Painting

I just watched Herb & Dorothy on Netflix's watch instantly feature. I love watching documentaries. And any documentaries that has anything to do about art get me excited about being creative. I've loved watching Art of the Steal, Art & Copy, I.M. Pei: First Person Singular, Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?, and many more.

After watching Herb & Dorothy I had the urge to get out my acrylic paints and do some painting. This is what I came up with. I don't know if you'd call it a successful painting, but I think it was a personal success in that I'm starting to think about value. I have a ways to go before I understand it, but I'm making progress.

It's good for me to just be creative and not worry about the results. I don't think you can grow as an artist if you are too worried about the results.

Yum Yum Short

I hate it when this happens to me.

Duel

Animation awesomeness. By Birdbox Studio.

Zombies!

Sean is at it again.

Slinky

When's the last time you pulled out one of these little beauties to play with? Slinky obstacle course on my desk at work, current course operator in this picture is Mike "the pod 3 Emperor".

Speakeasy South Parkerized

Sean (formerly intern Sean and now junior generalist Sean) created the entire Speakeasy staff as South Park characters. Can you guess which one is me?

Pardon Me While I Bare My Soul

I have to admit that these last two blog posts came from Joe Carroll's blog.

Funny

More Goodies

I've been busy working away updating my demo reel, adding more traditional art and drawings to my website, and working on a short Flash animation. You can check out my updated demo reel over at my website here . . .

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/index.html

You can see some of my new drawings here (although if you've been following my blog most of these won't be new to you) . . .

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/images/sketches.html

Hopefully I'll post the Flash short up here soon and I'll talk more about it then.

Aardman Goodness

This has been around for awhile but it is still amazingly good animation.

KING KONG!

I just rented Peter Jackson's King Kong from Netflix. The entire T-Rex sequence is simply amazing. What could be better than a giant monkey wrestling three Tyrannosaurus-Rexs? Not once during that sequence do I thinking hey this sequence is probably 75% computer generated. Awesome. Possibly the best computer generated movie sequence of all time. Ok maybe that's an exaggeration or maybe it's not. Either way it is crazy good animation.

Old Omega Videos

I'm young at heart

One way to look at this is a I'm younger than I look (which is a little dis concerning) . Or that my virtual age matches my maturity. Either way unless I get randomly mauled by a land narwhal I should live a long time.

Find your virtual age here.

New Drawing Table!

I'm super excited about my new drawing table. I got it as a Christmas gift from my parents (thanks Mom and Dad) and I just finished putting it together today. Ok, I know this image is pretty crumby but I can't find my camera so I had to use my web cam. There is a bit of a story behind this table. My parents bought me different table that while it was great it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. I'll admitt I'm pretty fussy when it comes to things like this. If I'm going to spend hours at a time drawing on this thing I don't want a table that I'm not happy with. So I returned the original table and did a bit more research. I found a couple of tables I really liked but they were way too expensive. I could only spend around $200 but I didn't want something cheaply made. After a lot of debate I decided on the Alvin CraftMaster II Deluxe Hobby and Drawing Station from Utrecht for $179.

Before I made that purchase I wanted to see the table in person just to make sure it was a solidly built table. I didn't want another wobbler. You can only buy the CraftMaster II online but Utrecht had the slightly smaller CraftMaster I in there store. I decided test driving the Craftmaster I would be good enough so yesterday Lisa and I took a trip to Berkley to check it out. But fortune had another plan for us.

As we drove up University Avenue in Berkley we decided to drop by Dick Blick and see what they had. We ended up buying a totally different table at Dick Blick and Utrecht didn't have the CraftMaster in stock. I'm really happy how things turned out. My new table, the Alvin Workmaster Drafting Table, has a large drawing surface and is sturdy too. I love it!

Blog Stats

Last week on a whim I installed a free traffic counter on this blog and I got some interesting results. Of the 35 unique hits I got 2 of them were from Egypt! Of the 35 hits 15% of them came from countries that don't speak English as their native language. That's pretty cool. Most of my traffic comes from the Flight forums. People read one of my posts and then check out the link in my signature that points the here.

	19	54.29%	United States
	4	11.43%	Canada
	3	8.57%	Unknown	-
	3	8.57%	United Kingdom
	2	5.71%	Egypt
	1	2.86%	India
	1	2.86%	Australia
	1	2.86%	Bolivia
	1	2.86%	Lithuania

Some times when I'm throwing stuff up here I don't really think anyone reads it except maybe my family. But I guess people do read what I'm posting. Not that 35 people is that much, but hey its something.

--I just updated my demo reel. You can get to it by clicking on either of the two "My Demo Reel" links on the side bar to the right. Or just click here to view the QuickTime version. There's some more polishing I need to do but there where a couple of studios that I wanted to send a reel to before it was too late. If you are reading this in the year 2008 or later. I'm sure the link will be dead and a newer version will be available somewhere else.--