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The Animator’s Survival Kit

| George Coghill

The Animators Survival Kit instructional DVD setThis Animator’s Survival Kit DVD set from Oscar-winning animator Richard Willams looks like a great resource for those animators out there. Personally, I do not have the patience for animation, but it’s fascinating to me.

This DVD set is a companion to Williams’ highly-rated Animator’s Survival Kit book. The site doesn’t seem to indicate if the book is included with the DVD set, but it seems not to be.

Richard Williams was awarded two Oscars for the animation on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit“. He directed and designed Roger Rabbit, Jessica Rabbit, Baby Herman and all the new characters for the Walt Disney/Steven Spielberg production.

The set isn’t cheap at £634.04 (or about $1,252.42 for us U.S. folks as of the date of this post).

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Digital Coloring Tutorials by MAD Magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond

| George Coghill

MAD Magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond digital coloring tutorial screenshotIf you aren’t familiar with cartoonist Tom Richmond, make yourself familiar. This guy’s work is absolutely amazing. Very much in the style of Mort Drucker from MAD Magazine — only taken to the extreme. Not only is his cartooning & caricature style excellent, but his color work is also phenomenal. Tom graciously has taken the time to outline exactly how he digitally colors his artwork in Photoshop in a juicily-detailed three-post tutorial/how-to series on his cartooning blog.

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Color Theory Resources

| George Coghill

Color Wheel artwork

Primary, secondary, tertiary, complimentary, analagous, brightness, hue, value, saturation, tints, shades… do these words mean anything to you? They should.

A post by cartoonist Matt Glover points out ColorFAQ – very basic web guide to color theory. It got me poking around on the internet for some other sites with some more depth on the subject. Sometimes I forget how much I use color theory every single day, it’s just something that sometimes goes on autopilot and is an easy topic to forget to recommend to others.

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Content Aware Image Resizing – Video of New Computer Graphics Technology

| George Coghill

This one is hard to explain without watching the YouTube video over at Creative Bits: Content Aware Image Resizing

The video is a demonstration/presentation from the annual SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) Conference. In short, the video demonstrates computer algorithms which allow an image to be resized horizontally or vertically non-proportionally, without distorting the image. Elements are “reshuffled” inside the image to keep the same basic look of the visual information.

Very interesting.

The Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University

| George Coghill

Who knew that Ohio State University has a Cartoon Research Library? Who knew anybody had a Cartoon Research Library?

A quick search to test the database, I searched for “Mort Drucker, magazine cartoon, MAD Magazine” (by selecting from the pre-existing categories in the search fields). Turns out you only get a textual search result, much like an old-school computer card catalog in a library.

They also sponsor an annual Festival of Cartoon Art, which this year is held October 26-27, 2007.

Odd Rods style scooter hot rod cartoon art at The Scooter Scoop

| George Coghill
Odd Rods inspired scooter hot rod cartoon art
Hot-rod scooter cartoon mascot character.

Steve over at The Scooter Scoop commissioned me a few months back to create an original Odd Rods inspired cartoon illustration for his blog. He’s posted a kudo-laden entry about the Odd Rods style scooter monster hot rod cartoon art I did for him, and I appreciate it very much. Just wanted to return the favor and give Steve and The Scooter Scoop a little press.The “Mod Rod” cartoon art is available at Café Press as well.

Thanks Steve!