Continue reading »]]>  Click here to see a bigger image at Flickr.com

I have been a big fan of the master French comic artist Mobius (aka Jean Giraud) since my college days where I was inspired by his style, technique and color use. With his recent passing I thought I would, like so many around the world, draw a tribute to the master.

My piece is based on Mobius 1985 “Starwatcher II” which many have been doing their version of in the last few years. To read more I would recommend the Tumbler Blog ‘Quenched Consciousness’ which has been my favorite place to follow the work of Mobius.

Visit the official Mobius website http://www.moebius.fr/ 

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A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

Time for a little “Practice-what-I-preach.” I have been posting examples of re-purpose artwork (comics, illustrations, photos) for animation for a while, but I have not posted much in the ways of my own animation. I do cartoons and illustrations, but also do some work with motion graphics and animation as well. In fact I am teaching a motion-graphics/animation workshop at a youth center in San Francisco currently.

My latests project was a promo for my workshop starting a Blue Dog I drew while teaching a cartooning workshop the youth center I work at. Here is a sample of the final animation…

Blue Dog test animation from Brian Kolm on Vimeo.

The animation above is a mixture of different techniques in Adobe After Effects (I am using CS4).
- Puppet Tool
- Liquefier
- Parented Objects
- Nested Compositions
- gg_puppet tools script to help automate coding the null layers to control the puppet pins on the figure.

And here is the original art…

I would be happy to post more description on how I achieved it if anyone is interested. Just let me know.

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This is a drawing I did in one of my cartooning classes that I teach where I was showing the kids how I inked a drawing over blue pencil lines. For the inking I used both a brush pen and some sharpies of different widths. I also liked the art enough to give is some photoshop coloring as well.

I know it’s kinda of weird to see a redheaded white rabbit, but I thought it was funny. He has a lot of personality and I like that.

©2011 Brian Kolm

See more at www.atomicbearpress.com

Continue reading »]]> I just started a new workshop at the youth center I work at featuring one of my favorite applications, Adobe After Effects (as well as Photoshop and Illustrator too). I love After Effects since there is so much versatility in what you can do. The program is also great since it can accommodate huge differences in artistic styles and accepts lots of  different digital media (even flash movies) which is perfect for a wide range of young artists.

The goal is for the students to plan short scenes or sequences and work towards having them in some final form. But I feel it’s important to take on the same challenges I give the students myself, so I gave myself the goal of doing a short project in the last few weeks. It’s important to do since it can help me to understand what they are attempting better and I can trouble shoot better ways to teach different techniques.

So the first week we learned the very basics of the software and drew short sequences as storyboards. We then scanned and placed the art in After Effects as an animatic (can also be called a story reel). A lot of our techniques are very low tech in part due to the equipment is not always available to the students. For my project I decided to do a sort of an animated holiday card.

Here is the first test with some minimal animation in it. This test is the first pass to see if it will actually work as a story in real time. I could have added some sound on top of it too, but decided that could wait for now due to a tight schedule.

After letting this Animatic sit in my mind for a while, I decided to add some rough animation in the ‘Sketchbook’ style into my animatic that I experimented earlier this year. The style is really fun to do and can be very expressive and fast to do. I scanned in the drawings and timed it out, mixing it into the original Animatic to get a stronger look of what it might look like. Here is what I came up with.

Here are some of the animation drawings I used for the test in the animatic.

While the drawings are less then perfect, it’s amazing how much life you can easily throw into your project. But now I had to decided what techniques to use for the final animation. I could create sequences of drawings like classic ‘cel’ animation or I could use less art and just manipulate the drawings in more of a limited cut out style or even do a mix of both.

I decided that I would explore how I could use a fairly new feature of After Effects, the Puppet Tool. The tool allows you to take an image and add ‘pins’ to it and then bend the figures where those are placed.

Here you can see above the yellow ‘pins’ on the neck of the bear. The empty square are null objects that control each pin and allow them to be parented to each other.

Here is my first attempt with the bear character in the story, mind you I was only testing technique and not going for giving an actual animated performance. To help set-up the animation I used a great After Effects script called GG_PuppetTools, which saved me a lot of time.

The character is made up of 3 layers of art, the neck, head and arm/hand. There is also two different faces to give the bear a change in expression.

Below is my second attempt at the technique with 4 layers of art, but no changes in the bears expressions. Here I attempted to give the bear a ‘bone’ structure and set up ways for the different parts to move together. Here the body, neck and arm are all using the Puppet Tool and the head is static for now.

The head is a bit off, but I decided to leave it as-is for now.

I have a feeling that I might use the ‘sketchbook’ technique that I mentioned above since it’s actually a bit more fun for me to do and very expressive, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Stay tuned to see the final results in the next two weeks!

Continue reading »]]> I wanted to find a unique way to show samples of my artwork that would stand out, so I decided to create a hard-cover book that I could use at conventions and professional meetings. The book features samples of my artwork from 2007-2011 including illustrations and personal work.

The books are Print On Demand through Blurb.com, who do a high quality job and create a very slick final product.

You can order the hard-cover book (with an on-line preview) HERE

This is the 4th book I have made through Blurb.com and I have been very happy with the results. The books are always printed beautifully and come to you looking very professional and slick.

Now, one of the best things about Blurb.com is that they are constantly updating their services aimed at their target audience: artists. So they have made their own software BookSmart more customizable, but also finally have an option for folks who wanted a more professional options. This year they introduced a plug-in for Adobe In-Design that not only generates the templates for a book/cover, but also a way to correctly output a PDF to upload. This means that you can pretty much layout the pages any way you want and can use files in formats like Photoshop .psd that BookSmart can not use. Considering I have lots of art as high-resolution .psd files, that means I could place them and not have to convert them to .jpg files first.

Uploading the final book as a Adobe PDF was easy to do and the website will let you know if any of your images are too low-res for print, but I would always make sure to carefully look at your PDF yourself to make sure there are not unexpected surprises which sometimes do not show up in In-Design.

If you are familiar with Adobe InDesign I would definitely consider using the plug-in since it was a lot faster and more powerful, but the BookSmart program is really good if you want something pretty nice.

To find out more about editing your book at Blurb.com visit HERE.

Continue reading »]]> The other night we had the second InkDrinkDraw event in San Francisco. The events are the brain child of George Webber (No Cash Comics) and myself and are monthly artist events that encourage creativity and comradery.

To find out more, visit the InkDrinkDraw page!

For this month’s meeting our theme was drawing faces. As artist it can be easy to end up drawing similar characters over and over again. These exercises were designed for us to work outside our comfort zone and try new things.

We started with a warm-up exercises where we drew a page of shapes and then passed them around and had others make them into faces/heads.

Here is the sheet that I got back after everyone had drawn on it:

Then we did a handout that George found through Deviant-Art called 25 expressions which is a popular meem. DOWNLOAD IT HERE There are other versions of the sheet on-line, but with facial expressions in more Manga (Japaneses Comics) vibe.

Here is an old west prospector characters that I drew based on the head-shape sketch by Jeff Plotkin.

Next we changed gears and did an exercises of evolving/devolving a character based on a photo. This was something I saw in How to draw comic book heroes and villains by Christopher Hart , but the samples were actually drawn by the late great comic artist Gray Morrow. See more of Gray’s work HERE.

My first attempt was using a photo of classic actor ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle which I sketched on my paper and then worked to modify it till there was still a hint of the character, but maybe not obvious unless someone was looking for similarity. I like the result, even though the drawings are kind of rough and lopsided.

Here are a few more I did…

Last I did a few more drawings based on the Shape Heads that were drawn on my sheet at the start.

These ones below were drawn riding BART home from the city.

Want to give the exercises a try? Here is what we did.

1) Shape-Heads: Each artist participating drew some basic shapes on a sheet of paper. Hearts, stars, rectangles, squares, circles, ovals, wedges, etc. Pass around the sheets of paper and have different artists make the shapes into faces. For ours artist did more then one per sheet sometimes and the artist who drew the shapes also added a few as needed.

2) 25 Facial Expressions: Next we picked a Shape-Head from (1) or had someone else pick one for us. We then filled in a pre-printed handout that was labeled with all the expressions to draw. It’s OK to draw hands and bodies in the shot too. DOWNLOAD HANDOUT HERE.

3) Face Evolution/Devolution: Take a sheet of paper and some photo reference and draw on the Left side one of the faces, trying to capture a decent likeness of the person. Moving to the Right take the head you just drew as reference and modify it into a new character by changing some details. Then draw one or more heads just using the second drawing you did and trying to make it into something new.

4) Take your Shape-Heads and try to draw them again with a body, different expression, etc.

Continue reading »]]> So here is the second chunk of photos from the first day of the Cartoon Art Museum Sketch-a-Thon at the San Diego Comic-Con 2011. We were doing a fundraiser to help the museum by having artist rotate ever hour and create original art pieces for donation of $10 or more. As you can tell that most folks got their money’s worth.

To go back and see PART 1, FOLLOW THIS LINK.

Anthony Hon busy drawing.

Scott Shaw’s Captain Carrot.

A drawing I got of Fred Flintstone as Batman.

Another amazing drawing by Mike Dubisch.

Scott Shaw and Chari Pere busy drawing for their fans.

Anthony’s awesome Hulk drawing.

Dirk Tiede draws Batgirl.

Museum Curator, author and artist Andrew Farago draws his version of Daffy Duck.

Brad Rader’s drawing of Goliath from the TV show Gargoyles which he worked on.

Wow, someone got a drawing by Chari and Scott. Lucky lucky lucky.

My first ‘kick butt’ Disney Princess drawing.

The amazing Jamaica Dyer gives us the mysterious adversary of Batman, Poison Ivy.

And one more from Seamus Smith.

To go back and see PART 1, FOLLOW THIS LINK.

Continue reading »]]> This year I again volunteered to help one of my most favorite organization at the San Diego Comic-Con 2011, the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco. I can only wonder around the convention so much before getting burned-out and this was a way to also promote my art as well as help a great non-profit.

The idea is that the Museum has artist scheduled every hour to do original art for a donation of $10 or more. The art was amazing and it was great to hang out with other artist.

These photos are from the first full day of the convention Wen July 21, 2011. I did not get photos of everyone and every drawing I am sad to say. This is just the start of posting a lot of images of the artist at work as well as the final results.

Enjoy.

a drawing by…Me of Adventure Time characters

a drawing by Seamus Smith

Rick Lucey and Renee making art

The fabled Hat Box Ghost from the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland by…Me.

Andrew Farago draws Captain America

Mike Dubisch painting a very cool dragon.

World famous Captain America from Marvel Comics and the new movie.