Well, I know it has been quite awhile since I have posted. I have been deep into working on Tanked: part three: TURTLE TOWN
Really, Really hoping for a December finish. I have been posting updates about the animation here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tanked/279545472365?ref=hl

Dizzy's In Park Slope

Since November of last year I have had paintings hanging at Dizzy's in Park Slope curated by Radar Curatorial.




Stop by and say hi Thursday Jan 26th 7:00 pm., and have a bite to eat.

Show ends Feb. 3rd.

Dizzy's 511 9th Street, Brooklyn

Bumper to Bumper

You know, I think this was actually one of the first pieces that I started on when I began the "Things I Miss" series quite some time ago. For whatever reason, it never got finished and got shuffled around for maybe a year or two until a few weeks ago.

As I began building up one of the cars, it started to resemble a gelatine mold of Grimace, not of a grimace (lower case "g") although it could maybe be inferred as "a twisted expression on a person's face, typically expressing disgust, pain, or wry amusement," but in this case I am talking about that big purple guy from the old McDonald's commercials. It is weird that the word is associated with these feeling and the place. Apparently when he was first introduced, Grimace was supposed to be a villain, some four-armed shake stealing bad guy. They even called him "Evil." Can you believe that? Here's another surprise: I have not eaten anything served under those golden arches for over three maybe four years now, due in large part to a wheat and gluten allergy that I had developed/discovered and the subsequent knowledge of what is actually in your food while learning how to manage my diet. Not gonna lie, I kinda sorta miss it. But if I did in fact partake, in addition to a bunch of other not so fun things, I would most likely bare an expression of a grimace, (lower case "g") disgusted with my self for eating something that caused me pain with a hint of wry amusement because, let's face it, I'd be in the ball pit sippin' on a Shamrock Shake.

Oh yeah, I was talking about the painting. As I continued working, the painting developed into something that reminded me of one of those Mexican wrestler masks...


...and shortly after that, I thought it looked one of those Native American carvings of an orca whale wearing a Mexican wrestling mask. Until...


..it was all done and got itself a buddy. This one is called "You are kidding me? On the Bumper Cars?" And that, my friends is a whole 'nother story.

Still Lifes: A Nanny's Work

Suspected by many, toys do indeed come to life and play while children sleep. In this case, a bulked up version of a yellow ranger strums the 'ol Banjo. I wonder if Trini had these skills or if this was part of the modifications made to retool the merchandising franchise?



A Jurassic/Rubenesque Brachiosaurus.



Backwoods Woody and his Crocodile Pal.



Lego Man Walking.

Documentation Station

I am standing knee deep in piles and piles of papers , scraps, and index cards with drawings and doodles and notes and jokes. They have been accumulating over the past few years and
I have developed a bad habit of stuffing them in boxes and bags and tucking them away in corners, closets, and shelves. In a sense they all sort of non-exist in the sense that I am not doing anything with the sketches and writings and such, but at the same time are super annoyingly present in our not so huge apartment. So, I have given myself a challenge. My mission: Scan and Shred it all and put the paper strings of things in a clear bag and drop it in the recycling bin outside of our building, thusly freeing myself (and Amanda)of the crazy town filing system I have been employing for far too long. I just hope the little flatbed is up for the task.


The featured drawing in this post was found in a plastic grocery bag amongst a bunch of other random papers, a box of replacement bicycle tubes, some scrabble tiles, A Skip-Bo card, a lidless tube of Cerulean Blue Hue, old medical bills, an action figure of a black hand Luke Skywalker in his Jedi Outfit, and a shiny quarter machine sticker depicting a scuffle between Jasmine and Jafar from Disney's Alladin (it is labled "Jafir and Jasmine" so naturally I have to keep it forever, as one day it will be valuable.)

Become a Fan on Facebook

It's official, you can "like" Tanked.

shifting my focus.

So, I am back working on Tanked. I have nearly all of my scenes animated in Flash, and I am working in Premiere to piece everything together. After that, I will record sound. But before I get to that, I have been hitting a few snags. I think I kinda lucked out on the first episode as far as technical hang ups, and now I am getting them in spades. I do not really even know what "in spade" means, I even looked it up and got no real answer. I had a similar thing happen when I was asking my google search what it may be that I was doing wrong, and what I needed to do to make it right with this project. You see, I make all these in flash , export them to Quicktime, and then import them in to Premiere(and then back out again as a Quicktime or something You Tubeable.) Each transition came up with some sort of problem.
All of the images I use for Part Two have been either created in Illustrator, or live trace tooled from Photoshop to .Ai. The intent with doing it in this way was so that the final product would have a better picture quality. In doing so I got the "bigger is better" notion as far as file size went and made the Flash document properties to reflect a larger screen size, not realizing that consistency was key when exporting them as Quicktime. I kept getting parts in my videos where bits of images would break up(like the image above). I thought it was just part of the process, and I would just try again and get the same results. When I figured out the sizes had to be the same, I changed the Quicktime settings to my randomly assigned numbers I made up for the Flash documents. The result seemingly worked, as a Quicktime file. However, Premiere is a little bit more sophisticated and wants everything all orderly. Apparently there is some sort of standard for these things, and I am finding out the hard way. 720px by 480px 29.97fps seems simple enough, but applying these parameters to several files that I thought were completed is going to be a bit of a chore, especially on a few with complicated bits of animation.But I have to admit, I do love it.