Tablets and Glitches

Getting back into animating stuff hasn't been easy lately.  I like 2D animation; it looks nice regardless of how rough it is and computers are generally more willing to work for you.

That being said, I've been low-tech lately because my graphics tablet went obsolete.  My tablet is a blue Wacom CTE-640, which was gifted to me when my dad bought it on clearance back in 2007 (or round-about that time).  Buying it cheap was practical because I'd never used a tablet in my life and there was no guarantee that I'd like it.

To my dad's relief I took to the tablet like a bird to flight; a little awkward at first but raring for more.  Though I often claim that my first digital drawings look like my 7th-grade self drew them, the novelty of having Ctrl + Z and no eraser lines kept me coming back.  I still prefer line drawing with paper, but I love digital painting.

My little Wacom tablet survived my senior year of high-school, 4 years of college animation classes, being stuffed into book-bags, being dropped on the floor, and having the USB cord replaced.  It has scratches, sticky notes, and sparkly smiley-face stickers stuck all over it.  The pen tip has never worn out, and neither have the buttons or the eraser bit on the end.

A month or two ago I plugged my tablet into my desktop computer...

...and the computer did nothing.  It was clear my tablet was working, but the computer had forgotten what a graphics tablet was.

I went online to download updates, because that usually fixes weird things like that, but there were no more updates for the CTE-640.

Here lies my first tablet, brought to death by software obsolescence.

For a time I borrowed a Monoprice TWA60 from a friend, but that model doesn't have an eraser, which bugs me.  It also developed this quirk where it would start drawing at a point as much as 2 inches away from where I intended to draw, so I'd get done coloring a character's belly, and then have to erase all these unwanted freckles from their backs and tails.  When it stopped registering pressure differences (essential for my calligraphic lines) I decided to return the TWA60 to its owner rather than download the software updates.  The tablet design overall didn't thrill me.

I'm planning to get a brand new, professional-grade tablet this time.  My aim is for longevity as well as quality.  I need something that I can get comfortable with and then keep for the next 6 years or more.  I've had my eye on an Intuos5 Touch.  It has an eraser :) .

Earworm of the Day: Fortune Days by The Glitch Mob
.  On a related note, I recently started using Pandora.  What took me so long!?

Blog is Back Online!

Penguins with Jet Packs is back!!!  Kinda.  The name is being changed to EY Productions: The Blog.  

Reason 1: How many times have I actually drawn penguins zooming around with jet packs on in the last few years? Twice?

Reason 2: There's a band.  I'm just going to back off and let them rock.

Reason 3: Consistent personal branding.

I have profiles on a lot of websites, and I like to keep my user names and avatars consistent so people can tell it's me across all 5 or so websites.  EYproductions is my user name for both DeviantArt and CG Society. The dripbird logo (supposed to vaguely [really vaguely] evoke a coat-of-arms critter) will also be a reoccurring avatar image.  The "Made By E.Y." hamster will still be stamped on all of my digital art.

EY Productions: The Blog has a mission statement: To chronicle my growth as a digital artist/animator.  Stuff that you can expect to see from here on out:

• Concept sketches & thumbnails
• Updates on modeling projects
• Short but hilarious commentary about bugs/inconvenient features of various artistic software
• Short computer scripts for fun and other artistic purposes.
• Recommendations for resource materials
• Earworms (because I just have to, it's my thing.)

Things I will NOT be posting about from here on out (sorry, but it's for the best).

• Random craft projects & photography (that's what deviantArt is for).
• What I cooked for dinner last night.
• 3 paragraph rants about tropes or personal epiphanies
• The latest novel I'm reading (unless it inspired something relevant).
• Lengthy descriptions of my Animalburg characters (I really want to make a web-comic of that someday, so I really need to stop giving you people spoilers.)
• Apologies for not posting!!!  If I miss a post, tough cookies for all of us, the world will keep spinning.

Posting will resume with the traditional schedule of Monday, Wednesday, Friday.  I will aim to post an original image each week, and an original animation once every 4 weeks.

That's all you need to know for now.  See you Wednesday!

P.S.: I would love to ramble about the tv show I (finally!) started watching, and the knitting project I've been working on... but I just banned that kind of rambling from the blog.  I'm sure you can guess both of them by listening to The Earworm of the Day.

So Long, Farewell.

Web-presence will continue on these sites:

• LinkedIn
• deviantArt
• Vimeo
• Carbonmade

 Yes, it's true.  In an interest to simplify my life, I will no longer update this blog.  This decision was not made in haste and is based on a few good reasons:

1. Including this blog and not including my facebook (because it's way too easy to put info on facebook), I have to manage my information on 6 separate web-sites (this blog, the above links, and a school job board).  A professor recommended I add one more.  That's a lot of internet time.  This concerns me.
2. This blog is read by very few people.  Most of the blogs I've seen on blogger are updated even less than mine.  There's not much potential for networking here.
3. deviantArt has a journal wigit.  It has the Earworm posting feature built-in.  I'm already on dA on a daily basis, so it makes sense to condense.
4. The thoughts in my head are not nearly as useful as the work of my hands.  Much as I would love it to be true, my rants about stuff are doing nothing to change the world.  Making someone laugh by showing them a kangaroo chasing clam-frogs around a kitchen at least improves that person's day a bit.
5. Speaking of videos, I'm tired of messing with embedding code to share videos I've made.  Linking to my Vimeo account is just simpler.
6. I've graduated from college with my B.A., 2013 is less than a week away, and as said before I'm job-hunting.  It's a good time for change.

With that, I say goodbye to Blogger and all the people who've been reading this public diary of mine.  Though I must leave you with one last Earworm of the Day:  So Long, Farewell from The Sound of Music

An Excuse to Post Another Earworm.

So I finally saw Wreck-It Ralph.  I can honestly say it lives up to the hype, and even my trope-savvy brain didn't see the ending coming. Though I really should've.  It's foreshadowed way ahead of time,but it's so subtle that on the first viewing it's hard to catch.  It ranks up there with Megamind on my list of "Movies I'm Impressed With".  I did not see Wreck-It Ralph in 3D, but frankly it doesn't need the 3rd dimension (unlike Megamind which certainly does).  My exposure to video game culture came in handy for this movie (a character used the Konami Code and I'm pretty sure I was the only one laughing) but even if you don't play games this movie is entertaining because it's all about the characters.  Any plot-relevant game mechanics are explained in-movie, so the audience can just sit back and get absorbed in the story line.

It also has catchy music.  Wanna hear the catchy music?

Earworm of the Day: Shut Up and Drive by Rihanna  It's in the movie.  It's been stuck in my head for days.

The Merits of Meyer's Other Book (a minor rant)

I woke up this morning and I'm all like, "I must write!!!"

Today is my last day of college.  All I have to do is show up for the figure-drawing critique and turn in my class portfolio.  Then try to maintain attention long enough while forced to analyze each student's artwork for ten minutes while having to stand up... yes standing is the hard part.  I can't take standing for long periods of time, it gets me all stressed out and cranky.  (Walking for long periods of time has the opposite effect strangely enough.)

My Hand-drawn Animation final was yesterday.  Here's how it went:


Kitchen Chaos: Pencil test stage from Elizabeth Young on Vimeo.

On a related but totally different note, movie trailers that have succeeded in making me want to see the movie:  Warm Bodies, and The Host.

A word on The Host, it is a book written by Stephanie Meyer.  I've read it, and I thought it was better than the Twilight series (for one thing, there is only one book of The Host).  Was it the writing caliber of Timothy Zahn, Anthony Horowitz, or Naomi Novik?  No.  Of course not.  This is Stephanie Meyer we're talking about.  Was The Host at least more palatable than Twilight?  Yes.  Yes it was, and for no other reason that the narrator is a space alien.  The narrator is still a Mary Sue who can do no wrong and has no depth (read: expert/victim/flaw model, implied back story, 3-dimentionality).  When she does mention a past life, it seems to come out of left field (this character can fight?  What?  This was not foreshadowed or referenced in the preceding pages!  I call shenanigans!).  But, any Mary-Sue-ishness can easily be written off because Wanderer is a space alien.  She doesn't feel human, but then again she's not human.  Disbelief remains suspended.  The story was at least decent.  I'd be willing to pay money to see how the film makers handle it (because frankly they can only improve upon it.)

Earworm of the Day:  The BG music to the video Our Story in 1 Minute.  I put the video link first because you must see the epicness that is the video, but the song itself is Our Story by melodysheep.  I am seriously considering downloading this, it would be worth every penny.

P.S. Because I promised to post when I was done...

Cll'li jogging along... and she doesn't look happy.  Safe to say someone's in big trouble.

In Which My Train of Thought Waltzes Down the Produce Aisle

I have had some very silly songs stuck in my head for the last 3 days.  But I'll get to that in the earworm section.  First...



Second...

Sketch of Cll'Li jogging along.  Color inverted in Photoshop because it looks cooler that way.

...which I am currently coloring by trying out Photoshop's various brushes.  I'll post when I'm done.

And Finally...

Earworm of the Day: Oh No What We Gonna Do? from the VeggieTales episode "Where's God When I'm S-scared?".  I recommend reading the lyrics too.  I was 3 years old when this came out and my Grandma worked at Berean Book Store, so yeah, our VHS collection was 40% VeggieTales growing up.

Looking at old VeggieTales from a distance of 19 years and a B.A. in Animation?  Well, now I get all the jokes.  And the CG is on par with a 1st year animation class, but the character design and acting (asymmetrical eyes, great voice acting) is very professional, and also just plain hilarious.  I mean, come on, cucumber singing about his lips, peas parodying Monty Python?  How can you not laugh?

--End of Babble--

Return of the "Flams"

For my animation final this quarter I've decided to pull the animatic Kitchen Chaos off the metaphorical shelf and move forward with production.  For those of you who may not have been reading that far back, this project was started in my story-boarding class last year.

So here is the first pencil test for what will soon be a fully animated video (I only have two weeks to complete everything.)  So far I'm optimistic.

Nothing gets the creative drive flowing like animating a very angry wallaby-thing running around with a butterfly net.  The character with the net is named Jimmy (thanks to an earlier project concerning a sound clip from a certain show).  His mom is a giraffaroo and his father is a very large frog, which means I'm still waffling on whether Jimmy's skin (or possibly fur) is yellow or green. The frog-clam-annoying-mouth-things are a little less puzzling, having officially been dubbed "Flams" today by my animation teacher (because "Clogs" is already a word.)

I also wrote a chunk of script in Celtx this morning for the first time in months (at the expense of homework time, but totally worth it).  I won't post it here because it's long, but let's just say Spitfire wins a fight using pacifism and parkour.

Oh, and found another cool video concerning movies. Warning: that video has some language in it, (because many good movies are not rated PG.  Sorry, fact of life.)

Earworm of the Day: Zorba's Dance what else?

Lost My Drive... No, Not That One, the Other One.

I know, I haven't posted for a whole month.  Again.

The funny thing about a gap this large in posting is that when I finally sit down to write, I have nothing interesting to post.  It's like all the interesting things that happened over the last month mash together and cancel each other out so I can't remember any of them anymore.  Hmph.

Well, ok, I have Elf the Jackalope freaking out:

That was animated on paper then lined in Toon Boom.  Ok, there's something to talk about.  Toon Boom is -- according to my teacher -- the industry standard for digital painting in animation (or something to that effect).  At least in the west (again, according to my teacher, the Japanese has better programs, but they aren't available in the U.S.)

But then again Toon Boom seems to be a pretty intuitive straight forward program and I wish I'd bought a copy when it was on sale for $150 instead of waiting too long and having the price jump.  Live and learn.

Earworm of the Day: A Whisper and a Clamor by Anberlin

I don't remember if I've posted that one already, but I've been blasting it to stave off the end-of-college-beginning-of-fall-too-long-away-from-family depression I've been wrestling with lately.  (Don't worry, I'm getting help for that.)  The artwork may be few and far between until I can relocate my creative drive.  I think I dropped it somewhere.  Maybe it's hiding in my subconscious under the philosophical inquiries, or the dismembered Motion Builder actor guy, or the 2 ton chunk of self-doubt in the corner.  I'll find my drive eventually.  Hopefully by Christmas (this Christmas will be fantastic, I can feel it.)

20 Days To Graduation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Grumbles about .Gifs

So, I think I'm changing my posting schedule to Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.  Why?  Because that's when I've got time.

First, I finally (finally!) figured out how to make an animated gif.  As per usual, I was only missing one button to make it work.

Also have a really cool idea for a deviantART avatar image now.  Involves a hamster of course.  Now, a bit of a note about animated gifs and my opinion of them.  I don't understand the phenomenon of chopping up a perfectly good YouTube video of a dog doing something and making it into a 6 panel animated gif comic strip.  It's a mutant if you ask me.  Too many things moving at once.  Mono-tasker's nightmare.

I also find endlessly looped gifs to be cute for the first two seconds, then annoying for the rest of their existence.

That being said, I wish I had looped the rainbow as it is a very short animation and may be hard to catch when the page loads.  I get that.  That makes sense.  What gifs need is a pause.  Some breathing room.  But making a gif longer means more work, and more animation skill.  In that sense I understand why annoying gifs happen.  They take less time and energy to make.

Well, I'm an animator, so I'll just have to expend the extra energy and make something fantastic.  My work ethic won't allow me to do otherwise.  Huzzah!

Earworm of the Day: What is Love? by Haddaway OR played on 8 floppy drives

Chucking Rigging out a 13th Story Window With as Much Force as Possible.

So, Google Chrome no longer works on my laptop because my Mac OS is old.  My desktop PC, within the span of 2 weeks, has gone from dust collector to primary computer.

And consistent readers will remember my rant about wallpaper.  Thus, this:

My attempt to take adorable up to 11 while maintaining realistic proportions.

I love Photoshop CS6.

In other news, yesterday I reached an epiphany.  I am not a rigger.  I can model, UV map, and put a bone system in place -- heck, I can even paint weights if I must -- but once I reach setting up a control system for it all, it's grinding hours of frustration.  FK/IK, pole vectors, splines, face rigs, locators, handles... dislike.  Dislike it all with a passion.

And as of yesterday, I am completely ok with that.

So in light of that epiphany, here's what's going to happen.

1. I am going to make a simple skeletal rig for both Butterfly of Doom and Dripbird so I can place them in some other position than a t-pose.  Nothing more.  They will not be animated... in 3D.  (Dripbird lives in 2D now.  He's finally getting to stretch his wings.)
2. I will finish UV mapping the fossa skull.
3. I will finish coloring Butterfly of Doom, Dripbird, and the skull.
4. I will render a video each of charater/object posed on a turntable in both color and occlusion passes.
5. I will post the 3 videos and accompanying stills to my portfolio/vimeo/blog/gallery.
6. All of the above will be completed one at a time so I can get my homework done.
7. I will celebrate when all three are done, take a week off, then go model something new.  Maybe a ninja hamster.

Earworm of the Day: Elements by Lindsey Stirling because you can never have enough dub-step violin. (To be fair, it is a narrow category.  Reaching saturation would be highly unlikely.)

Hands-On

I totally forgot to upload this Monday.  Wow.  I'm scatter-brained.

Matt Owl asks "Am I in the right century?"

In other news, today I applied for my degree conference (did I spell that right?).  If all my records are filled out correctly, and everything administration wise goes right, then an official paper that says "B.A. in Animation" should come by Christmas.  (I hope.)

In the mean time, I have the supreme hilarity of having a Motion Capture class and a Hand-Drawn Animation class back-to-back.  Yes, I go from the most automated form of animation to the most hand-crafted form of animation within the span of 3 hours.  I love my life.

I also love traditional animation.  Here's a bird jumping for an apple:

Earworm of the Day:  Due to my rule of not repeating earworms, I've officially got nothing.  Pick your own catchy tune and jam out to.  Heck, let's make it interactive.  Post your own earworm in the comments (video link is optional).

'Tis My Birthday! Hooray!

Another year older, and life is moving at a pretty fast clip.  Today I worked on a 2D animation of Dripbird jumping for an apple, which I hope to have refined and posted by Wednesday.  I also, finally, purchased an Adobe CS6 package for my PC.  Two weeks from now, I will be creating awesomeness from my own desktop!

Also, my roommate and I teamed up and made cupcakes (from scratch!) and decorated them with icing and chocolate (from the store).

Yay, cupcakes!

 In other news, I was helpful!  I got to help make a prayer network board Willow Chicago is using for its kids' program. I designed the swirly background and mapped out where the colors would go.  The painting and string was by some other super talented person.  I think it turned out great!

It's also upside-down.  But I kind of like it better this way.

Earworm of the Day:  We Got a Dollar (or I Got a Pickle in some versions) from The Little Rascals.  Of course, thanks to NATSU I now have an entirely different (equally catchy) song stuck in my head, but I'll let them have the glory for that.

"I got a birthday.  I got a birthday.  I got a birthday, hey hey hey hey..."

Whatever.

I'm tired.

I was tired enough yesterday morning that I actually tried to use caffeine (in the form of tea) to wake up.  It didn't work.  I was totally off my game for figure drawing class; couldn't hold an image in my head to draw the construction lines.

Despite getting to bed late, I got up early this morning to get to school and accomplish more homework.  I had no energy for heavy brain-work and my philosophy homework is covering skepticism.  I spent ten minutes today scribbling down a poem about how I know I'm not dreaming right now because my dream world is a lot darker and weirder than real-life in mid-day.  If the sky is bright blue, I'm unable to read with my eyes closed, and the architecture of the building hasn't spontaneously changed in the last 15 minutes, odds are good that I'm awake.

Yes, I was making arguments for being awake.  Philosophical Skepticism is twisted enough to make me do that just to keep my sanity.

So I've been cranking out critical thoughts all day with an already exhausted brain, and I can't find anyone to model for my drawing assignment due tomorrow.  It's 7:30pm.  I'm done.  I give up.  I'm going to sit here and do nothing of any importance for the rest of the night and take the late grade for art.  Whatever.  I don't care anymore.

I don't care.

Earworm of the Day: Good Times by Manic Drive because it's been stuck in my head the last couple of days.

And So It Continues...

Fleet the Super Gerbil, boldly running into battle with his trusty... kitchen broom?

I know I said this would be the last "digital sticker style" character I'd make.

But...

Then a friend of suggested I do these guys next...

Galleon and Jacobson: critters from another dimension

Which got me thinking again of characters and poses, and so then I drew this...

A chrono-drive is not nearly as good at telling time as a normal watch.

And it would be a shame not to color it in... .  So it appears I'll be making these for a little while yet.  Hope nobody minds.

Earworm of the Day: The One (I'm Fighting For) by Article One.  I consider this song to be Fleets "theme song".

Wands and Light-boxes: No, This Isn't Hogwarts

I said I'd get it done, and I got it done:

Spitfire:  always a bad idea to get him mad.  Especially when he's armed (or decaffeinated...).

Next I'll do Fleet the Super Gerbil, but after that I'll give this style a rest.  My schedule's filling up now so I better turn my focus back to art projects that will have a grade tacked on.

Today was the first day of the last quarter of school for me.  I'm giddy with excitement; I'm cringing with fear; and I'm all-out stressed about my future and its scheduling.

But it's better than 80% of this summer has been, so I'll take it.

The two classes that met today were Motion Capture and Hand-Drawn Animation.  In motion capture we learned how to calibrate the mocap studio and how sensitive the cameras are to anything reflective.  Like glasses, belt buckles, reflective running shoes.  I swear at one point it was picking up the spiral binding of my notebook; there was a cluster of dots that moved when I did.  It was weird.  But not as weird as calibrating looks.  It involves a reflective ball on the end of a pole and you walk around the stage waving it in figure 8's.  How the computer makes sense of all this, I have no idea.

Hand-Drawn Animation started with the revelation that I already own most of what I need for this class.  Pegbar?  Check.  Hole-punch?  Check.  Stack of paper?  Check.  Richard William's Animator's Survival Kit?  Check.

Light box?

Uh...

So there's always one thing.  But that's nothing compared to my supply list for figure drawing.

Earworm of the Day:  I've had Winter Wrap-Up stuck in my head again, and I hate to repeat myself.  Ooh!  How about the Korra's Main Theme?  Now that's some beautiful background music!

Digital Stickers

So there's this style of drawing/coloring characters, usually chibi versions of characters, that I've been noticing on deviantArt; it involves solid outlines, sharp two-toned shading, and often some sort of flat border around the whole thing to make it look like a sticker.  Often the coloring is textured or water-color-like in some way.  Examples of what I'm babbling about can be found here, here, and here.

Now I rarely attempt to emulate other people's styles.  Sure, I'll gradually incorporate specific techniques as I learn the reasons for them, but going all-out and trying to copy a complete style is not something I try very often.  And really I should because to copy a style one must first understand what goes into the style.  This requires a close examination of another person's artwork.  The end result is learning techniques that were too subtle to notice at first glance.  Coolness comes from the details.

You know how in art class, your teacher always made you stare at master works for, like, ten whole minutes trying to pick apart the color scheme.  Or made you re-draw a da Vinci sketch line-by line?  Or had you try to emulate any other artist's style. This. Is. Why.

I repeat: Coolness is derived from the details you never noticed.

And yes, I only just realized this yesterday.  My apologies; I will now end my rant.

But yeah, that style I mentioned?  I tried it out on Beth:

A sketch, a scanner, a high-texture piece of paper, and 2 ^1/2 hours in Photoshop.  Yup. 

Then I wondered what other characters I could do in this style.  So I drew Spitfire...

My roommate's scanner, have I complained about it enough?  I'm not sure I have.

... and I'm currently in the process of sticker-fying him too.  Maybe I'll be done tonight.  Hard to say.

Earworm of the Day: Shooting Star by Owl City which I listened to while drawing these two images.  Wait, does this mean... *Gasp* I'm turning into an Owl City fan!  Nooooooooooooo!

On second thought, I don't really think there's any way to make me more dorky than I already am... so... I'm immune by virtue of saturation!  That's possible, right?  Right?

Carbon Dating

My textbooks are bought, my student CTA pass has been collected, and all the animation labs are shut down for a re-boot of the system or some-such.  Oh, and I'm trying to get used to a new haircut.  And my childhood fascination with paleontology has resurfaced.

If ever there was a time for me to go totally off my rocker, this weekend would be it.

Today I found a free portfolio building site called Carbon Made which looks like a good place to (finally) construct a professional portfolio.  Linking to deviantART and Vimeo is fine and all, but it doesn't give off that extra flair of knowing what you're doing.

Last week I read a fascinating book about the Field Museum's most famous fossil.  Tyrannosaurus Sue by Steve Fiffer (what a great last name!)  It goes through the whole complicated backstory of Sue, legal battles and all.  (Someone actually did jail-time by the end of it all!)  It also covers some major points in the history of fossil collecting in America.  And all of it is written in perfectly understandable modern lingo, so go check it out if you can.  It's a good read.

But of course this has gotten me looking at more books about ancient critters, though I've decided to look at the Cenozoic this time, see what kind of crazy rhinos and four-legged whales people have dug up.  It should be interesting.

Earworm of the Day: Giggle at the Ghostly from MLP.  Yeah, another one.  I've had this stuck in my head all day.

Two Lady Birds

First, I would like to introduce the newest member of my puppet collection: Julia the marionette.

Julia strikes a pose.

Though I decided Julia was a female bird (or hen I suppose?) in real life most female birds aren't anywhere near as colorful.  It's the males who are invested in putting on a show with long feathers and bright hues (remember that anytime a woman in media evokes a peacock fan.  Peahens are a little more conservative with the tail feathers and are usually brown and green.)

With my recent work on Dripbird, who is definitely male, I started wondering what the female bird of his (totally fictional) species would look like.  And thus I sat down and created Damselbird:

Damselbird, female counterpart of Dripbird

Besides the brown and green coloring (to camouflage against undergrowth) Damselbird has shorter tail feathers and crest feathers, as she would only be using them for communication and defensive postures rather than for showy mating displays.  Her wing feathers are the same length as Dripbird's because, though their species is mostly flightless, they use wings for extending jumps and balancing when running.  The female would need to be equally well equipped for jumping and running, and so the wings stay the same.

I would like to make a Damselbird in Maya in addition to Dripbird, which I don't think will be too hard.  I'd just make a duplicate file of Dripbird and do a pallet swap and a scale function on the feathers.  As for what I'd do with them?  Well, a cute short about Dripbird courtship wouldn't be out of the question (being cartoon birds, you know it'll be just a little sillier than what you've seen on Animal Planet).

Earworm of the Day: Your Love is a Song by Switchfoot

Avian Emotions

Beth will willingly dive into battle with aliens, robots, crime lords, and homicidal librarians... but spiders?  She doesn't do spiders.

I bought a bag of coffee for my dad today and put the bag of beans in my backpack for safe keeping.  My favorite sweater was also stuffed in there.  Now my sweater smells amazing!

In other news, I've been working more on Dripbird.  His legs and claws are now fully rigged, as is his face.

It lives!!! Buahahaha!

Unfortunately I waited till now to create the master locater thingy (usually seen as a big set of arrows at the character's feet).  Everything is grouped under it.  The problem is, when I grouped everything under the locater, the neck sorta... went nuts.  Like translating the character would turn it into an alien giraffe. So for the moment I'm back to square one on the neck.  But that's ok.  At least I have books to tell me how to do that.

Earworm of the Day: Trip the Light by Garry Schyman and sung by Alicia Lemke.  As seen on the fantastic video called Where the Hell is Matt? 2012.  Seriously, it's great.  The scuba-diving part is my favorite.

Rainbow Alarmclock

First, the drawing I mentioned last time with the clock and the frying pan.  For context, it's set the morning after giant killer roaches invaded Dennis and Beth's house and they had to barricade themselves into Beth's room.  After a tense night with little sleep, well... Beth's a little jumpy...

Frying Pan of Doom indeed.

And I know the sizing here makes it super hard to read, so here's the transcript:

Dennis: Zero to deadly in 2 seconds.  I'll have to remember that.

Beth: And it was the nice one with the colored numbers too...

And for the record, Beth's clock with the colored numbers is real.  I got it at Target several years ago.  Sadly, they don't seem to be carrying these anymore.

Also worked more on Dripbird today.  I'm reasonably happy with the leg rigging, or at least I'm totally sick of it and just want to be done.  The skin hasn't been connected and weighted yet, so I attached some cubes to the rig so it could be seen and made this walk test:

Earworm of the Day: Germs by "Weird Al" Yankovic