WALTZING to the Scrabble Beat-Down

I have a buddy in Switzerland I play Scrabble with.    He tends to win 3 out of 4 games, but I keep on trying.

Since I draw and paint as much as I play I’ve used Scrabble in a lot of cartoons.  This one came about when my he emailed me a score he’d just made on a single play.    (Fortunately, this was not one of our games).

He played 7 letters along the edge of the board, to complete the word: “WALTZING”,  scoring the 50-point bonus for playing all 7 letters and re-tripling the face value of his letters (including the 10 for Z) by landing on BOTH Triple-word score places.

So I commemorated the occasion for him with a sort of trophy-cartoon of his opponent:  Buried, in a single play.

This, by the way is a shot from The Pixie Pit where we play.

Karma Macchiato – Day 3

Day 3:

I refined the painting of the cup in ArtRage Studio and did a couple of fast tests to see how it rendered at various sizes.

Looked pretty good so I set to working out a fast way to transform all 42 of the morphing crema transformation images from circles to ellipses in Paint.Net and imported each of them into a layered ArtRage file.

The next step was to export each one of them as a separate GIF to get them ready to animate.

I then moved the set into UnFREEze and tested several frame speeds to get the result I was looking for.

Here you see the Test Version 6.0 in motion.

 

Karma Macchiato – Day 2

Yesterday I dragged an old project out and dusted it off.   (here)

Looks like this is going to work,  so today I did a couple of things:   1. I didn’t really care for the exact hue of the coffee image so I used Paint.Net to color-shift all 42 images from umber towards sienna.  2. I used Paint.Net to resize the same set from 200×200 to 200×115 pixels, or, from ROUND images to ELLIPSE images.

Then I tested again by making a fast 10-image save of the morph using ArtRage (which plays well with Paint.Net, as both programs can use the Photoshop .psd Format.)

The result?   you decide.

Concept Test 3

Coffee Keeps Life in Balance

I’m working on a new project today.

The Working Title is:  “Karma Macchiato”.

1st rough in ArtRage Studio

The original idea for this one came about in August of 2008 while I was playing around with some new project ideas.

Coffee is one of my favorite subjects.  I had this black & white Yin/Yang image.  I imagined painting it as the foamy ‘crema’ atop a cup of a macchiato.  (In Italian “caffe macchiato” means “marked coffee”  – an espresso with just a little marking of steamed milk on top. )

So I’d done a few sketches when it occurred to me that just maybe I could animate it – make it transform, morphing from a crema into the Yin & Yang…

The image below is the origial proof-of-concept test.   This is an image type called a “GIF” – stands for Graphical Interchange Format.

"Yin/Yang Crema" by Raoul Widman, 2008

I used Paint.Net  to create all of the individual images and then interlaced them with UnFREEze to create the animated GIF.

The project went on the shelf and I decided to haul it out and do it up right.  So that’s what I’m up to today.  When it’s finished I’ll come back and post it here.

ArtRage Studio Pro

I was doing a massive file-sorting operation here and ran across this fast sketch I made a couple of years ago when I decided to test ArtRage.  I’m posting it just because it’s such a fine example of the depth and contrast you can get out of the platform.

Holy Crap! You ate 56 Chicken Nuggets ?? — No problemo

New York recently made this Dual-Option Siphonic Dual Flush  the official Toilet for all new city construction and for replacements.  Now, these things save a LOT of water, so the reason is obvious.

But it’s this DEMO that has me so amazed.  It’s very – – suggestive.  I mean okay it does impress.  But it’s kinda bizarre when you consider it is representing the most extreme disposal scenarios imaginable by engineers . . . ” You ate

HOW MANY tamales ???!! Scary, man. Doesn’t this imply a sort of superhuman view of New Yorkers as eating competition marathoners?

Independence day

Wife v1.7.5

I was having a fun conversation today by e-mail with a good friend about marriage and cliches about wives and told him mine didn’t fit any of the cliches.  He joked back that maybe I should get a different one.  I so enjoyed writing my answer to him I’ll go ahead and post it here:

    “I’m happy with the functionality of wife v1.7.5.  
Runs stably with a true absence of glitches.  
Occasionally slows down on AdWare but remains secure.  
Absolutely immune to intrusion attempts by other users.  Never been hacked.  
Occasional crash reports result in daily bug fixes and updates are readily available.  
REALLY nice interface and has a number of changeable and very colorful skin choices available.  
Very intuitive navigation with an accessible Help file, On or Offline.  
Her code is simple & compact, with far fewer lines than found commercially in other programs.  
An upgrade to wife 2.0 would be immensely costly and no software currently available could even
compare, lacking all of these features.                   Besides – I got the Lifetime Warranty !”

Freelancing in Hawaii

In 1979 I was working in Honolulu.

A local shopkeeper of a mini mart on Nimitz Highway asked me to design a logo and paint it on her shop’s window.

So I drew a cartoon of a ‘Haole’ guy carrying a 6-pack and a sack of chips on 2 sheets of paper, with pencil and a Sharpie marker.

I taped the cartoon sketch to  the inside of her window and painted it on the outside.

According to Google the Nimitz Mart is still there, so I called them to ask if they still had my logo painted on the window, but alas, it is no longer there.

Alas, it is gone.

But I still have the 2 sheets with the original cartoon.

I liked this guy.  This was a fun project.

So, if you ever happen to be on that little stretch of Nimitz, between the Airport and old downtown Honolulu, let them know there is a logo that is still available for restoration….

I’d share it again for a beer or a package of sweet & sour Mango rind.

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