Wumpcat

Wumplion

My personal favorite is the Wumpdragon.
 

Over the weekend, I Tivo'ed an episode of The Mind of Mencia, the show featuring comedian Carlos Mencia on Comedy Central. The episode featured an animation clip done by none other than Mike Milo. My friend Mary is a producer on the show, which led to the producers contacting us for some animation they needed.

The turnaround was fast! Mike just animated this last week, and it aired this past Sunday!

Here's a sneaky-peak at my own submission, a story titled, "Planet Mexico". It outlines a future where the twin of the dinosaur-destroying Chicxulub asteroid (or perhaps, comet) arrives for strike two on Mexico, and this time knocks the entire country into its own planetary orbit. As the centuries passed, most of earth's citizens have long forgotten that the oddly shaped planet was ever a part of earth. That is, save for one lone soul who vows to be the first to find what, if any life exists on Mexico.

There's no word yet on the official release date for the next issue of HML, but we know it won't be available in time for the APE Con (The Alternative Press Expo) this year, April 21-22nd in San Francisco.

However, the publishers will have a special sketch book featuring the work of HML contributors ready in time for the APE Con, and the new issue of HML will be hot off the presses in time for the biggie- the annual San Diego Comic Con, July 26th-29th, 2007.

This post just wouldn't be HML-worthy, without ending with an exclamation in Spanish, so here goes:

¡Buonas díaz!
 

Last week I was up at my good friend and fellow Zaptooner, Mike Milo's house for the world premiere of Mike's cartoon, Flavio. The house was packed- I'm not sure how many family, friends and co-workers of Mike's showed up, but there must have been 30 or more people on hand for the main event. We all gathered around Mike's brand new high-def TV and watched the cartoon from a screening DVD fresh from Viacom.

I have to say, I loved the classic look and feel to the cartoon. Watch it here: Go on, take a look. Then come back and finish reading this post.

Back? Okay… so what did you think? Pretty cool, huh?

Specifically, I like the look of the backgrounds, the character design, and the little details like the cartoony sound effect pop ups and funny sight gags. I also love that it's an all animal world, something I've always thought was more interesting than just human characters.

Flavio will eventually be on the Nickelodeon channel, on the show "Random Cartoons", but of course keep your fingers crossed that it'll be picked for a series. Mike did an awesome job on this cartoon!

"I start first with the original art. In this case, because the art was drawn for a children's novel which I illustrated in black and white art, the drawing was done on paper and then scanned.

After that I brought the line drawing into ArtRage and set it up as a Tracing Image.

From there I started to paint just the base colors over the line drawing, working slowly to achieve the flat major colors I knew would need. I didn't waste time getting into detail here and as you can see I was even a bit sloppy in the process. I can almost hear my daughters yelling "Stay in the lines daddy!"

I continue to refine the Ribeye. I build up the colors alternating between slapping dark color over the lighter ones by turning on the Insta-Dry function in the Brush settings.

This allows me to place precise amounts of flat color directly onto the lighter areas. Then I can smear it and sculpt it into shadows. I have found that I can go as dark as I want and I can still get it back to a lighter richer tone all the while looking for form.

Now did it make a difference that I went back and forth with contrasting colors to achieve this at the end? Probably not, but that's how I built it up to this. I also added daubs of light teal directly behind them and smeared it into the green giving them light behind them and allowing us to focus a bit more on them.

Finally, now that I ended up with a green background which worked nicely for Ribeye and the Lion, (and I think helping them stand out best) I needed to change the Lion's sleeves because they were too similar to the bg. They also felt too naked to me so I changed them to green as well. I also added some blue to Ribeye's shadow which you may not be able to see but I think it adds a bit of depth.

I have been told by a painting artist friend that sometimes, even if you think a color you've added is gone and you have gone over it with another color, it still changes the final color enough and that the feel, or "aura" remains. Your eye can see it even if you think it can't. Well, I'm not sure if I believe that but, hey it sounded go so there you go.

This is the final pic. Anyway, I am pretty new to painting and I probably broke several rules in creating this but I had a blast doing it and I hope at least some of what I said made sense. Feel free to ask me to clarify if I wasn't clear."