Randal

   I'm not that great of an illustrator.  Truth in that appears quick when I learn of some new rule in drawing and start to apply it to doodles and it's like night and day before and after.  Here I'm trying to figure out how to do line work better.  You try and make heavier, thicker lines to the objects that are closer to the eye, like this guy's nose and teeth and shit, and then the farther away, the thinner the lines get.  It's something I've always known is important, so I've been wanting to figure it out for myself for a while now.  When line work is done shittily, it's really noticeable and makes your comic or cartoon look like shit.  This is especially true for comics, though.


    Fucking comics get squeezed down so that they're tinier than all fuck and Dilbert still only uses 1/16th of the microscopic four frames it gets per day, no colors, so some of the only ways left that the artist could ever show that they know a single thing about drawing things with are construction and line work.  And Scott Adams poops this out:

    Construction built from those transparent, green ruler/stencil things you get in fourth grade to draw 10 different shapes and measure angles, and every line is the same exact weight.

    It's just always made my eyes hurt with how awful it looks.  It's what you do for a living, guy!  Do you have any idea how many artists with even the slightest bit of knowledge on illustration would kill to have 1/50th your readership and 1/50th of your income?  At the very least you should try to maintain the illusion that people like you deserve at least a little to be where you are, just for the sake of these people not just fucking blowing their brains out on your heart-wrenchingly unfunny comic one morning.

   Just comparing Dilbert and something like Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County is like the difference between Picasso and a drawing of a smiley face in a trail of pee in the snow.

   So yeah.  Doodling is good for experimenting and understanding new artistic things too so give it a try why don'

Obey the Lost Skeleton!

                         WATCH THIS TRAILER:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe9Fs10IIk0

This fucking movie.  The first five minutes or so I was laughing my tits clean off with the brilliantly stupid dialogue, all delivered deadpan without a single drip of insincerity... but I suspected this whole act would grow tired after a while.  I turned out to be pretty goddamn wrong.

All of the people responsible for this movie understood that the concept in itself wouldn’t hold it all up.  You can’t just be yourself writing a shit movie and make it a funny parody-homage to unintentionally hilarious film; you have to understand WHY those movies fail in their very sincere intentions, and WHY we happen to find their failures both funny and endearing.

Really what everyone on the production did was act as though they were really making an Ed Wood style film.  The actors aren’t really just playing the stupid, 2-dimensional character that appears in the movie, because beneath that, they were all portraying an actor who would actually be in a film like this.  Particularly in the male alien’s performance, you can tell that the actor he is portraying (as in the character of a bad actor playing the bad character in a real 1950’s shit film) is really putting his all into this horrible fucking schlock, like he was an actor in the 50’s who has been hired on this film and he is truly excited about the production, really thinks that it will be a great movie and feels lucky to be playing this part.

If you’re big on Ed Wood, Plan 9 From Outer Space or other ultra-low-budget, 1950’s B movies, other “So Bad it’s Good®” movies, this is a very important movie to see.

If you watch it and you do in fact dig it, there’s a sequel called: “The Lost Skeleton Returns Agains!” and a handful of other movies the writer/director has made with the same crew, like Dark and Stormy Night.  Both of them are amazing, but Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is the best place to get started with this series of films with writing that eventually reaches modern-Shakespeare level of brilliance, while still never leaving the territory of dumber than all shit.

Doing Dribbles

I have a lot of projects.  I’m sure alla you know I write books; I’ve finished one and am now getting it copyrighted and sent out to independent publishers, so now I’ve been working on my next book.

 

Next book is going to be in a series of at least four.  I tend to sort of do this.  My last book I actually did the preliminary work for four separate books that all make appearances in the main story, all squeezed down to fit into a novella, two of which are the main focus and had to be developed completely.  I thought that it’d be a cool, ‘less is more’ approach, and give the world lots of depth that the reader wouldn’t necessarily see upon first reading, but would be conscious of and draw them deeper into the story.

So with this one I’m just going to go all out and write four books as the tip of the iceberg, and have beneath the surface biographies of every character, and make this project more character-focused and less message focused like previous book.

Besides that, there’s one weird book that’s really hard to write, so I’ve been not rushing it and working on it on the side.  Sometimes suddenly something will happen and I’ll just hammer out a whole chapter from four to daybreak, but that’s pretty rare, so it might not be done anytime soon, who knows.

And all of that’s just the books.  I do other stuff too.  Like movies.  I met this guy named Gus in a film class I took in high school, and me and him have been making movies for a few years now.

Here's those if you'd like to see them.

But ever since we’ve finished our first short together, we’ve been talking about this one pet movie that we essentially wrote in conversations with friends and each other for about two years.  We started filming it a year ago, and now we’ve only got a few more scenes to shoot before we sit down for a week and do nothing but edit it and release it in parts on youtube.

It’s called Bundeloafe II: The Return of Jaffar, and it’s seriously the craziest thing I’ve ever worked on.  We just talked so much about how to make a movie that no one has ever seen before and just movies in general and where we think they’re heading, just putting as much as we possibly could into it, that at some point during the shooting a while back, we realized that this thing was going to be at least an hour and a half long.

But when you work on massive projects like those, you don’t really have anything to show for it until they’re done, so it’s sort of hard to tell people who may find me having just woke up at 3 in the afternoon in my underwear that my work life is stressful, intense, and requires a lot of attention to mental health in order to not fall into bouts of depression. 

So I’m going to do little things.  I do little things anyway, it’s just that a lot of the time the little things become big things after a while, IE a short, stupid movie with your friend becoming this massive, feature-length, surrealist commentary on the future of the film industry, or a short book for your senior project in high school becomes this sprawling, four books in one, philosophical bleeding of everything you feel about humanity’s existence.  But there’s stuff like little comics, 30-second songs comparing child singers Michelle Creber and Uria Shelton, drawings, books I’ve made in my childhood, videos parodying middle schoolers reviewing things on the internet, etc., and all that’s just sort of sitting there.

So I’m going to put those little things here that I’m always doing anyway, some of them will totally never become anything more than what they are, some of them might become my new, put all of my heart and dick into love projects, sure, we’ll see.

So Mondays I’m going to post a doodle.  Something simple to start the week.

Wednesdays I’m going to post a little thing of miscellaneous variety.  A short or long story, a short or long essay, a short song, a long song, a short video, a long video, whatever comes out I’ll stick here.

Fridays I’m going to recommend things.  I guess sort of reviewing.  Maybe not recommend.  I’ll figure all that out.  But the main deal is that it will be something to show that I didn’t make, with a written thing attached that I did.  Sort of like the Wolfman and the Airship Captain dealio I did a bit back.

So…  Yeah.  I’m going to put little things on here just for fun and if you would like to see those things then come here for them.

First Monday Doodle

  I owe a lot to doodling.  It took me out of the blaring, fuzzy anxiety hole of school and let me focus on something else.  I doodled so much that even later on in school, when I started having some classes that were great and engaging, my hands would just go on doodling simpler things that didn't take that much focus, like their default switch was stuck.

  At least that's what I thought.  It actually turned out that my hands were possessed by a demon tapir named Nicole, who was trying to cause mischief and get me in trouble because my great, great grandfather burned down the rainforest her and her family lived in when she was just a calf.

  I unwittingly flushed her out last week when I did the cinnamon challenge with my sister.  I was all like whaaaaaaaat  

  So here's to doodling!  It's not just for when there's boring things trying to destroy you slowly over the course of 13 years anymore!