Plans for world domination: A look back at 2008….

I like the spirit of  a New Year Resolution, but as everyone knows that has ever made one, they usually don’t last more than a week or two at most. Especially resolutions to do with quitting part of your regular routine.  To stop doing something takes immediate work. Which I’m not good at anyway.   So last year I decided my resolution would be to start doing something, and my timeline would be all of 2008… So every month I started smoking more and more. Just kidding. Last January,  I laid out some works goals for CartoonSmart. Here they were…

Not teach every lesson myself. Kind of a trust issue there. CartoonSmart is my baby, so to let someone else in and teach lessons was a tough decision at first. Fortunately a guy name John Nyquist stepped up and offered to teach Blender, and since I hadn’t even heard of the program at the time, I was fine with someone else teaching that. And John proved he was an excellent teacher, and brought some 3D lessons to the previously-2-dimensional CartoonSmart.  John broke the ice, and since his lessons in March, I’ve hired on many more teachers for a lot more software than just Flash. So, big check mark next to goal #1. 

Start a CartoonSmart forum. I put off starting one since almost the beginning of the site, so I decided 2008 would be the year. It took me till July though to finally sign up for one. Which takes all of about 20 minutes. So you can get a sense for my pacing here. 6 months to do 20 minutes of work. Although it did takes a few days to really figure out the administration end of managing the forum.

Start a “real” blog. I had a CartoonSmart blog before, but I updated it once a month at most, and only when new lessons came out, which was pointless because anyone that knew about the blog would have also been on my newsletter list. So September was the month for getting this current incarnation of the blog rolling. And to my surprise, I’ve not only been updating it regularly, but I also REALLY LIKE updating it. And as regular readers know, I’m a huge advocate for artists keeping a blog. It’ll keep you on task, even if its just your closest friends and family that visit it, at least you’ll know that they know you’re falling behind if you haven’t posted new work recently. Plus a blog is super SEO friendly, and can replace a regular portfolio website if you don’t already have one.  And once you get setup with a blog, you can start broadcasting yourself via RSS or connecting it up with your Twitter account (like this) So there’s all sorts of Web 2.0 shit that manly dock workers would laugh at you for even thinking about doing, but thats why you don’t work on a dock. 

Launch the Affiliate Program. Again, here’s something that took almost no time to put together that I waited months to start on. October to be exact. It didn’t even take any programming because Payloadz.com (our product delivery server) gives me all the code ready-to-go for the affiliates, all I had to do was tell people it existed. Actually I spent 2 or 3 days making fake box art (as seen to the right) for the affiliates to use in a promotional kit (here by the way) 

Switch servers. This took a whole year for no reason. I could have just done this in January, but it felt like a December thing to do. CartoonSmart.com was previously on a dedicated server, now its on a slightly faster dedicated server. This really was a dumb thing not to do earlier though because I’ve had both servers for a year. 

So you see the point here?  I’m slow. Veeeerrry slow. Maybe you are too. But a year is a long time. And thats what I needed to get all this done. And to remind myself 2008′s modest to-do-list still needed to-doing: high tech scraps of paper taped to my monitor. Anyone care to suggest some 2009 stickies to tape up?  

Comments very welcome.

Stranger Than Fiction – Title Sequence

Just got word back from one of my instructors that he is planning a tutorial based around the Stranger of Fiction title sequence. If you haven’t seen it yet, ArtofTheTitle.com has it posted. Its extremely cool, setting up Will Ferrell’s retentive character by animating details around him as he gets ready for work…

UPDATE: That lesson is now here

FlashBooty.com’s Annual Holiday E-card!

Our good friends at FlashBooty.com have continued their streak of holiday e-cards with this 2008 edition.  And if you’re new to the blog, FlashBooty does excellent web & Flash development (and they are for hire of course).  They also recently did a massive site makeover, so click the image below for their e-card, and visit FlashBooty.com to check out their main site. Enjoy!

Back from ze dead!

Phew! CartoonSmart.com  looks to be totally switched over from our old dedicated server to our newer dedicated server. So thanks for bearing with us. If you visited this blog yesterday you might have noticed none of the images loaded. Whoops! We (meaning, I )   forgot to re-upload all our WordPress stuff.

Lazy Weekend Linking…

Here’s a week’s worth of internet-coolness that I dragged to my desktop for possible bloggery, and for the sake of cleaning up my workspace, here they all are at once….

Excellent CG of some people battling over something or other  (be sure to switch to the HD version). Before you get bored with it, and you probably will, skip to the last 5 seconds when for some reason Mickey Mouse shows up with a sword. 

WebUrbanist’s Top 10 Most Awesome Approaches to Photography: Nuff said. These are indeed awesome.

South Park College Course. Kewl. 

Some guy’s Deviant Art profile : Guess what? He likes drawing Asian women wearing very little, except their weapons. But he does it very well, and many of them look to be a mix of vector art and Photoshop shading.  Respek.

Elephant’s Dream The world’s first open movie, made only with open source graphics software (Blender being one of them) 

Finally,  Tyson Mangelsdorf’s excellent blog of family and art, aptly title Illustration Life. More pics like the  one below, after the jump (and per my copyright rant earlier this week, notice the non-art-disabling one Tyson uses.  ) 

My Most Used Blambot Fonts

Just got an email asking where I get my fonts, and that shouldn’t be a secret. Most of the ones I use in logos come from Blambot.com , illustrated by the great Nate Piekos (proof of illustration greatness here).  The ones I use most are below…

Click the pic to land on Blambot’s Super Scroller-ific Page o’ Fonts. Most of the ones above are in the Design or Sound FX columns, and many of them are 100% FREE!!   And those that are not, are well worth the price. 

Once you install them, notice that they have “BB” in the font name. At least here on the Mac, using FontBook (a font library program) you can do a text search. So among my hundreds of other fonts, I like being able to just type BB in FontBook, and only pull up my Blambot fonts. 

Blambot also has some nice (and free) resource files for comic book/strip illustrators. Click the pic below to hit up his Resources section, and download these two files full of useful vector art…

And non-Blam fonts you might see around CartoonSmart are Letteromatic, Artbrush Medium, and Kenyan Coffee.

Enjoy.

iPhone Application Tutorial!

This is probably the most excited I’ve EVER been for a tutorial launch. My friend & neighbor, Ian, put together this awesome 2 hour lesson on creating iPhone apps. What’s so cool about it you ask?? Well duh… if we (me included) learn this whole app thing we can cash in on that iTunes Store. Imagine creating the next Tetris… Can you say “CHA-CHING”.  But before our pupils are replaced by dollar signs there’s some foundation to be laid, and thats what this course teaches. By the end of the lesson you’ll have built two applications, a simple Hello World app, and a Timer app. Neither will make you millions in the App store, but hang in for the ride. More lessons to follow!

Click the pic to hit the sales page…

 

What not to wear…a HUGE © WORD!

So this WAS going to be an artist profile type article. Not that I do much profiling with those ever, I usually just repost the artist’s work, say “this is cool” and link to their site. But today’s will be link-only. Take a look at Jeff Miracola’s site, and browse through some of the images in his portfolio. Great work, BUT there’s a GIANT “COPYRIGHT JEFF MIRACOLA” directly in front of every image. And in most cases its so big it delivers a kick in the nads to the art itself.

UPDATE: Jeff’s site no longer has giant watermarks on the work! Yay. We can see clearly now. And thanks Jeff for the response below! I’m only noticing it 3 months after you posted it! Sorry.

So I’m shelving this post in the Freelance Tips category. Please don’t repeat this mistake when posting work from your portfolio.  As soon as you publish something original, you’ve copywritten it. And the internet is a publishable medium. So when I hit Publish on this blog article, I’ve got some legal rights just by doing so. Is that as good as downloading a copyright application and sending it into the Copyright Office. No. But do you think newspapers submit copyright applications for every article they publish? Nope. That’s why the copyright laws are the way they are. Publish something, and you’ve got a right to it. Same goes for art. 

Here’s the only semi-harmful scenarios I can imagine for Jeff (or anyone) not-watermarking their images….

1: Someone decides to print the art and sell it. Well, a 1000 pixel wide image on the internet is BIG, but print wise that resolution would be terrible. That size might print a quality copy around 2 inches wide.  I doubt micro-prints would be a hot seller on Etsy.com.

2. Someone decides to print unwatermarked art, for the malicious reason that they just like it and want to hang it up in their locker. Harmless right. Well maybe the artist could have sold this fan a real print of their work. So a sale is lost because this fan can print a low rez copy….  I don’t believe that. If someone really appreciates an artist’s work AND they have the money, they’ll buy a high rez print. If they don’t have the money, let ‘em print it low-brow, and  they’ll be advertising the artist to anyone that passes by their locker. 

3. Someone decides to pass off the artist’s work as their own. Okay, thats possible. Maybe someone will sign up on Elance.com and claim “I did this, hire me”. But if someone is going to stoop to that level, there’s nothing stopping them from downloading watermarked images and saying  ”Hi, my name is Jeff Mircola Nice to meet you, look what I drew.”

Finally,  someone may comment (or at least think it) that this seems a little hypocritical coming from someone that sells video downloads with the CartoonSmart logo somewhere in the video. Well that logo is not watermarked overtop the software OR the script editor. So at no time would someone be like “ack, I can’t see behind that damn logo.” So I consider it non-intrusive, and not taking away from the content in the same sense that a watermark takes away from art.  Art can be obstructed.  Training videos can’t be obstructed like that.

Plus, I’m not saying that art shouldn’t be signed. Art should be signed.  Two great places:

1) Bottom Left

2) Bottom Right. 

 

Pay for stuff in a Flash game?! Waaaahhht.

I don’t know much about this company Whirled, but they’ve got some serious prize money for Flash games ($7500 for first place!!)   And if that wasn’t enough to get you coding,  they’ve got a development kit for incorporating micro-transactions into your game. So for example if you made some kind of Conan type game, you can pay to upgrade from his sword to a bazooka. And if you’re not interested in making a game, they have plenty on their homepage to play. 

Dynamic Text in Flash Video

By now you’ve probably seen one of the Flash movies where  you enter someone’s name, hit play, and then magically see that name inside a video. Not sure what I mean?  Here’s an example. Well if you want to know a bit more about how that’s done, here’s a recent blog post by Michael Coleman from Adobe. Enjoy.