Okay we got some great last weekend submissions to show off. Actually I see one video is still in line to be converted, which is fine, I’ll get in touch with Toon Boom today to start figuring out the grand prize winner. And I’ll kick in some 2nd and 3rd place prizes since we got so many fantastic entries. Speaking of which…

By Tomasz Ostaszewksi…

By Anthony Williamson…

By DessieBabe…

Oh and since this posting will live on forever for future societies or interstellar races to stumble upon, all these entries in the contest were done using Toon Boom Animate Pro: Personal Learning Edition (the free version) and while this contest is now closed, I’m sure we’ll have more to come!

My Actionscript 3 Menu Mega Course is finally complete!! I spent the last month or so putting together tons of example projects for just about every kind of fancy menu you might want to build. The course is divided into 5 parts, and is over 6 hours, but with plenty of separate projects (there’s 34 start and finish example .fla files), so you’ll have a comprehensive library of files to pull code from for years to come! Also this course is for both newbies and oldies to Flash. I learned quite a bit myself prepping it.

Also master template builder, Tibi, has returned to offer a discount package on his 3 incredible Flash Video Player Templates. Each one is totally XML populated, but as always the .fla’s are included.

More details and discounts are at the usual spot…
http://www.cartoonsmart.com/this_month.html

Also Toon Boom has reactivated their discount code to get Animate for only $399! I can’t publish the code for the entire world to see, but if you check the latest newsletter, or email me, or post a comment below, you’ll get that code.

Thanks all!

Check it out, this one by Evan Bonifaico is quite nice. Definitely some cool multiplane action happening mid-ninja-leap…

Alright, I think we have a real contest on our hands. After this weekend lets call it quits for new entries, so we can start to figure out how wins the big prize!

Its pretty rare one of the uber-nerd websites I go to (way too often every day) has some actual art posted as  geek news, but AintItCooNews had these posters linked up. Which might prove someone running that site has some design sense, and could possibly one day change AICN to look like something other than the worst. designed. site. ever.

This is getting to be a lot of fun! Check out the latest two entires in our Toon Boom Animate Pro contest. The second one is CRAZY…

I have no idea what this is for, its a bumper for something,  but hey, it looks awesome (and its got a moustache on a robot)…

HOLY Space-Food-Ballin’,  Cracker-jackin’, Baby Laughin’, Coke-drinkin’ Animate-made ANIMATION!!  Today we got more Toon Boom Animate contest entries to show off.  Also good news for anyone deciding to finish this contest or finish their Halloween costume, you’ve got till November 9th to wrap things up.

This one below is actually our first entry…

So I’m currently reading the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, and about 120 pages into the second book I realized I had no idea what the cover to the books looked like. No idea, meaning, my memory sucks. But I do tend to remember good art and these were just plain bad. Each cover looks like the publisher just slapped together some royalty-free photographs, added some blurs and tints, and wall-la, done. Which is a shame because  these covers came from a recently-made combo pack of the first 4 in the Dark Tower series, so there was already plenty of fan art out there. Google “Dark Tower art” and there’s tons of better covers.

Anyway,  this all reminded me of an artist named Aly Fell I discovered a few days ago from Drawn.ca’s blog. They posted some of his sexy horror women pics, but I thought his portfolio had some even stronger pieces based on old pulp novels. So more baffling, here’s a guy making awesome covers for his own pleasure as a hobby, and Stephen King’s publisher can’t find a few hundred books to buy better art. Click below, or here to see how a real artist draws a cover.

Well, its about time for the entries to start rolling in. Remember the big prize is a copy of Animate Pro, a $1999 value. Full details on the contest are here, and obviously its not too late to enter (we might even extend the deadline a wee bit if I get enough emails saying “I’m almost done!”)

Take a look at one great piece done for it so far…

Excellent work done by Shawn Encarnacion!

This animation by Sergej Hein is awesome, but easily 20% more awesome for what he did in the last couple seconds.

Am I right or what?