Okay, this one is tagged with "tutorials", but it's really more of an art resource.
I adore this thread. It's a bunch of people reimagining members of the Justice League.
The picture is from Roy Lichtenstein's "Meat". Anyway, here's a list of a bunch of great sites I've found recently for art tips, tutorials, and inspiration.
Here's a nice, basic guide to lettering in Adobe Illustrator. The crystallize tool is something I didn't know about, and the quick arrangement of the sound effect graphic is pretty cool.
Here we have another inking and colouring tutorial in Photoshop, this one with a voiceover explaining his tools and methods. This one is fairly extensive, broken into ten parts.
Here's a GREAT video of how Scott Kurtz colours his webcomic, PVP. The demonstration of how he adds shading is particularly intriguing. He's actually got another colouring video and a drawing video here, and both are well worth watching. Through his YouTube homepage, I found this fabulous demonstration of digital inking by CWGabe. I wish I knew how he got such even line variation in his Photoshopping. I want to learn how to do that.
Here's another interesting art tutorial, focusing on how Bob MacNeil goes about tackling a project on the computer. He has sketches and Photoshop captures, and has more illustrations of his process on his blog.
I've got a number of drawing and animation resources bookmarked, and I'm trying to include them here on The Transmutation Effect for others to enjoy and learn from. The Temple of The Seven Golden Camels is, first of all, a really cool name for a blog. However, that alone would not merit inclusion here. The contents of said blog, however, are fabulous. The masthead describes The Temple as being "everything I know about the art of storyboarding", but really, there's so much more here. I'm particularly drawn to an insightful article about using colour to distinguish figures and draw the eye to the focus of a scene. Great reading; highly recommended.
This is the motherlode of animation information. The International Animated Film Society is building a webpage of information that is unparalleled. If all they had online were scans of Norman Rockwell's Famous Artists Course, well, it would still be the best web resource ever. But they have so much more. John Kricfalusi is joining up with this site to produce the $100,000 Animation Drawing Course, featuring scans of classic Preston Blair instruction books. The course is worth $100,000, but it is in fact free. And Kricfalusi will critique your work online. Jesus.
Scott McCloud's books are pretty much required reading for anybody interested in comic books, whether you read them or create them. He started off with Understanding Comics, expanded his vision in Reinventing Comics, and then capped it all off with his most recent work, a fabulous treatise on how to create comics and graphic novels, Making Comics. I don't make a lot of "must have" recommendations, but I would say that if you enjoy comics, or want to make your own comics, you really should own all of these. Don't borrow them, buy them. They're worth having at hand.
John Kricfalusi is the creator of (among a zillion other things) Ren & Stimpy, and that would be more than enough to make him a cool guy. IN addition to all that, however, he has a kickass blog where he frequently spotlights how animation art is made. His scans of old art instruction manuals are truly fabulous, and should all be downloaded and studied. (There are bunches more; just look for 'em.) In yesterday's entry, John has an article by Hanna-Barbera background artist Art Lozzi, explaining how he created backgrounds for such cartoons as Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound. Animation background art is one of the frequently-overlooked joys of cartoons, and having a peek behind the curtain at how these were made is a treat. This article was written by Lozzi in response to an earlier post from Kricfalusi which is also well worth reading.
An amazing and inspiring, yet very simple video. The video camera watches master caricaturist Al Hirschfeld sketch and ink a Paul Newman portrait. Very interesting to see how he works and how he draws.
So last week about this time, I posted about the wonderful "22 Panels That Always Work" by Wally Wood. Today I stumbled on a little parody/extension done by Ivan Brunetti that is terribly amusing. If I drew comics, they'd be a blend of Wood's and Brunetti's dicta.
Sweet daddy siki, this is a goldmine. I had seen "Wally Wood's 22 Panels" before, but always as a copy of a copy of a copy of a fax of a satellite photo of the original. Somebody atually found the original, bought it, and made a series of scans freely distributable on the web. Plus, there's a great story behind it. Get it all here.
