Wow. Five cartoons in the last three months. I’m really slowing down, enh?
I’ve actually had a few ideas for cartoons but no energy to make them. Its sad because when I do sit down to work on one it takes me way longer; I’ve lost a lot of the drawing ability I built up through repetition. I feel rusty and the finished images feel less satisfactory to me.
Still, my movie project is going well and I hope to put more cartoons up here soon.
There was really no reason for a two month break, nor was there any real reason why I did this cartoon today. But don’t expect any cartoons on a regular basis for the forseeable future; I’m pretty busy working on a short film. We’re not doing it in flash this time, which means it will look better, but the cost is that it will be a lot more labor intensive. If I get any ideas or energy, I might update again - but no promises.
So, about Jesus and his love of turning water into wine…
So many celebrities make money nowadays by selling their own personal brands of vitamin waters and energy drinks, which makes me wonder: WWJD? Because Jesus seemed to be anti-water, pro-wine, at least in that one miracle. But wine isn’t a choice in this thought experiment, its snazzy water or energy drinks. I feel like Jesus wouldn’t like Fiddy rapping about shooting random people over a few dollars or a pair of sneakers, but what about the official 50-licensed water?
Then again, the upscale celebrities like Carlos Santana and the lead singer from Tool and Francis Ford Coppola have opened wineries. So maybe I should put wine on the official list of options; its not like cultural degenerates aren’t also hawking that to the masses based on their names and reputations in other areas.
This thought experiment is boggling my mind a little.
So a few weeks ago I went to a Chinese chain restaurant in town and I saw that they labeled themselves as “gourmet food” even though everything they sell is overheated by heat lamps and soggy from too much salt. (I enjoyed my food anyway.) It got me to thinking about how Americans play fast and loose with words like “gourmet”, and also “antique”. In Europe, antiques are (if I remember correctly) defined as things that are over 400 years old, which makes sense when a lot of countries there have buildings that date back from the Roman Empire. In America, most antique shops sell crap from the 50’s - stuff that our grandparents bought new. I think a technical definition for “antique” in America is about 75 years - meaning that there are many generations of cars that are antiques to us, but that the steam engines that powered the trains that were the car’s great ancestors are still a century or two away from being antiques by Europe’s standards.
I spent a long time thinking of a third thing to throw in with antiques and gourmet food as a uniquely American malapropism, but just couldn’t come up with one. Today as I was biking around I settled on “Playing God” and voila, this cartoon was as ready as it was going to get.
On the one hand I think the layout is nice. There’s a certain fluidity to the graphic design which is eye catching, and it doesn’t look as much like a rip off of A Soifter World as some of my photo cartoons have been. On the other hand, I’m not sure if people will read “playing God” last since it’s in the middle, even if it is dropped down a little, and I’m not sure if people will be able to easily put together the story - to understand that the contrast is between the Frankenstein in the top and the atomic bombs on the bottom and differing ideas of what it means to “Play God”. I have no idea how obscure this cartoon is. But what the hell, if it doesn’t work I can just call it “art”.
Also, I would like to point out that the actual cartoon isn’t much of a joke sort of purposefully. But I do think that the fortune is really funny when you put it next to the cartoon. I kind of like the one two punch of a good fortune and comic, because it allowed me to do something a little more wry and subtle and then to still give it an absurd over the top punchline.
Enh. Just mixed feelings on this one. But I’m glad to finally have knocked it off the to-make list.
Huh, it looks like I didn’t write a single blog post in June. I think that’s the first month I’ve skipped. I guess I’ll have to bump this blog up in the priorities a little bit; I kind of forgot that it was here, to be honest with you. Ah, it’s just as well. Who wants to read me blather on anyway?
So it’s July Fourth again - which means El Kiablo turned four!
I said I’d do this for five years, so still being here four years later really says something about my determination. That five year goal is looking more and more attainable, although to be honest with you, I am getting sort of burned out, so the plan of doing this for exactly five years is also seeming more and more sane. But let’s not talk about that; this should be a day of celebration.
Over the last year a lot’s gone on both in my life and in the site. I’ve blogged sufficiently about animation so I’m not going to re-toot that horn, but we did move into an audio-visual realm, instead of just a visual realm. There’s also been another public display of El Kiablo work - all the animations were shown at the monthly Incubator event at the Someday Lounge. Plus there’s been more experimenting with Photoshop. I guess the biggest event, however, was that it stopped being daily.
This June, for example, I did 18 cartoons in 30 days. Not bad; I doubt most webcomics have a new episode every other day. With numbers like that you can’t say that I’ve really fallen off, although to be honest, I do feel guilty that I’m not doing one every single day. How did I ever keep that pace up, though? Even doing 18 a month stresses me out now.
Whats next for the coming year? Well, I don’t know. I kind of want to get back into painting regularly. I want to really work harder on using photoshop to make things look nice - but to be better about avoiding that trap where things look like they’ve been photoshopped. I want to flesh out the art more so that it looks distinct and less like the a re-tracing of the first thing that came up on Google image search. I want to do longer, more complicated animations - I want to make short films, not cartoons that came to life. I suppose that’s the number one goal, but it’s also the most daunting.
Anyway, happy birthday, El Kiablo. I don’t think there’s going to be cake, but you do deserve a treat… You’ve come a long way.
In some sports where people leave their feet - for example, figure skating - they talk about “sticking the landing”. In other words, the leap up was great, but when gravity brought you back down, did you land as you wanted to? Were you as graceful at the end?
For me, in terms of cartoon, drawing the nose is sticking the landing. Everything else - the colors, the shading - is like the leaping into the air, or the timing, or the spinning. It’s the meat and potatoes. But the thing about sticking the landing is you can spin and dance and leap perfectly, but if you fall onto your ass at the last second, everything else is erased. It’s the tricky part, and because when it’s bad it’s really bad, its the part that sort of counts more than the other parts. Sticking the landing is the last thing people see, so it’s important; because people look at faces first, the nose is important.
Noses are really hard. They have the same color as the face, basically, because they have the same skin, but the shading is different because of the fact that the nose is raised off the face. They have mutliple shadings, actually. I hate to draw a cartoon, and get it more or less done, and then look at it and think: well, I fell onto my ass with that nose… but that happens semi-often because I barely understand competent shading.
This is all brought on by this cartoon, which looks good. Except that nose is way too dark. Oh well, too late now…
I just uploaded a few of the more recent animations to Youtube. They are here. This means that if you wanted to, you can now grab the animations and imbed them in your blog, website, whatever. Youtubes allows you to do that!
And if you do imbed them somewhere - well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll make an animation for you, either out of one of your favorite cartoons or based on a subject of your choosing. Warning: it might take a few weeks for me to deliver the animation because it’s so time consuming to make them. But I won’t forget!
Anyway! Click HERE FOR EL KIABLO ON YOUTUBES
So, sometimes I throw a rough draft on here to show what could have been. I spent a long time working on an alternate draft of this cartoon:
I ended up not going with this, the more visually striking of the two images, because on closer inspection all the digital mucking about I did with Bruce Willis just made him hazy and vague, instead of more dynamic. This version looks ok at this size, but there’s no room for text at this size; to make it big enough to be readable would require me to figure out how to clarify the image, which I didn’t want to bother doing. I just went with the simpler image so I could be done with it…
Sometimes I scroll down the folder where all the cartoons are stored and I’ll catch an image that just doesn’t make any sense, and I’ll just have to go “wait, what was that about again?” It’s a weird sense of deja vu. I know that there’s some logical reason for that illustration, but it will completely escape me. Once I re-read it, the lightbulb will go off… As the cartoon folder grows larger, this sense of deja vu happens to me more and more.
It occurred to me today that the relationship between cartooning and animating is a lot like the relationship between being a babysitter and a parent. The basic tasks are the same, but the level of dedication and time and risk and reward is a lot larger for the latter. After all, a babysitter is just as legally responsible for the kid while they have them as the parent would be - but they hand the kid off a lot sooner. I can knock out a cartoon in an hour, but it takes five or six to do even a simple animation, and the animations I want to start doing will probably start taking weeks if not months. Its exasperating and exhausting - but then I’m so much more proud of it, at the end, because I built it up, and I knew what it was like when it sucked, and I didn’t quit and I didn’t stop.
Don’t be surprised if there’s a lot of “animating is like…” metaphors in this blog in the months to come. (That is… if I think to blog at all. I’ve fallen a little out of the habit, but then again the original purpose of the blog was to explain the logic behind the cartoons to people that maybe didn’t get it, and once I got better at putting the logic actually in the cartoon, I did less of it. And the animations are even more straightforward, because tv does a lot more of the work for you - no reading, for example, and its more clear whose speaking and how they’re saying it. So I guess its not so bad for me to neglect this blog, now that I have logical reasons for needing it less.) Anyway, if I do blog, it will probably be ruminations on animating, because it’s still on my mind and I’m still making sense of it, and this is where I spell a lot of those concerns and thought processes out.