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.....