmatians was the way backgrounds blended stylistically with the animation.

Up until then, if one excludes the first 5 or 8 years of shorts, Disney backgrounds used a lavish pictorial style. Sometimes, soft and simplified (Dumbo),

sometimes almost impressionistic (Bambi)

sometimes rich and detailed (Sleeping Beauty).

I always found a bit strange that while the characters are stylized, (often rendered only through contours and lines, shading mostly absent) the backgrounds, albeit not REALISTIC, are rendered in a completely different technique.

In his essay Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes the point that this very choice is what makes Disney movies so accessible and yet so immersive. We can project ourselves far more easily in to simplified, stylized characters, but at the same times we "buy" their world because of the detail with which it is depicted.

For Scott McCloud, this technique is analog to what Japanese manga do (for instance, think of the contrast in Masamune Shirow's Appleseed, between the increasingly cartoony face of Deunan and the extremely detailed technology in the background)

But apparently this problem of "blending" characters and background together was something that bothered Walt Disney’s renaissance man Ken Anderson, who saw in the new xerox technique and in the contemporary setting of the movie an opportunity to experiment with a new style of backgrounds.

And here comes in Walt Peregoy.
A longtime collaborator of the studio, Peregoy was the color stylist for many Disney productions, and his contribution to Dalmatians cannot be understated.

In the movie, the modernlystylized backgrounds by Ken Anderson and Ernie Nordli (slightly asymmetrical and tending to caricature) were superimposed over flat, almost abstract patches of color, with stunning results.

Background artists Al Dempster, Ralph Hulett, Anthony Rizzo & Bill Layne followed very closely the styling as dictated by Peregoy.

As Brad Bird points out in this video, this style is only deceptively simple.
It requires a great degree of draftsmanship, extreme color sensibility: the illustrator has to become a designer.

I've attempted (with little success) to apply some of these principles (textures, bleeding) to my own work.
I'll let you judge the results, but they are far from satisfactory.

 





















The only pride I have in this work is that I was able to deliver on schedule! (by basically giving up sleeping - which led to acute forgetfulness - which led to discovering I'm probably ADD anyway - which led to... oh, screw it. That's going to be my next post).

you can listen to a two-parter interview with Peregoy here 
and here. (thanks to The Animation Guild blog)

***

In many ways the work of Peregoy (Anderson and Nordli) reminds me a lot of Mirosalv Sasek

And in more recent years i find the same qualities in Lou Romano's designs.

Somehow I guess my fondness for this style of design traces back to some books I used to have around the house when I was a kid.

In giro per il mondo con Disney  (Around the world with Disney):

The book series Il Club delle Giovani Marmotte (Junior Woodchucks Club):

And the guidebooks called Il manuale delle giovani marmotte (Junior Woodchucks Guidebook), volumes 1 to 3:

These books were all illustrated by Italian Disney Maestro Giovan Battista Carpi.

As a kid I didn't particularly like his style, preferring the more modern Giorgio Cavazzano, Massimo De Vita or Stefano Intini, but when re-thinking years later about it, I must admit Carpi really had an incredible sense of design.

Dave Gibbons

Dave Gibbons needs no introductions: co-author of the seminal WATCHMEN and frequent collaborator of Northampton's scribe Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons is on of the most complete artists working in mainstream comics: penciller, inker, writer letterer, you name it.
His graphic style is a perfect blend of the american and european traditions.

I do not love his style viscerally as I do with other artists, but on some stories it just works perfectly.

There is undoubtly a staggering level of craft and we can all learn from his details and uncompromising technique.

He's also one of the most articulated people working in the field, no it is no surprise that this conversation with Bleeding Cool's Chris Thompson is very enjoyable to listen.

Of course, the reason for him to be interviewed at this particular time is the release of a movie based on a graphic novel he worked on (Kingsman - The Secret Service), so there you have it again: comics getting second-rated by movies.

But still...

The WIRE fan art

Just received the pre-press proof of my next book. and it looks like the link to this blog will be put in print.

Not that I expect an increase in traffic to this page, but keeping it up-to-date maybe isn't such a bad idea...

Unfortunately not much to post in terms of comics/animation-related content, so I've decided to share this work in progress.

If you have read some of my provious posts you know I really loved The Wire.

I feel kind of dual in regards to fan art. On one hand I find it a form of masturbation. A way to rub one's self into comforting and familiar feelings.

On the other hand I can't deny that some works greatly inspire our imagination and provide an entrance in to the realm of creativity.

As much as I have outgrown my passion for Star Wars or the superhero genre, I totally understand that some imaginary worlds and its inhabitants are simply too good and full of potential to be left alone.

And anyway, having a shot at portraying our favorite fictional characters is a way to exercise and train our skills, and that's always good.

So, here's a little rough for an upcoming pin-up of LT. DANIELS from David Simon and Ed Burns's The Wire.
I hope to finish this one soon...

 

Plus, soem sketches done using other characters as references (they don't look like much, gotta say)...

to conclude: online you can find a lot of Wire Fan art just by googling. Only a few honorable mentions for the following

Prezbo, Frank, Rhonda and Kima and by Greg Smallwood:

And two  nice caartoonish rendition of some characters by Paul Sizer and an unknown artis (respectively)

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.

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Nostalgia