Music Vid Progress and Custom Converse Sneakers

     S'been a while (again), but here's the progress on the MeOhMy music vid.

Lemme hear y'all SCREAM!  Hey, indoor scream, please.

     And I also got into the business of customizing converse sneakers like I use to.

     Here's the new kicks I made for my sis for Cystic Fibrosis awareness:

     Aw yeah, gonna be the envy of the neighborhood with these rockin' your feet!  These one of a kind, personalized converse sneakers are 100% made to individual specifications.

     If you want your kicks customized, personalized, and unique-ified, email me for pricing, shipping, and details.  Sweet deal!

     In closing, my homemade cake.

     More to come...

"MoneyMaker" Progress and Jojo Art

     S'been a while, but here's the lowdown:  still working on the music video for "MoneyMaker", and it is good.  Finally finished animating the star of the video kicking some angels and landing on Earth, getting ready to stroll our streets and experience the high life.  Still have to do a lip synch before everything I have so far can be put together to form the first quarter of the video.

"Who gives a..."

     Sometimes it sucks doing everything on my own since it takes more time to complete, but it must be so and it can and will be done.  It's tremendously satisfying to step back from the work in progress and see how it all comes together, taking shape into this meticulously crafted, breathing life that became sentient through my very minuet fabrication.  Animating is my whole passion for life, and it fills me with such insurmountable pride to see my work and time take form and flourish.  Sorry for drifting off, but I still have a ways to go before completion.  I still have more amorphous faces to melt into one another, and more streams of jewelry to projectile vomit across famous world structures.

     Also gonna animate some quick cuts for the choruses.  That'll speed progress up a bit, and keep up with the song's upbeat tempo.

   

"So what?"

Can't touch this

     Aside from that, I also made two pieces of fan art for my favorite comic series: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.  What a bizarre adventure it is!

Devo the Cursed, Ebony Devil

     Season 3 (the most popular one in the west) saw Jojo and friends travel across Southern Asia to Egypt in a bid to save his mom and vanquish a long-time foe, fighting dozens of psychotic assassins along the way.  My favorite of the villains includes Devo.  This deranged hitman purposely lets his victims attack him first, thus allowing him to let his raw hatred fuel his powers, possess the doll, and murder at a later opportunity.  Because normal people don't know about Stands (the invisible guardians that grant these powers), everyone assumes Devo's victims die from a curse.  

Rubber Soul, Yellow Temperance

     Another cool villain is Rubber Soul, hired to kill Jojo in Singapore.  His invincible Stand Yellow Temperance eats flesh and grows bigger with every meal.  It can also assimilate other people's forms.  But like all other villains in the series, his downfall comes from his overconfidence in his abilities.

     Getting back to work on this here music vid.  More to come...

It's close...

Fat Kid Update and Shenaniggaz

     1) Finished up the animation from the last update.  Animated the background to show damage from the fat kid's landing.  Still thinking I should add more to that scene, but I'll get back to that later.  Gotta move on to the rest of the cartoon.

     Gonna record more sounds for it tomorrow.

     2) Working on a new illustration, something colorful, creepy, and NSFW (hence the center being covered for now. )  There'll be tons of grey, my favorite color beside green, in this one.

.lC_eaurnK

     3) "The Golden Idol" cartoon is coming along, too.  Still at a steady pace, not as fast as the fat kid cartoon.

My hero!

     4) These are a few concept sketches and art pieces for a show I and my pal Demetrius thought of called "Shenaniggaz".  The whole thing got started from a lousy pun, and from that we came up with the idea for this cartoon.  It's about three black youths living in the rolling hills of Jonesborough, Ireland.  They gain mystical powers from aliens and turn into a gang of troublemaking leprechauns!

     Their powers get stronger with the more mischief they cause to the townspeople.  They do it all, from heaving toilet paper at charity parades to leaving land mines under front door welcome mats.  They're a tremendous nuisance to all and a constant thorn in the side of the town mayor, who's a huge control freak obsessed with security and control.

Catch those... those... Shenaniggaz!!!

     Like the Power Rangers, they turn into the Shenaniggaz when they unite their rings.  They can also summon the P.O.G pod for speedy getaways and general mayhem, and fly momentarily on rainbow beams.  The only one we named was the fat one.  His name is Reese Fallon.  The one with the jerry curl is just called Beirdshartd for now.

     One story we made has the mayor tax the townsfolk extra gold coins to create more security.  What they don't know is that the mayor uses their gold to literally create more security...

Tis gonna be a very good 'ear!

     ... In the form of The Golden Ear, a sentient cop with an iron (or gold?) cast focus on punishing all troublemakers.  Can he stop those Shenaniggaz!?

     I'm sorry, I know this idea is dumb.

May Update: More Stall & Dean Stuff and "The Golden Idol"

  

     Still working on Stall & Dean material, and here's a few screenshots of my shot at a retro look.  This is what I was talking about earlier when I said I would make the cartoon have an "old advertisement come to life" kinda look.  In the beginning of the cartoon, it's going to look like an animated version of those aged adverts for baseball cards and gear in the back of 1940 era comics.  This is also what I meant about combining the old with the young, by animating the olden art and quality with the new age flash look.  Check 'em!

     This one is meant to look more faded, but I'm still experimenting with masks and whatnot.  It's going to look more weathered and worn than the last screenshot, progressively looking more aged, then going back to more modern and clean looks.

     And this guy's head will morph into that bow and shoot out that arrow, which is Stall & Dean's logo, which flies and draws S&D's name out.  This, coupled with all the other screenshots I've posted before, are all going to flow into one another in one continuous stream of wacky morphs and transitions, like one quick and crazy journey.

     And here's more animation from my baseball epic "The Golden Idol".

     Pretty neat and gory, huh?  Originally there was blood glistening on his eyes/meat after the tear, but I took it out since it made the rip look slower.  And I didn't want to go overboard with the gore, so I also took out the splatter flying out.  This part was a pain to animate, as the eyelids, brows, nose, and eyeballs/meat were all on their own layers and were animated one at a time.  Otherwise I would've gone insane doing this whole picture at once.  The twitching was easy, though.  Just animated him furrowing his brow and tightening his eyes, then copy and paste normal raised brows between those frames.  The scene where he's shaking hands with President Obama was kinda repetitive, too.  At first I wanted to make all of the audience members unique, but that was taking too long.  I just decided to copy a few bodies and just change the heads.  I also reused the hands.  And I'm thinking of putting Osama bin Laden's severed head in Obama's hand, but I'm still debating that one.

     More to come later!

Ed Edd n Eddy Illustrations

     So far I've done 4 illustrations of the Ed boys. One each year since 2007.  It's great to look at the progress I've made in my art skills over time.

My first try at Photoshop.

     The idea to make the Eds look like this came to me in a life drawing class in college.  I drew a dopey looking, realistic grin with chubby cheeks.  Then, for a laugh, I drew the outline to Ed's head around that face.  Afterwards I decided to include the other two.  Ed had to be the center of this world, with his obelisk head, his euphoric albeit vacant grin, and his hunched posture.  Unless Sarah was around to harass him, Ed was always full of joy and pure adolescent spirit.  I wanted to make it feel like he was slowly coming towards you.

    Eddy was always erratic and hyper when thinking about his next scam, and how he was going to use the other two to make it work.  I made him look super eager as he approaches the other two, with a self assured look on his confident face.  Double D, lost in his melancholy, just snares and goes along with his friend's exploits.  Originally he was holding cigarettes, then a calculator, then just a plain box labeled "Life".  Why?  Because life truly shines in only the hands of the youth.

     Also note the teeth.  It's a running theme faithful to the show.  Also, since I was new to Photoshop, I tried to do quick shading with pen.

     Funny story behind this: back in 2008, a friend of mine at the time gave me "Ed Edd n Eddy's Mis-Edventures" for my birthday.  She knew that two things I liked very much were Ed Edd n Eddy, and purposely playing shitty games for laughs.  Taito Legends 2 is a good example of those kinds of enjoyable (crappy) games, and she thought that combining EEnE and bad video games would be a good gift to me.

     Not so much.  Long story short, the game was total crap, the bad graphics and boring gameplay forced me to stop playing, and I almost ended up liking EEnE less.  Shit, it looked like an early N64 game... on a PS2.  The game was so bad, I imagined it to be something the Eds themselves created just to make another quick quarter.  But even that is too much to pay for this crap game.  Eddy's the only one ostentatious enough to still think it's a great game, even as the perpetual jerk Kevin kindly suggests where the game should be put.  Double D's eyes are burned out of his skull and his brain is completely fried, since he was the poor sap that had to program and design that horrible game from scratch.  Ed, my favorite character on the show, perfectly mirrors my animosity towards that game.  He glares at it intensely with angry eyes, knowing well enough the full extent of that game's terrible content.  He experienced it firsthand.  For a kid that takes a lot of pride in being disgusting and dirty, it's a true feat to make Ed feel repulsed.

     When making this, I wanted to have grotesquely realistic features put onto the character's original head shape.  Kevin is my favorite in this picture, as he's the closest to  the original and has the most perverted features of them all.  Same head shape and feature placement, just more weirder and exaggerated.  He and Double D both have the same shaped heads.  To save time and be a little stylish, I made everyone's clothing with flat colors.  Double D's ruler has the message "Life is measured in moments, not years."  Very poignant proverb I thought of at the time.

     The theme with everyone's teeth was something that was seen a lot on the show.  There was a pretty funny reason why the kids had odd colored tongues and teeth.  They were permanently stained since they all constantly eat a lot of candy (jawbreakers).  That's why I gave their tongues odd colors and made their teeth look so shitty.  Especially Kevin, since his garage is full of jawbreakers.  Oh kids and their bad oral hygiene.  Double D is the exception since he's always fixated on being neat.

  
     By request, this one features just Double D.  I don't entirely know what I was thinking as I made it this way. I know I wanted this to have a divine, enlightened feel to it.  I wanted to make him feel like an under appreciated  genius, lost in his own mind as a means of escaping from the uneducated dopes that surround him in his everyday life.  Had to include his ants and pet cactus Jim, too.  There was originally a crucifix at the center of the light, but I figured that'd be a bit too much.  Also, I messed up on coloring the bag under his left eye, so I just closed it and bloodied it up just because.  I wish I remembered how to make that skin look, as it reminds me of coffee stains on a white t-shirt.

     I was listening a lot to Storm by Godspeed You Black Emperor at the time, so that pushed me into making the enlightening aspects of this otherwise creepy portrait.

     Finally, this new piece shows the Eds trying to scam Johnny and Plank with their sewer swamp ride.  I know it was the girls (and Jimmy) whose business were originally ployed with this scam, but I wanted to illustrate Johnny and his hilarious head.  Again, as with before, everyone's teeth are in shitty shape.  I made Eddy fatter and rounder this time around.  He's the reason I made another Ed illustration.  Poor Double D isn't as physically compelling as his two compatriots, so I improvised with his form and made him as surreal as possible.  A little more disturbing than what's on the show, but still in the same wacky spirit.  I also like on the show how Ed's eyes (or some other character's eyes) would float off their head when they're excited or screamed.  Also notice how in Eddy's jar are a bottle cap from the city episode and a wooden coin, both from Kevin.

     As time goes on, I'll continue to improve my skills.  Little by little, it's happening.  Meanwhile I've got a really interesting project in the works.  Little by little, it's coming.

     Bunch'a stuff at this here account.