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.

Swordfish Sketch Club

Theme: Firefly

Kevin Days A Week

The quest strip I did for Kevin Burkhalter's Kevin Days A Week is up on his blog. Go check it out right now! Kevin's journal comic is a really great read and gushes personality and fun. Plus this guy is a comic making machine. Go check it out now!

Queue Lessons

Now that I've printed up and put together the first Queue mini-comic, I've had some time to think about the whole process. This being the first mini-comic I've ever made I knew there was going to be a learning curve to the process. I'm really happy with how everything turned out, but I've learned somethings and I don't plan to do everything the same next time. I've already got a story outline for my next mini and I'm looking forward to starting. I thought I'd take some time and write out some of the lessons I've learned to help remind me for next time.

-Stapling is a chore with a typical stapler, so I've order an inexpensive long arm stapler to make the whole process smoother.
-The text needs to be bigger than you think. The text in Queue is legible in the mini but I had to post the images larger than planned online so you can read some of the text in that version.
-Work on a size closer to final format. I'm not totally sure about this lesson. I wasn't totally happy with what shrinking the art did to the line work. The line work lost some of the spontaneity when I shrunk it down 35% in Photoshop.
-Include more backgrounds. I think some more backgrounds and atmosphere would help draw the reader into the story more. I ended up redrawing page three for compositional reasons but when I redrew the last panel I included more of the background and I think it really made the page better.
-Don't skimp on paper. Cheap computer paper or copy paper just doesn't look or feel right.
-Make your layouts as clear as possible. If your editors/first readers are using too much of their imagination and are guessing what's going on that's NOT a good thing.

Like I said I'm really happy with how things turned out but every time you tell a story you should learn from the process and be a better storyteller because of it.

Jobs: The Baker

Found this fun short on Keith Lango's blog. Enjoy!

JOBS : THE BAKER / LES METIERS : LE BOULANGER from lam le thanh on Vimeo.

Queue

Here's the first few pages of my freshly completed mini comic Queue. You can read the whole thing on my web page. The comic wasn't originally intended for the web but I feel it works pretty well online. A big thanks goes out to my wife, Mike, and Kevin for help with the editing/story process. I Hope you enjoy it.

Mini Comic Update

I wanted to post some of my mini comic I'm working on so you all know I'm not being lazy. It's been a crazy summer. I planned to have this mini done for SPX but because of my grandpa's funeral I wasn't able to attend and I didn't finish this mini. My plan is to finish the mini in the next two weeks.

You might notice that I'm still playing with my inking style and that the level of cartoonyness is still evolving. Ronald Searle's work has been a big influence lately. And I've been digging the blog/work of Stacy Curtis and the mini comics/blog of John Martz. Also my next 30 days project theme is going to be Nintendo. I'm looking forward to starting that once I've got this mini done.

Yum Yum Short

I hate it when this happens to me.

Swordfish Sketch Club

Theme: Stick Figure

Duel

Animation awesomeness. By Birdbox Studio.

Animation Test

Another animation test done in Flash.

Comic work in progress

I got the first draft of my new mini comic done. I still have some more characters to design and I'm sure I'll continue to play with the layout and panel flow but the first story obstacle has been crossed.

Vacation Sketches

While vacationing in California I set the goal to draw at least one quick sketch of my surrounds a day as a way of recording my trip and work on my skills. Some where successful and some weren't such a success. I've posted some of the success and failures below and left out the ones I deemed a waste of your time. Enjoy!

Back From Vacation

I'm back from vacation in California so things should start to pick up again here. I did a lot of drawing while on the west coast so I thought I post a couple of my sketch book pages.

My brother and his wife are expecting next month and asked me to do some art for the kids room. The theme was monkeys and gorillas. We kicked around a couple of ideas and formats and ended up with a couple of water colors. Here's some of my planning sketches. I decided to do my previous post in acrylics as a warm up exercise for this project, but they liked the water color sketch I did so much we went with that.


We I achieve my life's long ambition and become the ultimate dictator and emperor supreme of Mars his his how I will enter the capital city.


I'm also working out a new style for a short personal comic project I'm working on. Here are two test that show the direction I'm leaning.

Swordfish Sketch Club

Theme: Dame Vermios ont' Cavli (The Great Red Knight), and her trusted squire Verte

Sorry for poor quality of the image. I'm away from my computer so I couldn't scan this in all nice and pretty.

Animation Test

Just playing around in Flash.

Swordfish Sketch Club

Theme: "Oh Crap" Moments

Swordfish Sketch Club

Theme: Dragons

1 minute sketches

I've been doing this warm up exercise lately where I do a "complete" sketch in 1 minute. This helps me stop worrying about what it looks like, loosen up and just get an idea down on paper. It's been fun.

Swordfish Sketch Club

Theme: Road Trip