Law & Ordinance

fake lore, slime-time commute, looooong graves, jute ordinance, and a mini

CATGIRL PROVISIONS

I was asked to design a fake princess for the next episode of Hellavision along the lines of Toriyama’s Dragon Quest and here’s what I ended up with:

Hellavision is a fun animation jam that encourages cutting corners and working under constraints. It’s an opportunity to try something weird or dumb, open to amateurs, professionals, and anyone in-between. This episode is created by Lije Morgan, who is a great animator (he also helped me out with My Jeopardy). The deadline for submissions is September 8th. For one of the previous episodes I made a cursed Seinfeldey contribution.

While I was looking through Toriyama’s designs for inspiration/research, it struck me how much fun there is every line—there’s such a great, mischievous quality about his drawings, and a kind of innocence, too.

From Rocket Slime, actually the only DQ game I played (and loved to bits)

It’s more than just his way of drawing—there’s a unique physicality to his characters, monsters, and environments, that’s hard to describe, let alone imitate.

JUTE LAW, 1940

This is your reminder that I’ll be selling my latests comics and zines at Gosh! Comics in London on August 17th during their Small Press Day (5-6pm). More on that in my previous post, which is a classic.

GEN-Z BOSS AND A MINI

Note for nerds: this was made in Procreate (not Dreams, which I still can’t my head around) by using layer groups as keyframes.

This way, you can have two layers (the linework and the bg here) in each frame. It’s a bit annoying, since you have to create/duplicate a group instead of just pressing plus, but it works.

JUTE LAW, 1962

UNFLAT

Looking through my files, I realized I never shared my process for Flat. The whole thing was made in Blender, using only flat planes.

The main thing was having a perspective shift which was an absolute nightmare to animate—the transition from barista and back. I didn’t want a smooth 2d-to-3d reveal, which has been done before (most notably, in David Oreilly’s Octocat Adventures), so I animated the camera frame-by-frame to get that stuttery semi-flat adjustment.

Then the whole thing was rendered several times, with cut-out shapes of the stickers, then with the colored stickers (each one with various misalignments, so they don’t fit perfectly into the cut-outs).

Continued behind the paywall, along with more cartoons and sketches, and a mysterious looooong grave.