It's a Voltron Kind of Night!!

So I'm taking a break from animating the next (and last) footage of the Ursafriends, doing laundry and packing for camp.  I am usually in the habit of putting something on the big screen TV in the bedroom when I am packing, and tonight is no exception.  This time, I was very much in the mood for Voltron, since, the Ursafriends are meant to be an anime-bear version of the Superfriends... but for some reason, I reached for my Land Team boxed set of Vehicle Voltron instead of the Blue Lion boxed set.  I took a snapshot of the screen and uploaded it to Facebook... and of course, doesn't everyone just love the Lions better than good old Dairugger XV a.k.a. Vehicle Voltron.  So I had to throw in that Voltron was meant to be a trilogy (and someday, maybe someday I will finish writing & illustrating that comic) so meanwhile.... here are a couple homemade "artifacts" that show the Voltron that could have been.  Electro-Light Speed God Albegas would have been the third (actually second) installment of the Voltron Trilogy, and you can bet anything that the guy who played Keith (and Jeff) would have taken the lead on this one.... here is a homemade video from Youtube footage of Albegas, redubbed as Voltron II.  Below that is a make believe screenshot of all three robots, as if they were side by side in the Fleet Of Doom movie.  Anyhow... enjoy :-)

  

Sneak Peek of SpookyBear 2013

For the last two months, I have been living on a steady diet of Superfriends, Arrow, and comics in general.  I must totally confess that getting involved with SpookyBear in my first off year was completely selfish on my part.  What cartoonist in their right mind wouldn't jump at the chance to channel the Justice League (with Wolverine thrown in) to a bearish audience??  So the interim result is this video which I am sure a lot of my friends have seen already, but for those who might be following me only on Blogger, please enjoy watching this.  If all goes according to plan, there will be even more to see behind the big bar at the Crown & Anchor at the Saturday night costume party at SpookyBear Weekend itself.  I am very happy with the results of this, and am looking forward to making more animation!  Cheers!!

 

This video can also be seen on the following pages:  Hairyer Parts,  Bears & Hunters - Online Express Edition, and of course, the SpookyBear Weekend page.  As of the time I'm writing this, it was uploaded 5 days ago, and already has 399 views!!  The first showing was last Saturday at the Ursamen member's only pig roast... it was a real crowd pleaser!!

SpookyBear The Weekend

So a couple things have been going on to slow down my posts on my creative blog.  First, I have been buckling down as any good ex-president would, and have taken the time to catch up on things around the house.  Second, and this is a big one, I had been sinking some time into co-designing and coproducing the next SpookyBear Weekend for the Northeast Ursamen.  The original idea last fall was to do a "Heroes & Villains" party, but that fell away in favor of doing a more sophisticated Alfred Hitchcock theme.  I had actually set down to sketch ideas for the Hitchcock party, but we all soon realized that a Heroes & Villains idea would allow for more creativity and participation from the crowd.  So out went the idea of "Alfred Bearcock" and back in went "Heroes & Villains".  I set out to draw a few designs with the mantra of, "what if they were bears?"  This is my normal take on any creative, bear-themed project.  With a few sketches in hand, Chris (the Events Coordiantor and I set out to recruit the personnel for our shoot.  The star list changed a few times in the interim, but in the end it worked out really, really well.  We sewed lots of costumes for the heroes (and villains too) and held a great photoshoot with stellar bear photographer Tom aka PhotobearNE.com.  Meanwhile, I have been working on some custom animation for this project, to be seen in its entirety at Spookybear itself.  Later this summer, I may offer up some "behind the scenes" images, but for now, the end results of the photoshoot leave me feeling very happy.  Please enjoy these, and consider coming to what's arguably the best Halloween Party for Bears and their fans.

 

Vintage Science Books

While the world is busy falling in love with Superman again (and really, what's not to love about the new Superman??), I am reminded of some of the original books that made me want to fly to the stars myself when I was a kid.  I recently came across some old hardbound and paperback "How & Why Wonder Books" that I used to read all the time when I was in my single digits.  These books made kids like me want to study the sciences. I wonder if kids these days really get to explore the world with something other than a computer game, but I digress.  I love the futuristic take on the illustrations... especially where a lot of these were created well before we actually landed on the moon, or before we ever sent Viking, Pioneer, and Voyager out to get close up pictures of the planets.  I could say it a hundred times, I was definitely a child of the space age, and I suppose I always will be :-)

I have also been collecting vintage Golden Guides recently, which are probably the better known books for their illustrations.  I'll post more about those at a later date.

Boys Ahoy!!

I'm excited to be producing artwork for a non-Ursamen entity.  I'm a founding member of the new Leather boys of New England (Leather b.o.N.E.) and we are throwing our first bar party in a couple weeks at the Providence Eagle for the Friday night of Providence Pride weekend.  A couple weeks ago, we finally nailed the title as "Boys Ahoy!" but there wasn't any kind of imagery out there that I wanted to see in the poster, so I figured a "Hairyer Parts Comics" image needed to be created.  This cartoon is one part Gil Kane, one part Norman Rockwell, and one part Leji Matsumoto.... the end result is probably about 90% where I wanted it to be, but when time is of the essence, there can be no retakes.  It's the first cartoon I've done for somebody other than the Northeast Ursamen, and for those not following me on Facebook, I figured it was worth it to help get the word out about the event as well.  We will be doing a 50/50 and live demos.  The block outside the Eagle will be closed to traffic so that you can take your drinks outside.  It should be a great time!!  http://www.facebook.com/events/459799817439843/

Peanuts, The Art of Charles M. Schultz

In my previous post about my first exposure to cartooning ("How To Draw Cartoons"), I mentioned Charles M . Schultz as an early influence of mine, and I must say, I have not said enough about him.  In as much as I was a consumer of his work, I really studied it too.  I think I must have read every book of his comic strips in our elementary school library.  I was also quite taken by the idea that all his characters had a similar look and feel.  His character designs basically had interchangeable parts.  All you had to do was change the hair and the clothes, and suddenly you had another member of the Peanuts gang.  As an adult now, I understand that the drawings are but one component of the overall character... just watch, or even just listen to, any Peanuts holiday special to get the idea.  But in any case, some of my earliest characters were directly inspired by the Charlie Brown characters.  For this reason alone, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Schultz and his work.

A few years back, I stumbled upon a stunning art book whose title is also the name of this post. The book features incredible close-up photography of the actual printed comic strips, so that you can see the half-tone dots that are a by product of the printing process used to render Schultz's ink work.  Many of the pages show tape marks as they were photographs of scrapbook pages full of strips clipped from newspapers.  Scattered throughout the volume are photographs of toys and other memorabilia.  The overall effect is one of a gigantic collage that is enjoyable to explore.  The book shows Schultz's work in a much more intimate way than it had probably ever been presented before.  It's worth noting that the book is designed by Chip Kidd, a world famous book designer.  In as much as I find Schultz's cartoons inspiring, I must say I also find Kidd's books to be as much inspiring if not more.  They make you want to design your own books in such a compelling way so that people will WANT to read them.  I think I'm quite a ways off from doing that, but the direction is there.  Of course, when I just want to feel like a kid again, I reach for this book.  It's been a welcome and well used member of my collection.

The book cover... this just screams of Chip Kidd's style.

We actually saw this wall at the Schultz Museum in Santa Rosa on our honeynoo in 2003.

The Gemini II Recovery, Recovered

Recently, I've found myself saying frequently that I'm very much a child of the space age, and here is one of the reasons why.  When we were kids, my dad would break out his slide collection every once in a while and give us a show.  More often than not, we would be treated to photos my dad took when he was in the navy in the 1960's.  I fondly recall seeing images of the Gemini II landing, which his aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Lake Champlain, recovered.  I mean, I was the crazy kid to get up early in the 1980's to see space shuttle launches, so I guess I figured every kid had a dad who got to be there when space capsules splashed down, right?  I know now that these are really special memories, and I was a lucky kid to have been this close to the space race. For me, it was just a part of life to dream about going to space... I know I did.  I was the kid that was going to land on Mars, apparently.

When my dad retired and moved to North Carolina recently, he asked me to hang on to his photos and slides until he could transport them himself.  Well, I did what any normal kid would do some 30 years later... I went rumaging thru the archives until I could find those Gemini II images... and I did.  My dad recently turned 70, and I scanned a few of the slides to be incorporated in a photo display that my younger sister put together.  Below are the best of these images.  I will have them professionally scanned someday, bur for now, 1600 dpi scanning from my own scanner will have to do.  They have a bit of an Instagrammy, ghostly quality... but if nothing else, they are historic and simply must be shared.  These haven't really been seen by anyone in decades.  So here for you are some recovered images of the recovery of Gemini II, as seen thru the lens and the eyes of a navy meterologist, who happens to have the same name as me :-)

 

P.S. I've been told that somewhere in the collection are a few snapshots of the astronauts themselves.  Looks like I have more digging to do...  When I find them, I will post them on this blog.

Revision:  I was advised by said retired meteorologist, that these were in fact Gemini II, an unmanned mission.  U.S.S. Lake Champlain also picked up Gemini V which carried Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad.  I've revised this blog post to correct the mission, which I had previously described as Gemini V.  These images are in fact from Gemini II.  More to come, once I do some more digging. (6/6/2015)