Meeting Reminder

Because Lynne takes forever to write up an email, and is still jet-lagged from Hawai'i, and from staying up all night reading the entire Naruto series online in one sitting...and because I can't sleep and might as well do something productive before I forget about it...

The meeting scheduled for 12 PM Saturday, January 31st is still on, as originally mentioned here (click!).

You should receive a confirmation email from Lynne regarding the address & phone number to call to get buzzed in.

Be there, or taste our squirrely wrath!

We do have squirrely wrath, you know. It's one of our hidden "nature" things.

Andrew Wyeth, RIP

Jan. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Andrew Wyeth, the U.S. realist painter whose haunting portrait of a young woman lying in a field and gazing at a distant farmhouse became one of the iconic images of 20th-century American art, has died. He was 91.

What many people don't know is that he was an influence of Charles Schulz. You'd never know it by his drawing style in Peanuts, but Schulz had great admiration for the artist.

http://comics.com/peanuts/1999-01-29/

Wyeth's most famous painting, Christina's World, played a subtle role in the comic series Preacher, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. The mother of the protagonist deeply understood the emotions conveyed by the painting, as it was a reflection of her own mental and social paralysis. Glenn Fabry, cover artist for the series, offered up his own take on the illustration for issue #43.


http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/preacher

The Infinite Canvas

Happy New Year, everyone. We're all still recovering from the holidays and the return to the daily grind, so please forgive the recent lack of posts. To kick things off, here's some stuff on an idea from Scott McCloud's book, Reinventing Comics.



I Can't Stop Thinking!

If you're in New York City, please check out MoCCA's exhibit.

2009 New York Comic Con: February 6th - 8th

A reminder to you all, January 2nd is the last day to register and have your tickets mailed to you. After that you will have to pick them up at the Jacob Javitz convention center. Have you bought your tickets yet?

Seam Carving/Liquid Resize

Mentioned WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY back in the second post on this blog, the program Seam Carving (a tool for photo manipulation) has been picked up by onOne Software for development and renamed Liquid Resize. onOne has produced a couple of handy Photoshop plugins, like Genuine Fractals for up-rezzing low resolution images. They do quality work, so I have high expectations for when it's released.

Salon Quickie Tip #3: Matt Groening on Character Design

Matt Groening: The secret of designing cartoon characters — and I’m giving away this secret now to all of you out there — is: you make a character that you can tell who it is in silhouette. I learned this from watching Mickey Mouse as a kid. You can tell Mickey Mouse from a mile away…those two big ears. Same thing with Popeye, same thing with Batman. And so, if you look at the Simpsons, they’re all identifiable in silhouette. Bart with the picket fence hair, Marge with the beehive, and Homer with the two little hairs, and all the rest. So…I think about hair quite a lot.

Good advice, I think the principle of silhouettes in character design can be expanded a bit more though. But that's for the next article...

Inkscape

Via Lifehacker, via gHacks:


"Inkscape is a free, open-source and cross-platform vector editor. Whilst it will no doubt lack behind Illustrator in certain aspects, in my opinion it suffices the requirements of any non-professional graphic designer."

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks pretty snazzy!