So I would be wrong to not say anything about what have become my two biggest resources and cartoon safe havens. The first has to be Mr. Stephen Worth and the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. Animation and so much more. This is a place I'd seriously like to visit when I'm back stateside. I've had the opportunity to talk online with Mr. Worth and he is definitely a man that is passionate about the past and the future of the animation industry.

The online site has so much information, theory, illustrations, notes and other things from the various studios I can only imagine what the physical Archive contains. Everything from Walt Disney and the nine old men, if you don't know their names you know their huge body of work, to Fleischer and Walter Lantz. The most valuable thing that the archive does, in my opinion, is to shed light on the true men of genius behind the cartoons and characters that made the animation famous. Carlo Vinci, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Otto Messmer, Grim Natwick, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Robert McKimson I could go on and on. In the cases of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies the directors/animators are names that, people who gerw up watching these feats of drawing, are widely known. Add to all this great animation the amazing illustrations, most of which people my age have never seen, and Mr. Worth, and his team of volunteers, have probably the greatest collection of underappreciated American Art in the Country. I almost forgot the great instructional material which allow me to sweet segue to John K's blog.

John Kricfalusi is the creator of what was easily one of my favorite cartoons of the 90's, Rocko's Modern life was the other. Sure there was Captain Planet and a host of others whose title songs I recite from memory but Ren and Stimpy made Nickelodeon the channel to watch. With Ren and Stimpy off the air for a long time now, John preaches the gospel of cartooning and vents about the state of animated affairs on his blog, all kinds of stuff.

I personally have read every post on his site and have taken notes as well as saved the nuggets that I want to share with others. I wish I could have him as an animation theory teacher, and drawing, because his knowledge of old cartoons, the animation industry today and knwledge of what made old cartoons better than the new cartoons is amazing.

When I first started looking around at the blogs of chracter designers I noticed a common thread amongst the web of blog links of the artists. Those that went to CalArts all drew the same and it was the same style that I recognized from many of the cartoons I watched on Cartoon Network. When I stumbled upon John's site I was shown the influences behind this 'modern' style, Mary Blair and whole lot of Disney poorly imitated, and the reasons for it's existance. If more young artists read through what John has to say about animation, it's hard to think about the result. Not that hard since I desire to make it happen in the medium that John K isn't a fan of, go 3D! If watch Ren and Stimpy then read John's blog you can see how deeply infused his personality is into both, even moreso if you get the opportunity to see him talk about cartoons on one the Looney Tunes DVD collections.

With all that said my pool of influence and inspiration has been deepened courtesy of these two men and their dedication to a revival of the craft of animation, or in John's words putting the 'cartooniness' back into cartoons.

I promise I'll talk about AM later on. Especially about my first critique. I've had some long nights at the office and haven't prepared properly for a good AM post.

Stu's first time...

So I took my first stab at posing Stu from my sketches of people. The assginment was to sketch from life and then pose Stu. Some of my sketches came from the Gospel Service where I play trumpet. There was a new reverend that started and decided that I wanted to recreate this slow, MLK Jr-esque preacher at the point where he was at his firiest: When he was letting us know how to save our souls.

As you can see my first attempt with Stu doesn't look that fiery. In fact I wasn't really sold on the pose at all.

The cool thing about AM is the interactivity of the site. Before posting this pose for my assignment I subjected it to the Public Review to see if someone would be able help Stu help me. Within a few hours I had five responses from some folks that aren't even in my class. All of them focused on the pose.

It was Chris that took home the secret two cookie prize. His comment that Stu's pose was very "Fred Astaire like" let me know what the problem was. Stu needs to be leaning forwarding engaging the audience not leaning back and letting you come to him. He's not selling you something and he definitely should not be dancing-yet. He should be letting you know of the dire consequences ahead of those not living right.

The idea of what I was trying to do with Stu's pose was something that I'm noticing some people seem to missing, some people=the two or three whose work I've seen. But there's a lack of getting the model into a specific character as opposed just a pose. Granted Stu has no face but the pose that he's in should be able to tell what's going on every bit as well.

We'll see it's possible I've been reading way too much Kricfalusi, and by possible I mean I've read every entry that is in his blog and have the downloaded his entire 'book' from said entries.

Ok, for the record watching another mentor critique another AM student's work is...wow. I think thePublic Review and the Mentor Critique are easily worth, the sum of money I'd rather not talk about, what I paid for tuition. Twenty minutes on about 150 frames and it easily could've been longer. So yeah. These guys do a good job. Not to mention every student can view another student's Mentor Critique.

If only Animation Mentor had been around when I was looking for schools initially. Le sigh.