Back in the mid 2000's, a few animation studios were forming here in Orlando after the closing of Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida. One of these studios, Cecropia, set up shop to make a video game with quality 2D animation; not unlike the Don Bluth games of the 80's, "Dragon's Lair" & "Space Ace", except theirs wouldn't be an action game. They ended up hiring a lot of the very talented animation artists in town (many of them my friends) and ended up with "The Act", a hand-drawn animated romantic comedy game. Luckily, I was hired to do some clean-up animation (I worked on Edgar, Sylvia, Wally, and one of the doctors) and animate the game's instructions and comic special effects in Flash ( I also ended up teaching Flash at the studio). Check out some of the original art for it here: http://theactgame.com/Creation/
I'm really glad to finally see this game out in the open and hopefully enjoyed by people. The game was originally being sold to the arcade market but it is now being released to the iPad & iPhone. Check it out and download it in the iTunes app store: http://itun.es/is44qY
Gotta mention that my good friend Tom Buzbee and I got a mention on the talented Tom Thorspecken's Analog Artist Digital World blog! It's a great art and local Orlando event blog, highly recommended! Thorspecken is an Orlando event reporter except instead of taking pictures, he sketches the event (or part of it) in watercolor. A different perspective! He was a clean-up artist at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida and now teaches in the 2D Animation class at Full Sail University's Computer Animation department. I worked at Disney Florida on "Brother Bear" and although we never worked together, I hold Thor in the highest respect for working at the studio. Personally, it's great to see artists from the animation studio make art around Orlando.
Check out Thor's post and sketch here and follow him: http://www.analogartistdigitalworld.com/2012/06/first-thursdays.html
I've started a big painting (5'x7') collaboration with our school's Resident Artist and my friend, the amazingly talented Tom Buzbee! Click on his name to see more of his work and you will see why I am super excited about it! The man is not only a fantastic fine artist who's found his own voice but as an illustrator, I respect him highly for working in places like NASA and Disney's EPCOT. And I always was a bit jealous that my friends McArthur Albert and George Frei got to do painting with him so I'm really glad I finally get to do one!
I will try to post progress photos of the painting here on the blog as we go along. After stretching & double priming the big canvas, here's our 1st step: covering the background in expressive washes of black acrylic paint. The rectangles you might see in it are pieces of paper towels that we threw on it to soak some of the paint out. They left some of the pattern & shapes from the paper towels and we also threw them back at the painting to build more textures. Click on the photo for a closer look:
