Those Who Throw Milestones…
So… as I sit to type this live on the blog, the hit counter is at 29,999. To paraphrase from classic Doctor Who, this moment has been prepared for…
Over the weekend I prepared the above simple animation, knowing the milestone would probably happen early this week. Truth be told, this probably would have happened in January but the combination of illnesses and some Internet outages took away from my normal stream of visitors. I didn’t lose any followers (thank you all!) during those times but I did obviously lose hits those days when I hadn’t posted new nonsense.
I’ve continued the tradition of building upon the first animation I made when I hit the 10,000 hit milestone… then again at 20,000. Will I keep doing this? Who knows. I kind of like keeping the aspect of where-I-came-from by continually building on what came before for each new milestone.
Meanwhile… some less celebrated, but still occurring, milestones… I have over 975 posts on the blog now. Sometime in the next couple of weeks I will make the 1000th post on the blog. I’ll try and pay attention and do something special for that. That’s a lot of blogging in about 2.5 years! Also of note… at some point this past week I reached 650 episodes of my comic strip ‘Sects on the blog. I’ve had a lot of skipped days, some will be revisited, or that count could have been higher. Again, lots of nonsense from me the last couple of years! 🙂
I would like to take this moment to thank everyone who follows, and everyone who visits regularly. You give me encouragement to keep the nonsense going. Thank you! Also thank you to everyone who randomly stops by irregularly… one day I’ll ensnare you in my web of nonsense! 😉
Hit Me Baby 20000 More Times…
Apologies to Britney Spears for the butchered title… but I crossed the 20,000 hit milestone earlier today. I had thought I might get there by the end of March, so I only missed my guess by a few days. I almost stayed up last night until it happened, but ultimately decided I enjoyed sleep far too much to put that off!
When I crossed 10,000 hits, I made a nifty little animated GIF last year… so I was prepared to do that again for this milestone, and earlier in the week decided to build upon what I’d done previously. I think this makes for a nice simple way to celebrate hitting 20,000 while acknowledging what came before. For what it’s worth, it took me eleven months to get to the first plateau, but only nine more months to get to this one. That’s slow, but steady, progress.
Thanks go to everyone who has visited, and visited again, as well as those who might be seeing this very post on their first visit here. I hope you all stick around and bring in more friends… or enemies, your enemies are also welcome. 🙂 Here’s hoping to pick up the pace and be around for a while!
Vampirella is Coming to Get You!
More fun with simple animation… this time with my recent Vampirella illustration.
It’s admittedly a little clumsy in places, but I was trying to get the most bang for buck out of just 10 frames. Shrinking the image made it almost a worthless endeavor, and keeping the image larger meant exponentially larger final size with each added frame. So I tried to maneuver some of the individual bats around a bit in the background so they were doing more than just growing in size.
Also, it’s a nice happy accident that Vampirella walking is an illusion created solely by mirroring her image left-to-right in each successive frame. Amazing how just that, makes the hips sway and the feet appear to be moving alternately in front of each other.
This is just one fun example of something you can do to re-purpose a clean vector illustration once you have one. A lot easier to manipulate and maintain high-quality images in each frame when working this way than when working with a bitmap source image. Please, as always, let me know what you think!
Tardis Appearing Act…
So… I was proud of my Doctor Who inspired Tardis drawings from a couple of weeks back, and decided I had a good candidate to once again dip my toes into simple animation. Behold the mysteriously appearing Tardis, which then disappears again just as mysteriously, over and over again…
If I had this to do all over, I would do two simple things differently. One is that I would make the light on top blink a bit slower. I think it blinks a bit fast and it’s easy not to notice it blinking at all. The other thing I would change is to actually put something behind the Tardis so that the materialization and dematerialization obscures and then reveals something in the background.
Felt like I ought to get this posted before the end of the current series (only a couple more new episodes to go after tonight) so people could see it while in the right mood. Remember, if you are interested in requesting my services as an Illustrator, please use the Contact page and let me know as much as you can about your request.
And Another Thing!
After drawing and posting my Marvel Comics Thing character illustration the other day… I literally went back to the drawing board and took another crack at it. When I say literally, I literally mean literally! I still have my drawing board from the Engineering Drafting class I took in college and it comes in handy for this situation.
I enjoy working digitally, and it lets me have a clean look and it’s also easy to make tweaks along the way but there is something to be said for working old school. It’s hard to capture the organic look of working with your hands on a drawing. That’s why I was happy to go back to the drawing board on this one.
Pretty straight-forward stuff in the process here… penciled most of the detail in first, inked over that with a brush-tip Sharpie pen, and finished it off with colored pencils. I was working with this brush-tip pen for the first time, and wasn’t good at controlling my line-weights the way I wanted. The inking is a little heavier than I meant, but the coloring helped bring back some of what I felt I lost during the inking stage.
The animated image shows the transition from pencils to inks to finished drawing. Please let me know what you think. Remember, if you are interested in requesting my services as an Illustrator, please use the Contact page and let me know as much as you can about your request.
The Hits Keep on Coming!
I knew it was coming this weekend… just not when, and I still do not know by whom… but in celebration of my 10,000th blog hit I created a special animation for you.
I’ve been blogging for a shade less than 11 months now and, considering I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, it feels like I made it to 10,000 hits pretty quickly. Thank you to everyone who has been following my blog, and especially those who have been here from the very beginning! I wouldn’t be here without the likes and the comments from all of you.
Now… if each of you will tell two friends, and they tell two friends… and so on… and so on… (as that famous shampoo commercial once demanded) then we will all have successfully united the world in unifying annoyance with me! 🙂
And now, with that self-celebration out of the way, I return you to your regularly scheduled programming… which, actually, is nothing until later tonight when it is time to post the Monday episode of ‘Sects!
Animated Fringe Kisses
Continuing to play around with animated GIFs and simple animation, I decided to go back to the beginning and animate my first Fringe Kisses comic strip. Some of the stories lend themselves better than others to animation, so I might continue to animate some of these as I go along. Let me know what you think, and if you would like to see more.
Fun with Animated GIFs
In addition to writing and drawing, I also like to play around with animation. There are some fun things you can do fairly easily with animated GIF files. From time to time I will post things I am playing with as well as perhaps revisiting some animations I have created in the past.
Up first is a simple animated logo design created from my “From Where I Sit” logo. The animation here is meant to drive home the sitting notion from my comic strip by literally sitting that last letter.
This next one is a rolling version of my 45rpm adapter. I initially thought of a simple rotation, but I like the slight bouncing effect that was kind of accidental when I was processing the files so I left it that way!
i.e. Sequential... Journal... Visual... 
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