Last year on October 24, 2010 I helped organize a Halloween Comic/Art Jam at the Cartoon Art Museum 11-4. We like to call them CAM-JAM’s and they have been going on since 2009. We had called it the Ghoultide Gathering, but we were told at the last minuet that someone else clams the trade mark on that name. It was really fun.
Artist who participated were asked to draw on of the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot fortune telling card deck. It was a really fun challenge and everyone did a great job. Sadly life got in the way of preparing the work to be presented. But now the world can see the final results…
Click above for a bigger image at Flickr.com
Here are the artist and their websites (when available)…
Fool – Caryl Foote
Magician – David Mann
High Priestess – Brian Kolm – www.atomicbearpress.com
Here is a video that Michael Capozzola took at the Schulz Museum Sketch-A-Thon last Saturday. See if you can see me or my artwork (hint:Penguins).
Cartoonist Sketch-A-Thon Celebrates 60 Years of Peanuts!
Cartoonists include: Brent Anderson, Michael Capozzola, Rhoda Draws, Alexis Fajardo, Brian Fies, Shaenon Garrity, Mike Gray, Debbie Huey,Greg Knight, Jonathan Lemon, Paul Madonna, Brian Narelle, Thien Pham, Lark Pien, Dan Piraro & Frank Roberson www.schulzmuseum.org
Well, today 26 people came to the Cartoon Art Museum to create comics and art. Members of the Cartoonist Conspiricy San Francisco joined with the Cartoon Art Museum Bookstore for a Comic Jam.
Starting at 11 am artist begin to arrive at the Museum and were given a special custom lanyard while we finished setting up in the Museum’s lobby.
First off, artist were invited to help design the Bookstore’s online persona ‘Sparky Joe.’ Sparky Joe is a mash up of Olive Oyl, Wendy the good little witch, wolf girl from Lil’ Abner, and Disney’s version of Tinkerbell.
At noon we started the comic jams. One table did a series of illustrations that had an adventuring girl over the course of a day. The other table had two groups who worked on comics on Sticky Notes. The Sticky Notes allowed for us to create a collaborative story that can be rearranged and adjusted creating a more solid tale. The jams will be on-line in the next few weeks.
Later in the day we tried something new, Speed Comic Jams. We took pre-printed pages with three cinema scope panels and posted four of them on a tablet on a stand. The first time had each artist taking turns filling in the panels one by one with only one minutes per panel. We drew in pencil with a random theme with the words: Cinderella and Detective Tale. That produced loose rough drawings. The next version had two artist drawing two pages at the same time with two minutes per panel. The theme was Glam Rock Beach party. This time we drew with Sharpie pens which made the artist work simpler and cleaner. We did the challenges a few more times, finially returing to panel by panel at two minutes a time.
Around 4pm we had a few more artist finish some “Sparky Joe” drawings and then at 5pm we all voted along with shoppers in the Bookstore. Manager Heather had a hard time picking from all the designs so this made it easier. In the end there was a three way tie, so we had another round of voting with the winner being artist Audry Soffa (of the web comic the Bunny System) who’s art will be uploaded soon to Facebook.
If you want to be a friend of the Cartroon Art Museum Bookstore, just search Facebook for Sparky Joe or you can follow on Twitter as well.
It seemed that everyone had a really good time and we were really productive. We hope to have some comics on-line soon and look forward to returning to the museum sometime soon.
I will be at the Fremont Comic Arts and Anime Teen Expo (CAAT-X) this Saturday April 25, 2009 from 10-4pm. There is more info HERE.
I will be trying out something new (thanks to some electricity from the City of Fremont) to bring a small TV and playing a video loop of my animation and artwork. When I got my iPod Touch this December one of my hopes was to play slide shows and videos from it. But to make a video that will constantly loop over and over seemed impossible. But I figured it out and wanted to share it with you all in case someone else wanted to use the same technique. I am guessing it would work on the iPhone too.
YOU WILL NEED: Movie video loop in iTunes, Garage Band or other sound editor, Small TV or Monitor with RCA input, iPod Touch (I have version 2.0+), and the Apple Composite AV Cable (RCA imput)
NOTE: I will not cover making video in this post, but will cover it if folks want me too.
SOULTION: (as far as I know) the only way to loop a video is to have it be part of a PlayList in iTunes. But the problem I found is that Movies (i.e. videos) will not show up on the iPod Touch in a PlayList unless there is an audio track as part of the PlayList as well. Once you have an audio file the PlayList in iTunes can be set to loop.
Heres how I did it:
a) Open garage band or another audio editor and create a TINY audio clip that is about 1 second long and is silent. If your clip imported is longer then you want you can shorten it in iTunes’s INFO for that track. The file should be an MP3, WAVE or other compatible format.
b) Import the TINY audio track into iTunes as well as the video loop if you have not done it yet.
c) Create a PlayList with the TINY audio track as well as the video track(s) you want. You can put as many copies of the movies into the play list as you want so you can have it play the TINY blank audio track very little.
d) Go to the iTunes settings for your iPod Touch and make sure that your play list is selected in both the MOVIES and MUSIC sections.
e) Sync and update your iPod Touch
f) Plug you iPod Touch into the TV with the RCA Video cables that you can purchase sepertly. (Apple Composite AV Cable)
g) Select PlayList under MUSIC and make sure it’s set to LOOP (the icon of arrows going in a circle under the title and to the left).
NOTE on playing video and slide-shows from an iPod Touch. Nothing will show up on the screen unless you have hit the play button. In the case of a ‘photo’ slide-show (another option for conventions) you can press play to have the images show up on screen and then pause if you are giving a presentation.
RESULT: The Movie(s) will now loop forever or as long as the batteries lasts all from your iPod Touch! Yay! There will be a black screen ‘pop’ when it plays the TINY audio clip, but you can make a PlayList of the same movie over and over again that playes for hours. If this is helpfull, please let me know. If there is a better way to do it too, then post a comment and let me know. To see some video work I have done for conventions, check out my samples:
European artist Manuel Arenas has been working on a new comic with his character YAXÃN the FAUN. The book is painted in watercolor and looks amazing. Check out his behind the scene images. Manuel has a piece in the Totoro Forest Project show at the Cartoon Art Museum.
The Wizards of Ur is a new artist blog that features artists James V. West, A.P. Furtado, Nate Piekos and Chuck Whelon. I will be looking forward to seeing what new stuff these gents produce.
I had the pleasure of attending a birthday party for my friend, artist Richard Becker who is best known as a Pirate Artist. His latest work is an entirely painted comic and he added me in to a bar room scene enjoying the company of a lovely wench. I am very pleased and flattered.
Can you find me in the painting (and matching sketch)? click for bigger image
The comic is looking amazing and Richard is really out doing himself with the mood in the work for this story. I will post more when the book is published.
