Some people may have already heard about the great PAX flu of 2009. If you haven’t, what transpired was half of the world’s web comic artists went to a convention and came back with a flu so bad they couldn’t draw their own strips.

The upside of their misery is that the guest strips done to fill the content void have introduced me to a bunch of new artists. One of my favorites so far is Ramon Perez’s PvP strip.

His own comic Kukuburi is now on my favorites list. I like it so much I drew this little fan art homage:

Over time I’ve come around in my thinking about comic/manga fan art. I used to avoid doing it because I saw too many fan art makers that couldn’t draw without the crutch of the source material. They had gotten locked into bad habits and styles that weren’t their own without learning the theory & practice that was the basis of the art they were copying. However, now that I’m a little more confident in my own drafting abilities, I can see how much I can learn from the getting inside another artist’s thought process by copying. Plus, it’s relaxing to draw within constraints; a blank page can be such a scary thing!

I started life drawing again last week and an animation/texturing internship at Dream Machine Studios. It was a great week, but I didn’t animate as much as usual and was feeling a bit rusty this morning. So I decided to do a little test with ballie without planning anything out beforehand.

Sometimes you just have to do a quick little something to get the animation muscles warmed up before you’re ready to dive back into the complicated stuff!

One of the best blogs out there right now for animators looking to improve how they think about film is Mark K’s Temple of the Seven Golden Camels. One of the things that makes it so good is that he doesn’t just talk about concepts, he illustrates them with photos and drawings that make sense to a visually wired brain. His most recent post breaking the 180 degree rule was a great example of why I read his blog.

First of all, you may notice that my reel is now bigger and has much better, non-ear-injuring sound.

It’s all thanks to my good friend Michaelle who is a Final Cut ninja. She’s helped me a lot, and provided me with my own copy of FCP which I must now learn to use.

Secondly, I’ve graduated from AM, but that doesn’t mean I’m out of the club. I’ve been peer buddying students in the program this term and continuing to participate in the forums, events, etc…including the weekly theme sketch. I feel like I’m really starting to get into the groove of these weekly sketches, so I’m going to share the ones I’ve done so far even though there are still several weeks left to go.

There was some site downtime today while I manually updated to the newest Wordpress version. One day WP’s automatic update feature will work. Heck, I’d start paying for WP if they could promise me that.

This week my friend Glenn and his friend Matt took me on a drawing excursion in the wilds of the East Bay. By wilds I mean they took me to this great little kid’s petting zoo called the Little Farm where we sketched for a few hours and I got real sunburned. Hopefully we’ll do it again sometime.