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/ 

Continue reading »]]>

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.

Continue reading »]]>

This is one of my favorite pieces I created at 111 Minna gallery and club in San Francisco for the Sketch Tuesday artist event on 3/21/12. The event allows artist to make art on the spot and place it for sale for patrons visiting the space. The art is black acrylic ink and watercolor on watercolor paper.

I started with some light blue pencil lines, then etc on wet ink, then loosely painted the figures with broad watercolor strokes and finished with some more ink. Fun!

Continue reading »]]>

Drawn at 111 Minna gallery and club in San Francisco at the Sketch Tuesday artist event on 3/21/12. The event allows artist to make art on the spot and place it for sale for patrons visiting the space.  The art is black acrylic ink and watercolor on watercolor paper.

This one was my first one I sold.

Continue reading »]]>
Can’t see the video, visit Motion Art Moment: January 2012 Gorry Bug from Brian Kolm on Vimeo.

I would like to share with you something new I am doing for 2012, a Motion Art Moment. These will be short monthly videos that take a recent piece of my artwork/illustration/comics and animate them using digital tools. The first video above is from my drawing Gorry Bug in which I first showed a sample of the animation.

The term ‘Motion Art’ is a term I am basing on ‘Motion Comics’ (animated comic art such as DC’s Watchmen videos) which is Art of any sort re-purposed for animation. I might also use the term ‘Motion Illustration’ too.

I have been interested for quite a while in how you can use technology to re-purpose existing art from comic books, comic strips, illustrations and other forms into animation. In fact I have posts right here on the AtomicBearPress.com blog labeled Motion Comic Magic in which I have been sharing samples of internet videos using similar techniques and the tools artist use to create it. I hope these small videos allow me to explore new animation techniques and to share my artwork in a new way.

Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment here on the blog or on my twitter feed.

A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

Continue reading »]]>

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 »]]>

My first drawing (posted) of the new year. I drew this guy at my Parent/Child at the Cartoon Art Museum and to me it looks like it was designed by Edward Gorey.

Below is a test for something new. My hope is that at lest once a month I will take one of my drawings and use digital tools to animate it. The version below needs a bit of work still, but you get the idea of where I am going with it. If you like it, comment please and let me know.

EDIT: I have replaced the test footage with the final video, to find out more visit HERE.

Continue reading »]]>
A very Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday to everyone no matter how/what/where you celebrate.

Every year I have illustrated an original Christmas card for my family to send to family and friends. The earliest Christmas cards we would make were silk screened and my father took my art and cut it by hand into the screen. Latter we would xerox the cards in black and white and hand color a few small elements to enhance them. And now I can scan, edit, color and prep the files on the computer and have them printed in vivid color, but no matter what form the cards take they are a continuing tradition I am proud to be part of. This year I decided to show you the illustrations I have created since 2000 in the video above.

I hope you enjoy the video and have a wonderful season.

note: Music “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons “Attribution 3.0″

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 »]]> As mentioned in my trip report from the Dickens Fair this past weekend I attended the Pre-Raphaelite Artist Salon at the Adventures Club at the event. Here we were transported to a period drawing session with models recreating a religious scene while live harp music was played and poetry recited. It was a pretty awesome experience that I would recommend all artist visit when at the fair. The salon was at 3:30pm and ran about 45 min.

Warm up sketches while the event was getting set-up…

My drawing from the posed models… (note: the club seal was actually on the back of the drawing paper, but I photoshoped it on front so you could see it)

And some photos from the session…