First Ever Animation

This is the first actual animation that I ever made. I was done in April of 09 and created with Windows Movie Maker. Somehow I found the time to draw each frame on printer paper, scan them, then assemble it all.

The characters are from one of my more serious stories. I won't go into detail in the interest of space but it's basically about two guys who defect from the army and a side story about a few of their friends.




The video is cut short from the original 9 minute-long version, and since you're all busy people I'm just showing you the best bits.
Also, in the original, there is a soundtrack (it was intentionally a music video, hence the lip sync) but I've excluded the song here to save the trouble with copyrights and such.

My Beef With 3D

It seems that 3D features are everywhere nowadays and I am a little disheartened by it. As a child of the 90's I was used to 2D, and then when 3D came along, it seemed that everyone was immediately sucked in to it and its potential.
I feel that today, the general look of a movie or TV show is paid more attention to than the story it is trying to tell. Audiences are gobbling up the special effects and super-realistic cloth swishing but they are left hungry because of the lack of a story (though, Pixar is very good at 3D and very good at stories).
It really gets on my nerves when a TV series comes out in 3D (first experienced with "Cubix"), especially when the graphics are second rate (eg. the people's hair looks like they're carved from one piece of plastic and their cotton clothes fold like a raincoat). Lately I've been seeing less of this, which makes me glad only until I happen across something like "Chowder" and then I get irate again but that's another story.

Anyway, I'm not here to bash 3D, some of my favorite movies were computer generated (Pixar stuff, Shrek), and as for video games, I'll allow it since a major part of playing a game is immersion and 3D gives a more "realistic" quality. I'm just saying I wish people won't go overboard with it. For crying out loud General Car Insurance also climbed onto the bandwagon! And Nasonex! And the bee/wasp thing keeps changing designs every two commercials!


In short, I would like people to focus more on the story aspect of a project (2D features need to listen to this as well. Chowder!). And if the story warrants 3D animation, then the animation better be damn good. Too much bad 3D and bad stories is just too much.

3 Styles

For my cartoons, I basically have three basic levels of complexity in my drawings.

First is my most simplest style.


Then I have the medium difficulty example. It includes more details.


Finally I have my most detailed level.



I believe it's good to have a variety depending on the context in which you set the characters in. Basically, more detail = more serious story.

American S(c)hmoes

Here are the 9 main characters of my series American S(c)hmoes.

This was the first of my major series which I began in the summer of 2004 when I was just about to enter high school and completed in my senior year.

Never have I created a series that I spent so much time on. Over the course of writing and drawing it, I have filled up around 40 Mead spiral-bound notebooks of various lengths (1-3 subjects) and compiled them into 30 volumes.

It follows a group of kids (of an undisclosed age group but it is assumed they're tweens) and their sometimes crazy and sometimes mundane adventures through life. The series itself is an episodic comedy and has no real overall plot line. I basically made it to record any funny event that happens to me or anything funny that I think up. It also served as a platform for social commentary, though the only person to ever have read it was my dad, whom I coerced into reading sometimes. Perhaps, in a way, it was the first real journal I ever kept. Things would happen and the characters' dialogs would be my response to them.

For this particular series, I've made up a slew of characters (over 230). I even made a spin-off though it was less successful, since I did not put as much effort into it.

I was never much for diaries so I suppose drawing things out, putting in a story line, and adding humor was how I would express my feelings about things. Each character would have their own personality but I'll admit that if a little bit were taken from each of them and the bits were compressed into one being, that would be me.

Stories just make sense to me.

What I'm About

As trite as it sounds, I believe that everyone has a story. I am but a simple observer in the world. I watch the things that happen around me, human dramas that never engulf me personally. I only take part in the show when engaged by others.
Of course I have my own life and I enjoy it as well, but I feel that my main purpose is to document others and have fun while doing it. If the others are not interesting at the moment, I will create my own others.

This past summer, I decided to make a list of all the characters I've ever created (in this sense of the word I mean character design on paper). So far I've listed over 530 of them; and those are the ones whose names I can remember. I've got all sorts of characters from 60 year-old men to anthropomorphic bears to talking newts. Each one is part of a distinct series and has their own story and background. I must sound absolutely mental by now.

I began coming up with stories around the time that I started to draw (around 4 years). Their creation has given me countless hours of entertainment that was needed since I am an only child. Every character I've come up with means something to me, like old friends and acquaintances. For 15 years I've been doing this and I only hope that the world enjoys my creations half as much as I do.

Art, Design, and Their Relatives: My Introduction

Art and Design have been married for a number of years now and have quite the extensive family. There's Uncle Systems and Auntie Intuition. There are the cousins, Drawing, Painting, Photography, and Lithography, among others. Then there are the friends and neighbors, Materials and Processes. And of course, Art and Design's children, Impressionism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Pointillism to name just a few.

But there's one oddball kid who doesn't know which older sibling to follow if at all. He is called Cartoons.

This blog follows the story of one artist and her friendship with Cartoons and shows how together, some of the stuff they make is pretty neat.