I am so not Slick....

This Guy's name is Slick. He's another NS*tweens character for work. He is supposed to be the techie, computer whiz guy who is always connected to the Internet and has tons of gadgets. He is my antithesis. I have no faith in technology, my cell phone never works, Internet is always down, inbox is filled with spam, and my car stereo broke yesterday.

Fashion! Turn to the Left....

I was spoiled this year. I got so much for Christmas that i feel somewhat guilty. I have almost an entirely new wardrobe(which is good). I think I'm just going to have to be extra charitable this coming year. I think I'll begin by offering you these two posts. Its been awfully slow in the office this week which means that I've been able to work on some character designs without distraction. This little girl here is called Lolo(I didn't name her), and she is one of seven characters that we are going to be animating in a piece for NS*tweens on Internet safety. Apparently she is the fashionista of the group. See how she looks like she shops at Old Navy!!!??? That's in style right? I wouldn't know, I don't dress myself. I'm wearing a navy blue sock and a brown sock right now as I'm writing this. Is "Fashionista" even a word? I Feel like I heard it last night while watching the blockbuster hit, The Devil Wears Prada with Tini. I think that words like that are made up to make people sound more exotic. Take for instance the word "barista" which is a fancy way for starbucks employees to say "I brew and sell coffee." Starbucks must have coined that word. Anyhoo, I had a great Christmas and I'm looking forward to the new year.

A Tini Kiss Under the Mistletoe

A Sketch Dump

These are just a few concept drawings I did today for a new project we are starting. Eventually they will be done in Toon Boom. Finally seems that I will be able to put some of that training I had a while back to the test. Thought I'd share. Oh, and yes that guy is pooping with his Ipod in.

The Sugar Plum Princess

Here is a quick pic that I did today of Tini and I ice skating. Tonight we're going to try out the new Capital's ice skating rink on top of Balston mall. Don't be fooled into thinking that I drew myself after a fall though. The reason I'm depicted laying down on the ice is because I will have been skating circles around Tini all night. ;)

Blog war part 4 is the pits

Mcdoubletree likes to party!

(P.U.)

C-live

11 penguins accompanied us yesterday on *clicky live, it was a great show, a total of 84 people logged in, with three or four classrooms around the country. There were fantastic questions asked by kids and friends and answered by my robot buddy. Good job C-live team!

Stained Glass progress.

Here is the rough outline for the stained glass piece that I've been occasionally working on. I traced over these lines with a sharpie, numbered them, cut them out, and pasted them on the glass as templates.



I then cut the pieces of glass and grinded the edges down. I wrapped the edges with copper foil while watching the new Pirates of The Caribbean movie . The next step in the process is to solder the pieces together and frame it. Now I need to tell my married buddy not to look at my blog for a while so he doesn't spoil his gift.

Blog War part 3. (Priorities)

"What was it I was supposed to do???"

Blog War part 2. (The Weekend Warrior)

Hey, that was a good one Mumbles! What took ya so long?? Oh thats right, you were away for the weekend fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. Did we win this time?

hope this helps.......

Your turn Boo.

Terror of the Neighborhood

I thought I'd post a few drawings from work. The first one is clicky pointing to his bottom, the second is a gap-toothed Clicky, and the third is a storyboard from one of our current projects on school bus safety. I find it ironic that at work I animate schoolbus safety content and I've been yelled at by parents on my street three times in that past two weeks. The speed limit on our street is 25 miles an hour, I know this because every other house on our block has a sign that says drive 25 keep kids alive. The first scolding happened after work a few weeks ago when i came driving down my street at 25 miles an hour. I noticed a little further down my street a woman, (some neighbor of mine) was raking leaves in the middle of the road, in the dark, with her four children. She jumps out glaring and yelling at me to slow down. I understand and commend her for being protective of her children, I will be that way someday I'm sure, but i wasn't even close to them and had every intention of letting them get out of the road as I passed. Very un-neighborly! The second incident was similar to the first and on a street perpendicular to mine, but the lady was much meaner looking and she shook her fist at me. Again, 25 miles an hour. The third incident happened at the bus stop by my house in the morning. The parents on my street accompany their kids to the bus stop and after the kids board the bus, they stand in the middle of the street and wave goodbye for two minutes and then begin chatting with each other, still standing in the middle of the road. As i was pulled up to the stop sign, a woman driving in front of me slammed on her brakes ten feet from the sign causing me to slam on my brakes two feet from her bumper. She gets out of her car, sneers at me and then lets her kids out of the minivan and acts as though I'm going to try and run them over. I think that the parents on my street want something to complain about and feel right about. I feel that my roommates and I are an easy target being that we are the only renters in a neighborhood of young families. I think it may be time to move.

Blog War part 1. (touche)

Hey Scott-monster, look what I did! I drew a picture of you with hairy nostrils, a toothbrush cuz you forgot to brush this morning...again, and a cell phone ringing that you will never pick up!!!!! let the games begin. I know you got drawings of me!!!!


p.s. Keep it clean my mom looks at this! ;)

Stained Glass Pre-production

I heard somewhere that you have up to a year after the wedding to get someone a wedding gift. Im going on 7 months right now for two weddings. I told both couples that i would be making them stained glass windows. At the time I was taking a stained glass class with my Teenser at the torpedo factory and thought, "Gee, It'll be great to make stained glass windows as gifts." Well I'm determined to do it! Some day soon I'll take a picture of the first project I did for my parents and post it. Until then I'll post the progress of this one. These are a few preliminary sketches for a smaller peice i plan to do with all the leftover glass from my last project. The next step will be to draw it bigger and cut out all the little peices to tape to the glass as templates for cutting. More on that later.

The New DJ Cartoon Chris

Today I decided to remodel my *Clicky Live character *DJ Cartoon Chris. It is now possible for me to animate him in Toon Boom. If you havent seen the c-live show, you should tune in. Our next big show should be Dec. 13th. We did a show last night at 8:00 for a Microsoft City Tour in LA. It was a great time and I think the kids had fun. At one point they needed to be told to settle down I heard. That's how I know it was a job well done.

Tha Boom!!!

I have three days left of my Toon Boom training at work, then Steve, (our teacher) leaves to go back to Canada. AHHHH!! I have to absorb as much information as I can!!! This drawing is a rough sketch for a small test animation in the above mentioned animation application. She looks as stressed out as i feel when trying learn this program. In other news I lost in a trivia game at our local Irish bar last night.

Zoo Sketches

This weekend my friend Elisa came down to visit DC, so Tini and I decided to take her to the zoo to draw the animals. Our first stop was to draw the giant pandas. There was a baby panda born there 16 months ago named Tai-Shan, and my has he grown! He's a whopping 77 lbs.! Tini told me that his name means "butterstick," because he was the size of a stick of butter when he was born. This is a drawing of him sleeping on a weeping willow branch thirty feet up. I dont know the hippo's name so I'll just call him "bucky" on account that he has extremely large buck teeth. It turned out to be a perfect day to walk around DC, at 70 degrees we were able to wear tee-shirts. Sunday it dropped to 40 and rained all day. I guess you could say we lucked out!

Captain's Log

My roommate and I went over to my gramps house again last night to pick up my second load of firewood. He recently cut down a huge magnolia tree in his backyard and has tons of wood piles to get rid of. Its Lucky for both of us that I have a pickup truck and am in dire need of firewood for this winter. When my grandmother (Memere) heard that we were going to be in the neigborhood she promply asked us to drop by for a visit. Naturally, I said "dinner sounds good, we'll be there at 7:00!" Scott and I picked up a 2004 bottle of African red wine to bring over, which memere reluctantly tasted (she likes her French wine). Dinner was great, and so were the cremepuffs we had for dessert (Ouch). After much convincing on my part that I was okay to drive, we headed over to pick up the wood. When we got there gramps showed me his new GPS system and explained how hes learning all these new shortcuts around his house. He also gave me a couple of persimmons (which i had never heard of) that he got from a friend earlier that day. A persimmon is an orange yellow fruit that looks kind of like a pepper. Im not sure what it tastes like yet but did find out from gramps that i shouldnt eat the rind, it gives you constipation. Tune in tomorrow when I blog about chopping wood, WAHOO!

The Soundrack of Me

This morning I was looking through some of my bookmarked blogs as I usually do and found this music meme on my friend Jared's blog. I thought, I have an Ipod that I never use, why not not use it today for something.


If your life were a soundtrack, what would the music be?

Here’s how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, winamp, media player, iPod).
2. Put it on shuffle.
3. Press play.
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing.
5. New question– press the next button.
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool.


Opening credits:
"Johnny Too Bad" Taj Mahal

Waking up:
“Imagination" (is a powerful deciever) Elvis Costello

First day at school:
"Evil" Interpol

Falling in love:
“UYN" Clicky (UYN, great makeout music!)

Breaking up:
"And She Was" Talking Heads (Thats peculiar)

Prom:
"William Brown" Randy Newman

Life’s okay:
"Surrender" Elvis Presley

Mental breakdown:
"Universally Speaking" The Red Hot Chili Peppers

Driving:
"Love and Peace or Else" U2

Flashback:
"Losing My Religion" R.E.M.

Getting back together:
"Save a Prayer" Duran Duran (Simon Le Bon saves my relationship??)

Wedding:
"Suspicious Minds" Elvis Presley (Yikes! that doesnt bode well...)

Birth of child:
“The Fly" U2 (Congratulations, its a fly!)

Final battle:
“Get Your Freak On" (Remix) Missy Elliot Featuring Nelly Furtado

Death scene:
"A Line in the Sand" Q and not U

Funeral song:
"The Sweetest Victory" Touch (Rocky IV sountrack) (boom goes tha dynamite!)

End credits:
"Son of Son of a Sailor" Jimmy Buffet

A Basketball Benchwarmer

I'm going through ToonBoom training at work for the next two weeks. It's pretty exciting because its an animation software that is used in alot in the industry. Today we were told to create a character that we will be animating for the rest of the week. The instructions were to keep it simple. Our teacher said in order to keep it simple we should just, "not put arms on them." At the end of the day everyone had very detailed armless characters. This guy looks like he might be the last one picked when deciding basketball teams.

I am Obsessed With My Sister's Dog.

These are a few drawings of Murphy, my sister's shit-tzu. There was a span of about a month where all I drew were pictures of him getting into trouble. There was one of him eating my moms jade plant, jumping up on the tv to bark at dogs in commercials, chewing up everyones shoes, and tormenting my parents dog Riley. His latest exploit occured yesterday while we were at my Grandpa's house. Murphy just loves to roll around in and eat things that stink, and yesterday that thing was deer poop in Grandpas backyard. It made him sick as a dog. He spent the afternoon laying in my lap while we watched the Redskins game, which happened to be an amazing game. Go Skins!

Wooking forward to Halloween...

So this is the drawing I did for my Halloween party evite. It was also done in flash. The party was a lot of fun. I considered it a huge success because I did not know more than half of the people who came. My girlfriend and I wanted to have costumes that went together and the original idea was to be Han and Leia. I found that in the limited amount of time we had to find costumes and decorate the house it was much easier to go as Obi wan Kenobi (the Alec Guinness version of course). I already had an Anglican monk cloak just laying around and had been letting my beard go for the last two weeks. The icing on the cake though was when Chewbacca showed up to my party. My pal Mike (as Chewbacca) came over to give me and Leia hugs and ask for a beer all the while staying in full wookie character. The Star Wars universe was turned upsidedown that night by the site of Chewbacca engaged in a beer pong tournament and seeing Old Ben Kenobi poking Leia in the butt with his light saber and her calling him "Naughty." Ah.....fun times.

A Few Bad Apples

Two weeks ago my teenser, her mom, nanna, cousins, brother, my mom, my sister, and Buddykev went apple picking at Stribling Orchards. We used long poles with a hooked basket on top to reach into the treetops and pluck apples. Unfortunately the apples were either rotten or the size of golfballs so we didnt keep any. The apple picking poles resembled really long lacrosse sticks so my sis and I being former lacrosse players decided to make up a game in which we used the poles to throw the apples into a trash can held by Kev. After about five minutes of watching us miss the trashcan we took a few pictures and decided to walk back to the country store. Christina bought a jar of country honey which made her very happy because the last jar of honey she bought three weeks ago was confiscated by airport security on our trip to Maine. Thanks alot terrorists! Her jar of honey doesnt look like the one i drew here, hers has a giant peice of honeycomb inside. It reminds me alot of a book that i remember reading as a kid. you may have read it too, its The Berenstein Bears and the Spooky Old Tree. At the end of the book Brother bear and Sister bear get to eat some honeycomb and I can remember thinking how good it must taste. Not so much now.

First Post

I thought I would start my posts with a drawing that I did of my girlfriends parents. Its from memory and based on my girlfriend's description of them. In case you were wondering, they have seen it and no, I didnt get into too much trouble. Only one comment was made on Jerr-bears ankles. I made this in flash, so there's a possibility that they could end up animated someday. Oh boy!

Hello World!!!!!!

Welcome to my new Blog, the last one I had went missing. Have you seen it? Its been about a year since I posted anything on line so lets see if I remember how.....