Quickly added Christmas Cheer

I bought Dragonframe- a stop motion program.
Man it is so cool.
There's a lot of the stop motion craft I don't know-
especially camera stuff- but I can easily see that so much has been thought out in the program- a weird and novel  delight to see in software.
I think the beauty of stop motion is that even if it is "craptastic" - somehow watching it you forgive any technical deficiencies.
Anyway- makes me feel like a kid again....
which is nice.

Also bought Autodesk sketchbook- I only have photoshop CS5 but as a drawing program it sucks mightily- primarily because of the appalling jaggies/aliasing/stepping as it reads your pen stroke.
Hadn't occurred to me how singularly bad it is until I've recently tried:
Sketchbook
Mischief
Manga Studio
Painter
and none of them have the same problem/suck so much.

Actually sketchbook has piqued my interest in concept art again- and plain drawing - so again excited to give it a go with the new tools.

Did a very quick replacement dinosaur for the banner.
Added a hat for christmas.

Oz Comic Con 2

dinosaur scribble

Lach scribble #1

Another snippett

WIP snippett.- These are supposed to be "Elliot" type sauropods...with allosaur type therapods attacking.
Actually I should warn dinosaur tragics out there that the number of toe claws on the various titanosaur type dinosaurs probably wont be correct- although I could possibly fix this in the week ahead.
 (Actually who am I kidding? I have 28 followers who might visit and read this... and maybe some people who did a search for "Yuki Onna" or "Ammut "  or "Minge")
 anyway...
Likewise they are a bit dumpy- sort of shorter necked than they probably would be. This was done in the interest of fitting them onto the pages and having heads big enough to see them
- but also Rhoetosaurus and Saltasaurus and Jobaria seem a bit dumpy this way too- so I think they're still in the realm of plausibility.
So in a way I'm lucky they haven't found complete skeletons yet.
All of the dinosaurs are supposed to be from australias distant past- but then if you pick a particular moment in time there will be some stragglers from previous times- transitional forms....and precursors to future animals.
 Actually Australia seems to be an historical last refuge for many stragglers in time. I think they found evidence of some dicynodont in Tasmania recently - much later than they expected them to still exist.
Actually even platypuses and cassowary to me seem very ancient and primitive  survivors from ancient times.
and not forgetting  lungfish.
 So thats my excuse for variation between my renderings and any particular skeletons- although I've tried to keep things in the ballpark of what I can find that they looked like.

Dinosaur in progress.

As I said before- it seems my ability has left me in the last month or two .
Hence lack of posting.
Fairly cruel when the one thing you always wanted to do you now are marginal at....in this case  drawing dinosaurs.
 Initially I had really nice roughs- some of which I posted. I actually liked them as they were. Then in the process of doing more detailed drawings- they were still rough- I imagined I'd be able to do rough colour and then fix the drawing up finely. Bad idea. The bad drawing just got coloured lipstick upon pig style. Then I thought maybe it mightn't look so bad with a loose look. Then later I'd look at them and see the mistakes and realise they were loose and wrong as opposed to loose and good.
But then it is a kids book and the publisher didn't actually want the sort of full on rendered dinosaurs anyway.
Thankfully.
The last 2 weeks my dads been in hospital and I've been looking after my mum- which put an extra spanner in the getting things done works.
so hopefully in the coming week my ability will come back and I can fix the pages into semi respectability.
But my years of avoiding doing environment art has come to haunt me - if it were just drawing and colouring dinosaurs everything would be sweet. But the backgrounds could or in fact  have been a descent into madness. But then they actually need to be simple- so's not to distract from the characters and the dinosaurs.
Wish me luck.

Some pre christmas colouring tests...

When nothing seemed to be working and it felt like I couldn't draw- or couldn't find the right colouration.

Some of those dinos at the start of  the year  felt better than these-so  hopefully I'm on an upward path.

Minmi

 

And.... some minmi explorations. Again there seems to be quite a bit of variation. I've tried adding some cosmetic non bone spines and pointy scales along the margins - basically thinking about lizards and tortoises- or even thorny devils and horned toads that have all this surface detail (which isn't bony). There appear to be 3 spines above or attached to the back legs-who to believe?  Also looking at the images of the fossil minimi-there doesn't appear to be much of its face left in the fossil- I can see the top- but is everyone just assuming it looks like other ankylosaurs from the side or did they somehow reconstruct a crushed flattened skull? I've tried to find a compromise. And how to hold the tail?

Diamantinasaurus

 

Well after a fair hiatus the dinosaur book is once more upon me. Here are a few explorations for Diamantinasaurus. Its described by the Age of dinosaurs people as possibly being a bit hippo like in habits- but the interpretations of what it looks like that I've see images of  seem wildly varying. I guess they need to publish more bones- but in the meantime I'll have a go. Actually I liked the more short necked, short tailed stocky creature I had in my roughs- I might revert to that- but I'll have to do it quickly-the race is now on to get the book done.
Had a check- looks like the two lower ones area bit long legged considering the bones- which is a shame because I like them. Still the head detailing could be a goer on them.

The horror

Some more dino book rough thumbs above FYI- some a bit "spot the difference".
Some what I describe as a 'descent into madness' type of fiddling.
Its been a fairly dire week- behind in everything,-thoughts turn to digging ditches for a living instead.
Dire month really.
On a positive note the  quality of people who turn me down still continues to improve.
Positive side of positive note- more time to do my own work I'd been fanging to work on- if only I had gotten through stuff.


Everything that can go wrong is it seems, my hands are sore and hard to close too and when I do the skin on my fingers splits and bleeds.....what fun.
I was sent the large version of Kind Katie-a Little Mates book- and the first picture on the title page is screwed- looks like its missing a photoshop layer or two in the eyes and mouth- dreadful manky looking koala as a result. I'll check but I'm sure I didn't upload it like that- something must have happened at the dream factory end..
On a positive bit of news- Wombat went a Walking  is 10000 copies in print- which is small by any standard other than Australia- where its a triumph given its been on sale just 2 months. I think its initial run was much less...so please let me get a royalty check for christmas so I can buy some new hands.
On another positive note I did a few sketches for the shadow king that I liked and another tree dragon in my sketchbook. Just need to scan them in.

On the topic of christmas lists- Mary Ryans bookshop of Milton you are not on my list- you sell neither my Little  Mates books or my Wombat book- you may expect coal at best and not the clean variety.