Drawn on my new iPad of course. It’s a marvelous content creation device (I’m even dictating this!), but I must admit that using it for drawing doesn’t make as much sense as I thought it did when I bought my original iPad about a year and a half ago. Much like doodling on an Etch-a-Sketch, there’s a certain pleasure in overcoming the iPad’s inherent limitations to produce a competent drawing. All iPads thus far have been designed to register relatively imprecise input from your fat fingers.

The usual coffee shop sketches. If they look a little sloppier than usual, it’s because I’m really trying to sketch without looking at the paper. It allows me to capture fleeting motion that would otherwise pass me by if I were to focus on drawing instead of on seeing.

Must be Kerkel week. I thought I’d throw out a little reminder that the retarded protracted comic strip contest is STILL going on. Click here I think this week’s episode is my favorite; every panel with Kerkel makes me laugh, and I drew the darn thing. (That probably means this is the week I’ll be eliminated.)

Going back to some basic animation concepts here; although I feel like I learned something from the 11-second animation contest, I also threw a lot of these basics out the window–I was in a hurry, and I was anxious to see my characters move. This picture illustrates basic timing and spacing. If I wanted to have Kerkel angrily react to something by turning his head, and have the action take 16 frames from start to finish, I’d begin by drawing the two “extremes,” as indicated in black.

Okay, so it’s no substitute for drawing from life, but a mannequin useful for figuring out poses and lighting. As you can see I also used my 3D cartoon head for reference. Now I just need a model hand (real or virtual), and I’m all set.