Adam Sacks

Live Action Backgrounds

2010-04-01T22:47:00.011-05:00

I recently became a director of sketch comedy videos for the Upright Citizen's Brigade website, UCBComedy.com

Here's a video I directed and did the effects for recently.

Some people asked me how I created the backgrounds for the video, so I figured I'd go over the basics.

In Photoshop I start with flat colors. I try to go with a middle color for each section, that way I can add shadows and highlights later.

Then I add extra layers on top of darker colors to create shadows. It's pretty common for me to use 3 or 4 layers per section to build up shadows gradually, instead of trying to do it all at once. I use different opacities and blending modes on the layers to get the look I want.

Next I do the same thing, but with highlights.

This still looks very computery, so the next step is to overlay photos of textures to get the types of variation in color and value that make something look real. For the wood I added some wood textures (a no-brainer), and for the glass I added some concrete textures to make it look frosted.

And finally I flattened the glass section and warped it a bit to make it look curved instead of flat. In general, it's much easier to work with rectangular shapes (because it's much easier to make rectangular selections), and then when you're done, warp them into the shape you want.

And just to give you an idea, here's a screen capture of just some of the layering that went into making this background.

I Would Hate To Be You

2009-11-20T15:15:00.007-05:00

Here's a music video I made for my friend Peter Squires's song "I Would Hate To Be You." You can download the entire album for free at PeterSquiresSongs.com

3D Animatics in After Effects

2009-11-17T21:28:00.004-05:00

A while ago I applied for a job to make 3d animatics in After Effects. To show them I was capable, I went ahead and created an example shot myself.

Monster Chase Animatic from Adam Sacks on Vimeo.

I made all the drawings in Flash and put them together in 3d in After Effects. I never heard back about the job. Oh well.

Science is Real -TMBG music video

2009-09-22T21:39:00.002-05:00

Here's another They Might Be Giants music video I worked on. It's called "Science is Real," and was directed by Andy Kennedy and David Cowles, and animated by Andy, Chris Conforti, Sean McBride and myself.

Now because this video praises science and mentions evolution, some people who believe God created the world in 7 days are using technology that is a result of science--like computers and the internet--to refute the premise of the video. Hilarious

And in case you're wondering, I animated the part from where the kid sings the world "Real" through the part where the different objects come together to spell the word "Real."

Electric Car: Behind the Scenes

2009-09-08T22:51:00.003-05:00

If you wondered how the TMBG Electric Car music video was created, Max and Ru just released a making of video. Check it out

And also check out their post with some more explanations.

TMBG music video Electric Car

2009-08-27T18:27:00.003-05:00

Last year, my friends Max and Ru AKA Tiny Inventions directed another They Might Be Giants music video, this time for the upcoming Album/DVD Here Comes Science, and asked if I would animate on it. Of course I said "Yes" because it's always nice to work on projects with friends whose work you really like.

Here's the final product.

Everything was animated in After Effects.

John Mulaney

2009-06-18T01:38:00.003-05:00

You may not know John Mulaney, but he's an amazing stand-up comedian. I saw him tonight at a show in Williamsburg and he was ridiculous. Anyone who can make Howard Zinn the funniest punchline of the night is doing something right.

Anyway, although he looks pretty generic in most photos, in person he has an interesting face so I thought I'd give him a shot.

Tracy Morgan

2009-03-16T00:53:00.003-05:00

30 Rock is a great show, and I thought the last episode, "The Funcooker," was especially good, so I decided to give Tracy Morgan a shot.

Mad Men: Ken Cosgrove

2009-03-13T02:33:00.003-05:00

Couldn't sleep so I gave Ken Cosgrove a shot. Could also be Conan O'Brien.

Mad Men: Harry Crane

2009-03-09T19:25:00.002-05:00

Somehow, a Mad Men fan blog found my caricatures and gave me a bit of traffic. So I figure why not do some more. And since Rich Sommer sent me an e-mail saying he liked my sketches, I did him next.

I'm going to start a new rule. If you're on a TV show I like (past or present) and you e-mail me, I'll do a caricature. Ball's in your court, Jeffrey Tambor.

Weird

2009-02-26T23:56:00.004-05:00

So it looks like someone else has done a graphic novel about salmon. But that's not what's weird (seriously, all fiction should be about salmon). What's weird is that a blogger knew I did a graphic novel about salmon called "Salmon Doubts" as well, and described it as "very earnest allegory on the purpose and meaning of life and about how knowledge and understanding are limited by what we are able and willing to see and sense." When I hear it summarized so succinctly, it's hard to believe Salmon Doubts didn't sell better.

His

Mine

Color

2008-12-23T17:58:00.006-05:00

I decided to give color a shot. Skin tones were always a huge problem for me with real paint, and so they were again in Photoshop. Thankfully Joe Quinones gave me a few pointers which helped tremedously.

After finishing, I realized I could easily make this a caricature of two other people, so I made a triptych.

Jon Waters, Don Knotts, and Steve Buscemi.

My Second Digital Painting

2008-12-22T04:44:00.003-05:00

Slowly edging towards color, I go sepia toned.

And some in-progress shots.

My First Digital Painting

2008-12-21T14:27:00.003-05:00

I've never been much of a painter, so I've always shied away from trying to paint in Photoshop. Last week, though, I watched Joe Bluhm's latest digital painting podcast, and he talked a bit about about being fearless in your painting, which inspired me to give it a shot.

I wasn't going for a good likeness here, I just wanted to try playing with Photoshop, and to ease me into it, I went monochromatic.

And because I save lots of versions as I work, I can even show some in process versions.

One problem I've noticed with my Cintiq is that the image is usually way too dark. What appears to be a deep black on a Cintiq is barely darker than a middle grey on my other monitor. My solution was to do the painting on the Cintiq, check the values on my other monitor, darken the image using the Curves editor, and then go back in and paint more. Anyone have a better solution?

Hey You! I'm a Chicken!!

2008-12-19T15:48:00.003-05:00

I made a new video.

This is what happens when I can't find freelance.

A big thanks to Mike for voicing the chicken.

Demetri Martin

2008-11-25T22:00:00.004-05:00

I saw Demetri Martin perform at the UCB Theater last night. He's working on new material and it's interesting to hear his jokes before he's perfected them. He also showed some work in progress sketches that he made for his Comedy Central show which is coming out in February (I think). I thought these were the most interesting because they really ran the gamut. He only showed sketches he wasn't confident about (in order to gauge crowd reaction). Some were good and some...weren't, but it's a good reminder that everyone has to struggle to make good work and that sometimes you have to make bad stuff too.

Here's a quick caricature I did of him tonight.

Not that great, but whatever. Also, I tried out a new pen and as you can see it started leaving ugly dots and smudged when I started in on the hair.

An Open Letter To Bob Schieffer

2008-10-17T00:04:00.003-05:00

Dear Bob Schieffer,

If I had your face I'd do nothing but dramatically lit self-portraits all day long. How do you resist this urge?

Sincerely,
Adam Sacks

Mad Men: Joan Holloway

2008-10-15T12:16:00.003-05:00

After Kinsey, you have to draw Joan Holloway. Their subtle (and not so subtle) vindictiveness is pretty great.

Mad Men: Paul Kinsey

2008-10-15T01:19:00.003-05:00

The next Mad Men character I wanted to do was Roger Sterling, but after failing miserably numerous time, I switched to Paul Kinsey, played by Michael Gladis.

Drawn on actual honest to goodness paper with a ballpoint pen.

Mad Men - Peggy Olsen

2008-09-29T01:28:00.004-05:00

Do you watch Mad Men? You should, it's really good. Tonight's episode, I thought, was particularly good, so, realizing I hadn't drawn a caricature in quite some time, I sat down at my Cintiq and gave Peggy Olsen a shot.

I was a little rusty, but it was fun. I think I may do more caricatures from Mad Men. All the characters have such interesting personalities. Peggy is very private and often forces a smile to cover up what she's really feeling which I tried to get across but could have done a better job on. Good, subtle expressions are tough.

Ottawa - Drawing on Menus with Friends

2008-09-29T01:18:00.004-05:00

The Ottawa Animation Festival was two weeks ago and it was really cool to see my video in a theater with a bunch of kids.

In between screenings on Saturday, Sean McBride, Erin Kilkenny and I drew on menus for a bit. Towards the end David Cowles joined us and drew some nice caricatures of bar patrons.

I've barely touched this blog, so I figured I might as well share my drawing.

I definitely got caught drawing some of the people, but they didn't seem to mind. Canadians are so polite.

John McCain: Christian Enough?

2008-09-16T15:25:00.004-05:00

I wrote this mock-commercial for John McCain before he picked Sarah Palin as his VP. Her selection has put this issue on the back burner (I guess Evangelicals are banking on him dying), but I felt like making it anyway.

Sketches

2008-08-14T17:41:00.003-05:00

On my way back from Malaysia, I had about a week in Paris, and then a few days in Brussels and Bruges. During my time in Europe I did a bunch of sketchbook work that I'd love to share with you, but I lost that sketchbook on my last day in Bruges. So, if anyone finds a sketchbook at the Lybeers Traveller's Hostel, let me know.

Luckily I had another sketch book with me, so here are the two sketches I did after Bruges.

This one was done on the train from Bruges to Frankfurt.

And here is one done on the plane from Frankfurt to New York. I misplaced my favorite drawing pen and had to borrow one from the woman sitting next to me that didn't behave as well as I'd like.

I wonder how many sketches exist in the world done by people with time to kill on planes and trains. Probably a lot.

Good News and Great Plug

2008-07-26T10:18:00.004-05:00

I'm entering my last week in Malaysia! After a bit of time in Europe, I'll be back in NYC August 13th. So soon there'll (maybe) be more stuff here, and certainly less on my Malaysian blog, which you should totally check out if you haven't already.

The good news.

My TMBG video "I Can Add" (aka only thing this blog has covered in months) got into the Ottawa Animation Festival, which (FYI Mom and Dad) is the biggest (and I think only) international animation festival in North America.

To me, the cool thing about this is that Ottawa is now the second convention/festival that I went to and then decided I'd like to get something in it, and actually succeeded. Before my senior year at RISD, I went to the Small Press Expo (an indy comic convention), and afterwards figured I should make a graphic novel and try to get it published, which I did with Salmon Doubts (a book so successful that it's ranked 1.3 millionth in sales and was so hard to keep in stock that Amazon quit trying). Two years ago I went to Ottawa, and now I've got an animation in it, so I can only assume I Can Add will reach Salmon Doubts levels of popularity. The crushing details of reality aside, I am still batting a thousand, so if anyone has tickets to the Academy Awards let me know.

The great plug.

My friends Max and Ru also did a music video for TMBG with David Cowles. It is absolutely outstanding, and you have to watch it right now.

Did you watch it yet? I'll wait.

Okay, so at some point during the video you probably said to yourself, "I wonder how they did that." Well wonder no longer, Max and Ru put together a "Making Of" blog post. Check it out.

H2 - The Winter Killer

2008-06-16T04:12:00.002-05:00

In 2007, I was briefly hired by the New York based ad agency Endoplasmic Reticulum. This was a quick "proof of concept" I put together for their pitch to GM.

I was let go a week later.*

*None of this is true.

New Video: Dawerism

2008-05-12T13:05:00.002-05:00

I made a new video. It's a parody of those Dewar's commercials.

And I even went to the effort of registering Dawerism.com
You can see a higher quality quicktime of the video there.

I am a winner!

2008-05-06T09:47:00.005-05:00

This past Sunday, ASIFA East had it's 39th annual Animation Festival. I couldn't make it because I was on the other side of the planet, but the TMBG music video "I Can Add" I directed with David Cowles won an award, which I'm pretty sure means I won an award, which means I probably missed my chance to make an acceptance speech, which when you think about it, is everyone's loss (but mostly mine).

According to man-about-town Sean McBride the award was for "Excellence in Education," which is only fitting because I teach good.

And, lest I forget, let me once more promise a beer to everyone who helped out with the animation.

Joe Apel
Pedro Delgado
Nelson Diaz
Jeff Fletcher
Aya Fukuda
Casey Leonard
Jonathan Renoni
Thomas Sebasian Smolenski
Joe Stucky
Joe Quinones

And if you still haven't seen the music video, what are you waiting for? Check it.

They Might Be Giants

2008-03-15T19:57:00.003-05:00

Last year I was lucky enough to work with illustrator David Cowles on a They Might Be Giants music video for a TMBG children's CD/DVD called Here Come The 123s. We worked out the concepts and storyboards together, David designed the characters, and I was lead animator.

Each week on their video podcast, TMBG releases a new music video from the album, and last Friday my video was up.

The song is called, I Can Add, and someone was nice enough to post the video podcast on YouTube. Check it out. And stay tuned for the second music video, Seven Days of the Week, which my friend Sean McBride did with David Cowles.

I did the video entirely in Flash, and I'm proud of how it came out, and how little it looks like standard Flash animation.

Click here to see a high quality quicktime of the video.

And as a special bonus, here is the storyboard/animatic for the video. Because I was going to need some help getting all the animation done in time, I tried to do a decent amount of the rough animation in the boards so that anyone I could trick into helping me would know what I was going for.

And finally, here's the list of everyone who was nice enough to help me out with the animation. I still owe them big time.

Joe Apel
Pedro Delgado
Nelson Diaz
Jeff Fletcher
Aya Fukuda
Casey Leonard
Jonathan Renoni
Thomas Sebasian Smolenski
Joe Stucky
Joe Quinones

Superbowl

2008-03-04T02:28:00.003-05:00

Hello all.

In January I worked on a commercial that aired during the Superbowl. Check it out.

Simon Ampel directed it and did all the key animation. I just helped out doing clean up and inbetweens on Tom Brady's run, but regardless it still sounds cool to say I worked on a Superbowl spot.

Fauxkour

2008-01-31T15:59:00.001-05:00

Two videos released in one day. How amazing.

Mike and I finally finished Fauxkour. You should go make a comment on YouTube about how amazingly skilled and athletic we appear to be. No pressure or anything, but seriously, go leave a comment or I hope to never see you again.

Vegetables!

2008-01-31T03:27:00.000-05:00

Last week I did some freelance work for a company that does advertising for pharmaceutical companies, and got an idea for a parody video.

Here is that idea.

I was mostly inspired by that awesome bit of motion graphics done to the audio from a Pulp Fiction scene. The difference being that guy (his name is Jarratt Moody, he hasn't graduated college yet and he has a more impressive resume than me) knows something about typography, whereas I do not.

I directed a music video

2008-01-21T11:24:00.000-05:00

Live action is so much faster than animation. Both of the animated music videos I did took months and required many sleepless nights. This took a day.

Music and lyrics by Mike
Starring Sean and Mike

Greatest Comic Ever

2008-01-06T21:40:00.000-05:00

This weekend I was at a friend's country house, and they had a Spanish language collection of Garfield comics. Since I can't read Spanish, as a game I was trying to figure out what the "jokes" were just through the visuals, which was pretty much impossible.

Except for one strip, which I'm sure works much better silent than with whatever he was saying, so I took out the dialogue balloons. Enjoy.

David Cross Caricature

2008-01-02T20:10:00.000-05:00

I drew this after reading David Cross's reasons for doing Alvin and the Chipmunks. I can't really see why anyone would get angry about him doing a movie to make money. Most of my paying work has been on projects I've either been ambivalent about or outright disliked. When I wasn't spending free time on other creative endeavors, this used to really bug me. Now I realize there's only so much I can do about the overall quality of paying projects, and that I should use my time on them to save up money for personal work, and to find something about the actual work to enjoy and use it as an opportunity to stay sharp and improve so that I'll be that much better on the work that I do care about.

Anyone calling David Cross a sell out must be lucky enough to have a job that pays them very well to do exactly what they love.

One Over Par

2007-12-21T21:22:00.000-05:00

Here's Humphrey Bogart.
I really like drawing with ballpoint, but the problem is you can't erase. After I was too far along, I realized I made a mistake having the bottom of the nose, and the far cheek bone jut out at almost exactly the same angle. Also I wish I had handled the shading on the other cheekbone differently in order to match the structure of the far cheek bone. It's easy to exagerate things that have outlines, but much harder (yet just as important) to exagerate things that are only defined by shading.

The infomercial

2007-12-17T04:35:00.000-05:00

As my previous post pointed out, I recently discovered if you Google "How to get an attractive girlfriend" I am the ONLY result.

And my plan to cash in has begun. I've already made an infomercial for my DVD series.

The cast:
Adam Sacks - Adam Sacks
Attractive Girl - Andrew Kennedy
Guy - Sean McBride
Steroid Guy - Jon Renoni
Taryn - Taryn Crosby

I'm #1 on Google!

2007-12-14T16:33:00.000-05:00

I have a stat counter on my blog, and one thing it tells me is what search strings lead people here.

Not surprisingly Adam Sacks is a big hit. But quite surprisingly, someone arrived here by searching "How to get an attractive girlfriend"

Confused and intrigued (but not in that order), I Googled the phrase to find out what other web pages I am grouped in with, and I made a shocking discovery:

Not only am I the first search result that comes up, I am the ONLY result that comes up. Don't believe me? Check it out! No other website caters to the oft overlooked demographic of singles seeking attractive females for relationships (and presumably relations).

Maybe I'm crazy, but I believe I've discovered an untapped and potentially lucrative niche market here. I am currently looking for investors, advertisers, and attractive girls who want to become attractive girlfriends to those searching the internet for attractive companionship.

And if you're wondering why "How to get an attractive girlfriend" leads you here, it's because my initial reaction after seeing the movie Knocked Up was

Average guy gets hot girl by getting her pregnant. It sorta seems like a misguided fantasy a loser would come up with for how to get an attractive girlfriend.

I stand by that statement. There was an interesting article on Slate recently about whether Knocked Up was sexist. It might be, but unintentionally so. More I think it falls into the guys version of a romantic comedy which goes something like:

I'm able to look past your bland personality and appreciate your appearance, why can't you look past my bland appearance and appreciate my personality?

Which is what my retooled blog will be all about! Get in on the ground floor and invest now! In a year Rupert Murdoch will buy us out.

Katherine Hepburn

2007-12-09T01:37:00.000-05:00

With this caricature, I'm continuing three themes.

1) Classic Hollywood
2) Women
3) Last name Hepburn

Better Scans

2007-12-09T01:34:00.000-05:00

Here are better versions of Audrey Hepburn and Robert Mitchum. Two very timely caricatures.

Audrey

2007-12-07T15:54:00.000-05:00

I realized I've been drawing a lot of dudes lately, so I felt I should rectify that imbalance. And if there's one thing you need to know about me--if even that much--it's that I'm an Audrey Hepburn fan.

Drawn at work in ballpoint pen. Also scanned in at work, so excuse the weird streaks. Maybe I'll take this one home and scan it properly.

More Ballpoint Pen Drawings

2007-12-06T17:57:00.000-05:00

I know what you've all been wondering about: What has Adam been doing while waiting for After Effects to render at work?

Ballpoint pen drawings of course. Here are a few. The scanner at work isn't very good, so bare with the weird streakiness.

Robert Mitchum. This one took a while.

Steve Carell. This one didn't take me a while.

Steve Buscemi. Medium time commitment.

Self portrait. Not a great likeness...maybe if I had spent more time on it.

Dr. Stephen T. Colbert D.F.A.

2007-11-15T23:36:00.001-05:00

OJ

2007-11-15T03:32:00.001-05:00

I really meant to go to bed at a good time tonight, but I saw this photo of OJ Simpson that had great lighting on his face, and I got inspired.

Done on my Cintiq in Photoshop. I love my Cintiq.

Norman Mailer

2007-11-15T00:37:00.001-05:00

I did this one entirely in ballpoint pen while waiting for After Effects to render a scene at work.

I've been watching some of the digital podcast Joe Bluhm does and it's inspired me to try actually rendering a face instead of doing simple line work. It's been a really long time since I've seriously tried drawing with values instead of black and white. I think this came out okay, but ballpoint pen is really unforgiving, and it's hard to make hatching look like midtones instead of lines scribbled on a face (after scanning this in I erased some of my more glaringly bad lines). The illustrator James Jean does shockingly fantastic sketches in ballpoint pen, I guess he just never draws a bad line.

Also, just to be honest here: I've never actually read anything by Norman Mailer. He's on my (embarrassingly long) list of well respected authors I haven't gotten around to checking out.

Javier Bardem

2007-11-12T02:41:00.000-05:00

Here's my first shot at Javier Bardem from No Country For Old Men. I used some photo reference with this one, but none of the images are this exact angle.

While drawing it I thought I was pushing the features, but now it looks really tame to me. I'll have to give it another shot.

No Country For Old Men

2007-11-10T19:25:00.000-05:00

A nice thing about living in New York City is that a lot of movies get released here before they go wide. I saw No Country For Old Men today, and I think it's really great even though it did have three endings.

But while watching it I kept thinking what interesting faces all the main actors had. So when I got home today I drew Tommy Lee Jones from memory (though I did get some reference on the hat).

This is the first Photoshop drawing I've ever done. Before this, if I've draw in a computer, it's always been in Flash. The brush options in photoshop are really deep, but I don't really understand them that well, so I started trying to do a charcoal-esque drawing but got frustrated and reverted to pencil/hatching style I'm more used to.

Also I bought a Cintiq, so this is my first Cintiq caracature. I love it, but the colors on my cintiq are nothing like the colors on my other monitor. Anyone know how to fix that?

In Defense of Moving Crap Around in Flash

2007-10-28T01:31:00.000-05:00

So I guess there's been a big debate about the merits of Flash over at Cartoon Brew.

This was the inflamatory line "Forget honing your skills and mastering the craft of animation like those classic artists, just cheat your way into thinking you’re an animator by moving some crap around in Flash."

I will admit that I personally prefer hand drawn animation, but drawing and animation are not the same thing. Consider stop motion, or 3-D animation. Apparently some of the best Pixar animators can't do tradition animational. That doesn't make them bad animators, it just means they are not great draftsmen (or women). If you wanted to play devils advocate, you could argue that stop motion, 3-D, or any cut-out style of animation is more pure than hand drawn animation. Animation is movement, not drawing, so if the medium eliminates draftmanship from the equation, you can't hide behind nice drawings. Your work lives or dies by how well it moves.

And finally, in defense of moving crap around in Flash, check out this Yo Gabba Gabba music video directed by Justin Fines (who I don't know) and animated by Andy Kennedy (who is a good friend). You can do some awesome stuff in Flash by just moving crap around.

I'm hardly impartial, but I think this is the one of the best piece of animation I've seen done for Yo Gabba Gabba. The only other short that has impressed me as much is Nick Cross's "Kites Are Fun" piece.

Of course, what I like about Kites Are Fun, are the drawings and design more than the actual animation (which is still really good, and MUCH better than what his budget should have allowed, I'm sure), whereas what I like about Andy's piece is the animation more than the design. So the dichotomy continues!

After Effects

2007-10-26T03:16:00.001-05:00

I've used Flash for over three years, and by now I pretty much know what there is to know when it comes to using the program for animation. However, for my new job I have to use Flash and After Effects. I'd used After Effects a few times before, but I had no idea how amazingly deep the program is. It feels good to be a beginner at something again, I really enjoy learning new things, and there is a TON to learn with After Effects.

For my down time at work, I've been going through some excelent free on-line After Effects tutorials, put together by Andrew Kramer. I highly suggest checking out his website, VideoCopilot.net

Here's a little logo animation I did in After Effects using some tricks I picked up from the on-line tutorials. Click on the image to see the quicktime.

What is Faux-Kour, you ask? Why, it's the next inovation in Parkour, aka freestyle running. Here's a quick teaser. There will be much more to come.

They Might Be Giants

2007-08-21T15:02:00.000-05:00

Ealier this year I was lucky enough to work with illustrator David Cowles on a They Might Be Giants music video for a TMBG children's CD/DVD called Here Come The 123s. We worked out the concepts and storyboards together, David designed the characters, and I was lead animator.
I can't show you anything from the video, but you can order the album from Amazon.

I should also mention that I got a lot of friends to help me with the animation. I owe all them all, big time.

Joe Apel
Pedro Delgado
Nelson Diaz
Jeff Fletcher
Aya Fukuda
Casey Leonard
Jonathan Renoni
Thomas Sebasian Smolenski
Joe Stucky
Joe Quinones

Flight of the Conchords

2007-08-15T20:09:00.001-05:00

I just discovered the show/band Flight of the Conchords. It's amazing. Also, one of the leads, Jemaine Clement, has one of those faces that you just have to try drawing. His features, as described in one episode, are "too deep set to be considered classically handsome," but are quite fascinating.

So, I ended up doing an embarrassing number of attempts (many of which are not shown here). He has a really unique nose, which I think I got okay in the front view, but in the 3/4 and profile angle it's just not working.

Comedian Caricatures

2007-08-13T00:24:00.000-05:00

I don't read Harry Potter, but I do listen to them on audio books while I work. The problem is, during the final book I ran out of work, so I decided to do some caricatures while having Jim Dale read me the Harry Potter finale.

I started with Sarah Silverman because I had recently seen seen Jesus is Magic

And I thought Brian Posehn was great on the Sarah Silverman Program. So he was next.

At this point, I figured let's stick with comedians that had shows on Comedy Central, so I moved on to Stella and Michael Showalter.

My David Wain attempts didn't really exaggerate much.

My Michael Ian Black ended up looking more like Tom Cruise.

A bit of animation

2007-07-26T18:25:00.000-05:00

Wow. I did a bit of animation I can actually show. How weird.

My friend Sean McBride does a weekly animated short for Salon that explores the interesting dynamic in the friendship between Sean and his friend Tony. Last week I helped out by animating the Sean character for the latest installment. It's not the most impressive thing I've ever done, but it was fun. Check it out.

Sean's on a roll. He also just got mentioned on Cold Hard Flash, and before that was on the front page on YouTube for his Student Academy Award winning Junior year animation project. He made this in one semester, how crazy is that?

Random drawings

2007-06-19T11:43:00.000-05:00

I felt the need to do some purposeless drawings, so I jumped around Myspace drawing random people. I have no idea who any of them are.

I also saw Knocked Up. I thought it was very funny, but I do wonder about it a bit. Average guy gets hot girl by getting her pregnent. It sorta seems like a misguided fantasy a loser would come up with for how to get an attractive girlfriend. I saw the movie with all guys, I'm interested in what woman thought coming away from the movie.

Anyway, here are two drawings. The Hot Girl, and the Average Guy's friend.

Flash Tricks

2007-05-23T22:12:00.000-05:00

I just started a blog that will explain some Flash tips and tricks I've figured out over the years.

The first two tutorials show how to make looping, panning, multiplaning backgrounds.

http://flashtrick.blogspot.com

More Caricature

2007-02-22T02:27:00.000-05:00

I think I like doing caricatures because I'm new to them and I feel like I have permission to do bad drawings. Most of the time, even when I'm just quickly thumbnailing stuff out, I feel guilty if the drawing isn't "good."

Here are two friends of mine. You probably don't know them, so just trust me, they are spot on perfect.

And when I say spot on perfect, I mean they have some issues. I made Joe (the top guy) look quite a bit older than he should, and when Matt saw his caricature, he asked if it was a really mad Barak Obama.

So I drew Obama
I tried to make this drawing more structurally sound than the others, but the problem with doing that is the tendency to make a stiff drawing. I'm also not sold on how I did his forehead.

Lost-atures

2007-02-15T03:45:00.000-05:00

While watching Lost tonight, I was struck by what an interesting nose Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) has, so I did a drawing of him. And if you draw him, you gotta draw Hurley (Jorge Garcia).

I played around a ton with Hurley's eyes, and ended up going with really small ones to make his face seem that much bigger.

Sayid (Naveen Andrews) has a really interesting face because he has feminine eyes, but still looks very tough. I got tired of drawing dudes, but the hard part with doing Lost caricatures is that the woman don't have as distinct faces as the men. I tried to do Sun (Yunjin Kim, and no I didn't know these actors names, I had to look them up), but it came out pretty terrible. I include it only to stay honest.

Caricature

2007-02-14T15:01:00.000-05:00

I'm not so good at caricature, or really nailing a likeness in general. But John K put up a post on the subject recently and it made me feeling like giving it a shot.

These are both supposed to be the same person. My first attempt, on the left, didn't work at all. I like the one on the right, but I don't know if it actually looks anything like Penelope Cruz. Looking at my first attempt, I thought it looked a little like Nancy Pelosi, so...

But I think it's more a challenge to caricature woman who are known for being attractive, rather than those known for having a horrifying smile. Which brings us to...

The problem here is that I didn't really do much. I made the eyes a little bigger, rotated the mouth to an unnatural degree and didn't try to make her symetrical, but it's not really a caricature of Salma Hayek so much as a lazy drawing. So moving on..

My first attempt on the left just looks like generic cartoon character to me. I like second try more, but I think I gave her too much forehead. When I think of Heather Graham, I don't usually think of high foreheads. But I can get tired of drawing women (that's a lie), so I decided to try drawing a guy...

While doing this one, I kept thinking of that famous Frazetta caricature of Ringo Starr. He did a better job than me. Funny thing though, I had a really hard time finding any picture of Zach Braff that wasn't him looking straight on. Which is weird because I feel like his nose is an important part of his image, but when looking straight at him you don't see how interesting it is.

Drink & Draw & Drink

2007-02-14T14:55:00.002-05:00

Every other week there's a bar near me that has figure drawing. Not the good place to make great drawings, but a great place to make okay ones.