Everything Else!

Shackleton

2012-02-15T23:39:00.000-08:00

Shackleton is thoughtful, careful insanity.

300 pics

2010-12-10T19:55:00.000-08:00

Not the usual Fat Friday Fare, a short and interesting clip with awful music:

Fat Fridays with Natalie Portman.

2010-12-03T19:23:00.000-08:00

It's a day in the life of Natalie Portman :)

Fat Friday with Inspired Flight

2010-11-19T16:52:00.000-08:00

Midweek Madness

2010-11-17T01:22:00.000-08:00

Oh Holidays, you just sneak up on me every year, even though I know you are crouched in the calender like a hidden tiger-dragon.

To make up for it I bring you a webcomic from a fellow blogger: Endless Origami.

EO is a smart and simple comic started not very long ago that is already attracting a big following. It's a big inspiration for me as I practice making my own webcomic.

Also, here is a song as well. It is in much the same vein as the post before; calm, relaxing beats with thoughtful melodies and atmosphere.

Thanks for being patient with me. I'll have a new blog post up on EM soon that I am really excited to share. (PS I see you Thanksgiving, hiding behind that turkey, with a gleam in your eye.)

Fat Friday on Saturday?

2010-11-13T02:45:00.000-08:00

Friday got away from me. Hopefully this song makes up for it.

This is some of the fattest sound out there. Spunkshine is an undiscovered audio miracle. If you're feeling like your music isn't open or deep enough, this will fill the void.

No webcomic for a while

2010-11-08T13:56:00.000-08:00

Hello folks. First off, thanks for all the comments and poll votes for my webcomic ideas. You've helped me formulate a working set of characters and a world where those characters can romp around on adventures.

Unfortunately, I suck at drawing on my tablet, and although I have my first comic mapped out on a story-board, I still have nothing worthy of your time or attention. I hope I will soon.

Thanks for reading and in the meantime enjoy Dr. McNinja and other great webcomics each Monday on Erroneous Maximus.

Fat Friday #2

2010-11-05T14:31:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, not much to say except HAPPY FRIDAY!!!

You made it through the week, so here is something for you. I made this track using a method where I produce one sound in a studio, modify it in an ambient program, then slice it up and arrange it as best I can. The result is kind of a very simple stress relief. PS I'm not very good at making music - it's my least practiced hobby, but I hope you enjoy!

Enterstated by aarongbeyer

A Challenge Appears!

2010-11-01T20:11:00.000-07:00

So I found out that I am lacking some key technical equipment for webcomic...ing.

First I tried to draw my ideas in MS Paint. It looked like what I do with my terrible animal animations, but somehow worse.

Then I thought drawing it manually would be nice. However, I have no scanner. I do have a Blackberry camera though, so here we go!

I am bad at this.

They may be hard to see, and also that says "Probably all 3 at once" at the bottom. That was me thinking that I might have to throw these around for a while before one stands out.

I think the strongest one is Soap Opera. Imagine all the antics and good times soap bubbles could have. I got excited when I thought of this idea, then when it comes to drawing it I just keep drawing bubbles. I think some memorable shapes might help this idea.

My second favorite is Dr. Lemon, O.D. I like it because my brother is an optometrist, and he could be an endless source of humorous material.

What do you guys think? "Your ideas are bad and you should feel bad" is option 4.

Fat Fridays!

2010-10-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

I'm currently working on Part 4 of the Ghost Story on Erroneous Maximus. I'm also working on squishing my webcomic ideas into something presentable.

Those won't be done until next week though, so in the meantime I introduce to you ... FAT FRIDAY!

What is this madness you speak of, oh grizzled wizard?

Well, I like music, and I like weekends. I want to share some music each Friday that gets me excited for the weekend. Generally things with fat beats. I'll start out with a modern classic of electronica: Bassnectar, and his wunderbar piece called Timestretch. It feels like Bassnectar can stretch time with this track, so lets stretch the weekend a little further this Fat Friday!

Have a safe and happy Halloween weekend!

Comic ideas

2010-10-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

Time for an update!

So far I have 2 comic ideas that are feasible and original. I'll be sketching up some rough character ideas the remainder of this week, and then putting something together (probably in paint) over the weekend, so I can showcase both ideas on Monday!

Monday Comic Challenge!

2010-10-25T02:31:00.000-07:00

New webcomics from around the intertubes every Monday, on Erroneous Maximus

This week is dedicated to NEDROID and BEARTATO! Could it get any better?

Possibly!*

*Blogging is really great. I always get excited to share new stuff with everyone. It's a feeling like stepping off a cliff, but waiting below is a giant marshmallow to catch you. Which you then chew through to another cliff and marshmallow. Also there is bacon in the center of the marshmallow. Right, so, here is the deal-yo:

My personal challenge is to create a new webcomic, from scratch, and place it on this blog every Monday**.

Check my art below to see what these will probably end up looking like. Extremely homely and rough, and I expect the humor will be the same! Hopefully, over time, these things will improve.

My goal is to make everyone's Monday a little more enjoyable, and of course to get better at this stuff too.

**Unless life sucker punches me and I have to do other things for a while.

A slew of creatures!

2010-10-23T05:57:00.000-07:00

By popular request, a unicorn (an?)!

To be clear, this handsome young unicorn is saying "Neeeeigh" and then "Weehehehe", which are the two more common animal calls that unicorns native to North America will make when performing magic.

And now for two more poorly drawn and roughly animated forest friends!

He'll get there...

Owl + Sugar

More later - maybe some music, maybe something else. I don't know.

Easy Animations!

2010-10-18T02:58:00.000-07:00

First, draw something simple in MS paint.

(or use another drawing program of your choice)

The simpler the better, to begin with.

To demonstrate, I drew a woodland creature of questionable species.


Inanimate object!

The poor creature is frozen in time, so we better free it fast!

First and foremost, name your creation! (optional)

This one's name is Rumbelly IV

The next step is to determine the movement we want. Anything is possible! Since the drawing took about 20 seconds, lets take about that long to figure out the movement. Then we can churn out our very own lo-fi forest!

I for one would like to see Rumbelly wag, and then have him growl.

BUT HOW?!

Well, just go to your original wire-frame, and modify! To wag his tail, Rumbelly's tail must be erased and made to appear - in separate drawings - in the locations where it will move to.

The number of locations you move something to is important. This is because if I animated Rumbelly's tail to seven different locations, it would look smooth, but if 6 of those seven locations were tiny adjustments, while the 7th moved a large amount, the animation would look smooth then jerky. Basically, you can animate with a minimum of one change to one picture, and the human eye will fill in the movement. More frames gives a smoother animation, and the human eye likes more than 24 frames per second!

Cripes, eyes, calm down. We are going to give you like 5 per second and you shall see it works much better for lo-fi things such as Rumbelly. Eyeroll at my own eyes.

As you can see there are about infinity animation rabbit-holes above that you can go down and learn about endlessly. Some people did this and they are now called Pixar and Dreamworks.

Like I said though, we are after some lo-fi goodness, and the basics of animation, so I'll just make 2 more pictures of Rumbelly's tail in different places.

I like to name them starting with 1

This is #3

To make him growl, I'll just make an extra one with his mouth open.

Now what?

Now we get a GIF animator from the amazing intertubes! I like one called "Easy GIF animator". It is a demo download, but you can use it many times for this sort of thing. By the time it runs out you are either sure you want to be an animator or you are done with this noise. It's a tiny file and doesn't mess with your computer.

When you open your animator, start a new animation. In Easy GIF, this will prompt you to upload pictures. Just upload them in order (numbering them helps here). I like indefinite animations, and I like my delay about .15 to .20/sec for lo-fi projects. I also just set it as center, and so on.

You can monkey with the setting all you want I guess. I am going to load up Rumbelly!

graw!

Well now, we have a little creature that does our bidding, mwahahaha!

You can see here I did the frame sequence: 1-1-2-3-2-1-1-4: This makes Rumbelly pause, wag, pause, growl.

A different sequence gets very different results!

doh-ray-me!

We can do whatever we want!

We could put a wizard's hat on the old fellow, or we could make Rumbelly scamper through some woodlands.

One of the best things is to color your animation once you have it moving how you want and where you want.

meep

See!

Usually for these I will drop the file into .gif format within MS paint itself. The program will degrade the picture quality, which makes your lo-fi more savory. Yes, savory.

There's a lot more you can add, and you can make huge scenes or entire epic sagas using this method.

That's all for now. I can go into more detail if anyone wants, but that's the basic nuts and bolts to simple gif animation.

Questions? Comments? Creatures?

Tutorial Incoming

2010-10-16T17:30:00.000-07:00

I'll post a tutorial on how to make simple MS paint drawings into simple animations (only takes a few minutes) soon!

I started doing these because at my current job we have an interoffice chat, and new emoticons were a form of crack/cocaine to us entertainment starved cube-dwellers.

In the meanwhile, have pic and gif of an impatient rhino.


He gets blurry when he moves fast?

2010-10-15T22:57:00.000-07:00

So, what's up internet? Here's a bird I drew.

And here he is animated.

Oh hello!

2010-10-13T19:18:00.000-07:00

Why yes, I do need two blogs!

This one is for everything else besides writing that I think is nice or interesting or funny or...just drawings or music I make.

This respectable gentleman's blog got me thinking I should make a more lighthearted blog. As my first post, have a bunny I drew in MS Paint!