Wednesday, January 14, 2009

"Work-cation"

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Hi folks,

I'm writing from my vacation, or "work-cation" as I have so cleverly redubbed it (yeah, I'm not expecting an emmy nod for that one).

I'm holing up in this nice little time share with the rest of America's SOV crowd (Seniors on Vacation). Guess which unit is mine?



Got a visit from my good friend Kim. Here she is after one of our signature low-key surf sessions:


Working on vacation is obviously a bit limiting... it feels so primitive without my Cintiq, my scanner, my light table, my blasting music.... but one adapts. I'm doing all my character cleanup on my bulky laptop (I call it the lap-crusher) with a mini optical mouse. If I need something more hand-drawn, I'll draw it in my sketch pad, snap a photo, dump the image onto the laptop through the USB cable, then clean it up via mouse in Flash. Oh, and I have i-tunes for the blazing rock!


It's a little more difficult when you want to work outdoors. The first two nights here featured a spectacular full moon, so I was out on the grass patio in a deck chair cleaning up Chuck Norris' head. Though my moon-tan might suggest otherwise, there wasn't enough light to see the keyboard very well, so there will probably be a lot of mis-named assets.

I'm also using this trip to meet with a friend here who is gearing up to produce an autobiographical animated series taking place in Melbourne. We'll be snapping lots of photos today of this guy's world to take back to our icy caves and turn into pure entertainment gold. More on that later - hopefully.

Amid the sunshine and surfing are tons of little nuggets of inspiration. Here's one that had me tickled:

Didn't catch that? Let me zoom in for ya:


You see those damn birds? What a poop-storm that must be! I can't wait to work that into a cartoon.

While I'm gone, the Family back at Flinch is keeping the artistic vibe flowing:

Charlie has a morning rendezvous with a dishy Waffle Lady!
More to come -

T



3 comments:

Nazario said...

Why is it that the no matter how cool the moon looks, one only gets a yellow spot when he takes a picture. Coincidentally I took a picture of the last full moon as well and, as always, I didn't get it right. Gotta get me some telescopic lens or something.

Anyway, I hope you had a relaxing and inspiring "work-cation". Will we see more character clean ups soon?

JoJo's World said...

Tony,
I'm glad you guys got to see JoJo's World here at the beach. I can get your ticket fixed if it happened in Melbouring.
JoJo

FrankenBarry said...

Hey, I can hear the ocean in that seashell. Selling saeahells by the seashore is a great part-time gig for work-cationing cartoonists.

Waffle lady would've been one of Elvis's dream girls. Mmmm... waffle lady!