I recently worked with Mighty Grams, a company that does custom Invitations and Thank You cards. They provide their users with cards that have a more organic, illustrated feel to them.  It was a blast working with them and if want to support a company run by good people, they’re definitely one I’d recommend you give a shot. All of the illustrators and designers that they selected for their launch are very talented. You should go take a look at their website. Eileen commands it. They also update their facebook and twitter accounts pretty often, if you’d like to keep up with them that way. They have a 20% off promotion until May 31, 2012.

If you’d like to take a look at the ones I did, here they are:

• Barnstormer Invitation Card and Thank You Card
• Breaking Invitation Card and Thank You Card
• Mt. Rushmore Free Digital Postcard 

Mighty Grams also did profile videos for their participating launch designers. I’m posting the video they did for me because I secretly like attention even though I pretend that I do not. I’ve only watched it once because I’m completely insecure about that sort of thing, but hopefully you enjoy it. I’m a complex person!

I purchased two animation apps for my iPad, Animation Desk and Animation HD. I’ll post my tests, because, why the hell not?  This is my first test in Animation Desk. I haven’t played around with Animaton HD yet. So, we’ll get back to that.

I like the feel of Animation Desk. It encourages a free form approach, providing you with a variety of mediums to create in (pencil, crayon, brushes) and no line correction. You may control the opacity and cursor size of your drawing tool. Your default view has an animation desk motif, but you’re able to expand to a full canvas, where you can zoom in and out of your work. Playback speeds include 1X, 1/2X and 1/4X.

You have a Middle Ground and Foreground presented to you upon opening the app. If you’d like, you may also add a background in the File menu. You’re allowed multiple scenes in your project. Projects may be backed up to your desktop, by following instructions found in the Package Manager portion of the File menu. Uploading my animation to YouTube was cinch. I tried e-mailing the results to myself as well. It sent the file as a 640×480 Quicktime file. I found the playback of the file on YouTube to be a little faster than what I saw on my iPad.

There’s a few other tools in the app that I haven’t had a chance to play around with yet, and it looks like you can add sound.

While experimenting in the program, I found myself becoming a little frustrated with the onion-skinning. It’s great that it’s in there, but I sometimes found my frames looking a bit muddied with it turned on. It’d be nice if they cleaned up that feature to the point where it was easy to distinguish your lines on the previous or next frame from the one you’re currently working on.

Having worked with a Master Oxberry camera and pencil test cameras that involved recording to VHS back in college, the concept of being able to work on a tablet and upload immediately still blows my mind.

That’s it for Test 1 with Animation Desk.

I tightened up the site design a bit more. I wanted to add some texture in. You’ll see that in the background and the sidebar. My name logo changed. I switched the portfolio menu from an image-based one to text to make it easier to update. With regards to the WordPress theme that I had used as a base, there were a lot of spacing and font formatting decisions that I didn’t agree with. So, I fixed those. I muted the colors on the side bar some more, because I felt it was competing too much with the content. I also switched out the “art makes me smile” text with a graphic.

I’ll probably want to make more tweaks down the road, but this was good for one sit down. I’m done for now and that means I get to sleep!

We’ve been keeping up with sending out a holiday e-card on toonzone.net for the last few years. Here’s the one we sent out just prior to the Christmas holiday. The concept was a group effort. I did the sketching, inks and colors. It was a lot of fun to hammer out, particularly the expressions. Inks and final colors below:

Alright! Acidic Tees launched!

I did a series of t-shirts for them. So, be sure to check those out here and like their Facebook page so you can keep up with their latest news. Feedback is always welcome.

Most of the art I do is happy and cute and peppy. So, let’s switch things up a bit. Here’s an inked Zombie and a writhing person growing out of a skull that has sharp knives pointing away from it. Presumably, so that the skull will not accidentally cut itself. No one wants that.

While I was on vacation, I didn’t have a lot of internet. So, I spent some of that time doing some poses, costumes to add to the toonzone mascot’s model and idea sheet. I just inked the new poses and did the flats. I also split the costumes off into a new page. Here goes.

Recently, George “The Urban Jibaro” Torres allowed me the opportunity to redesign the logo for his online magazine, Sofrito For Your Soul. The magazine promotes the evolution of Latino culture in the United States and shares the spirit of that heritage through art, music, dance and other forms of communication. It was an honor to work on a project with someone who’s clearly quite passionate about what they’re doing.

As with all my personal sketches, I usually return to them down the road to ink them. While I was working on this one, I started thinking back on the Power Pack comic Marvel put out in the 80′s. That was a great series. Engaging, mature stories featuring a team of unsupervised super hero children and fantastic art by June Brigman. It is completely and totally worth your time.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Inked sketch of a kid as a superhero.

One of my buddies from the Bronx, Junior McClean, has two locations where you may check out and purchase his designs on t-shirts, iPhone, iPad cases, greeting cards and more. His designs are pretty slick. So, be sure to check out his Zazzle and RedBubble stores.