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February 5th, 2013

Reblog Contest Continues; Miizzzard Pixel Art Animation

Filed under: Admin,Artwork — Tags: , , —

Thanks to everyone who has participated in my Tumblr reblog contest so far! You can still enter your handle in the hat until Friday, February 8th at midnight CST. Just reblog this Tumblr post advertising the four digital prints I’ve added to my store to raise money to get to my table at TCAF. I will randomly select one person and mail them a 6×9″ ink drawing of the Miizzzard on smooth watercolor paper.

I don’t know about y’all, but my muse is fickle. Whenever I have work to do (right now, Fuel Quest, Vortex #4, and some freelance web development projects), I always get super stoked by the idea of a side project that’ll just derail me. Lately I’ve been reading about pixel art and game development, dreaming about making some small adventure games set in the Hyperverse. I’m contemplating how to best harness this excitement while still keeping my momentum on my current projects going. I think I might institute something similar to Google’s 20% time – give myself a couple of hours each week to work on whatever I want while reserving the remainder of my studio time for my main projects. How do y’all balance having fun with new projects and previous commitments?

The reason I’m bringing this up is because I spent far too much time this past weekend making a small pixel art animation of the Miizzzard walking:

Miizzzard walking pixel art animation

I followed Derek Yu’s very helpful tutorial on making sprites. I liked how this let me scratch my desire to make a GIF without all the effort of more traditional animation. Also I get to indulge the perfectionist part of my brain that agonizes over the placement of every pixel.

November 2nd, 2010

Hypermorph Animation – Rough Cut

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , , , , —

This concludes my series of posts of installation shots of my show Hypermorph at Domy Books, Houston.

On the southern wall, I painted the title of my show and had a TV playing an animation on a loop:

Hypermorph Installation at Domy Books Houston, Southern Wall
Hypermorph Installation at Domy Books Houston, Southern Wall

Here’s the animation that was playing on the TV (it doesn’t have any sound):


Hypermorph Animation – Rough Cut

I’m calling this a rough cut because I intend to go back in and expand/refine this animation and have my brother do some music for it.

September 24th, 2010

Hypermorph Opens this Saturday at Domy Houston, 7-9pm

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , —

Look into the eyes of the Miizzzard:

The official invite for my opening is here. I hope to see y’all there!

September 10th, 2010

Froghead Sez “Deal With It”

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , , , —

I’m busy working on the final pieces for my show. I won’t show much more until after the opening so this blog might be a bit empty until then, but I couldn’t resist making this and posting it:

December 11th, 2009

Sketch Klubb Comic

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Hey y’all, looks like another week has passed and I’ve missed my Tuesday post again. Apologies folks, I’ve been working on a long post about The Exile Waiting by Vonda McIntyre, and I didn’t get a chance to finish it because this past Tuesday was my lady and I’s anniversary.

I’ll get that up eventually, but last nite was Sketch Klubb so I’m gonna show y’all the comic that I drew. I hadn’t made anything since E.A.S.T. so it was great to just sit around and draw with a bunch of my friends (and some new people too). Anyway, here’s the comic, it’s meant to be read from right to left. Each panel is numbered for your convenience.

Also, this past Monday, Dash Shaw’s The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century, a series of sci-fi animated shorts, premiered on IFC.com. Go check it out, although be warned, there is some full frontal male nudity. When I went to MoCCA this past June I got a chance to talk to Dash Shaw about animation, I appreciate his dedication to hand-drawn animation and legacy processes like acetate cells. He really keeps it rough in these webisodes and it looks great — the animation process, drawing something over and over again to make it move, is laid bare when the frames are inconsistent and the cross-hatching on the Unclothed Man’s arm changes from second to second. I also dig the sequences that reference the visual language of 8-bit video games, silent film, and comics.

September 22nd, 2009

Dispersal/Return Animation Remnants

Filed under: Press — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , —

The opening reception for Dispersal/Return will be this Friday (9/25) at the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque from 5 to 7 pm. If any of y’all will be in the area, be sure to check it out – it’ll feature a special performance of “America’s Big” by my two good friends the Dirty Monke (AKA Jonathan Loth) and Li’l Bunny Krunk (AKA Gabriel Romero). You can also view my installation, Cryptostructure, alongside many other thought provoking works by Land Arts of the American West alumni.

Smudge Studio recently reblogged my post about my installation, and you can scroll down and view the work of the other artists in the show here.

I spent a lot of time working on different animations for that installation, and I’ve collected together some of the remnants into a new video, check it out:

The floating, segmented being with yellow eyes that you see in the beginning contains the longest bits of hand-drawn animation that I’ve done to date. This is definitely something that I plan to do more of, as I find the time in between comics and drawing projects.

August 3rd, 2009

Vincent Collins

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I’m trying to work on animations for my installation for Dispersal/Return, but I just can’t concentrate.

Rhizome fairly recently posted a Vincent Collins animation, Fantasy, which I finally got around to watching tonite.

It’s an extremely mesmerizing video, and it’s similar in structure (objects melting into one another) to what I’m working on, so I decided to scour the internet for more about Vincent Collins. I found his myspace, he’s doing CGI animations now. His about me is incredible, here’s a quote:

Computers were available, but they cost a million dollars and you need a roomful of scientists to operate them. I swear to God.
I went to a demonstration of one of these machines, but they knew I couldn’t afford to buy their crummy system, so they kind of ignored me.
There were a couple of guys there that were phony as hell. Both of them had “Calvin Klein” embroidered on their shirts, as if it was their own goddam name, or something. One guy was the kind of a phony that has to give himself room when he talks. He kept saying he would buy two or three of these systems right away. What a goddam phony.

I also came across It Depends on your Perspective from Sesame Street, which was also animated by Vincent Collins.

I hadn’t thought about that animation in years but when I saw it again I instantly remembered how much I’d loved it when I was a kid.

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