Corel Painter Blues

Corel Painter 9 was the standard program we used for digital storyboarding. It was a great application – super easy to learn, and the tools really mimicked traditional media well. Unlike Photoshop it was designed to paint pictures, so it could do a really good job without too much customization of brushes, or writing of scripts. Unfortunately there were a few problems. Problem #1 It crashed constantly. Problem #2 The default Painter RIFF format would fragment our hard drives like crazy. Problem #3 The RIFF format would frequently get corrupted resulting in the “green screen of death” - a lime green layer that would destroy all of the art in a file. And all attempts to find a work around just made things weirder. To avoid disk fragmentation these Riffs were saved as Photoshop PSD’s. But for whatever reason, every time I’d open them, the images would get turn blue! First time – a little blueish tint. Second time - more blue. Third time – almost totally blue! And after they were uploaded – they turned brown, yellow and purple! Maybe Painter 10 is better…..

Old Money

This is the episode that got me to wondering if Jorge had sold his soul. He comes up with too many awesome designs too fast for their to be any other explaiantion. And every character has an amazing back story! I particularly love Jorge's old man designs.Super unique, and really fun to draw!

One interesting side note about this episode - we had to pull out the gag where Manny and Frida smash mail boxes as a prank. Turns out that's a Federal Crime, with serious time behind it! So, lession learned - "Characters can't commit felonies."

Unforgiven

Zebra Donkey is another episode based on life experience.

In seventh grade, the most popular class was Life Science. The room was full of cool animals like snakes, lizards, hamsters and guinea pigs, but the most popular by far was the tarantula. Guys would put it on their biceps - pose for yearbook pictures with it. Girls would let it nest in their hair, or try to find its spider lips and kiss it.

Because there was only one spider and several hundred seventh graders, love time with the tarantula was in very short supply - so it was rationed out by the teacher - bestowed as a high honor upon the highest quiz score recipients.

This made most kids study like crazy. But for me, hating spiders, it had just the opposite effect.
Life Science was my favorite class - but I made sure to get at least one wrong answer on every quiz so I wouldn't have to hold the hairy monster.

At the end of the year party I thought I was in the clear. But the teacher, an equitable and just woman, had been keeping track of the spider love time, and noticed I hadn't had any. To my horror she made a big deal in front of the whole class about righting this injustice, and before I knew it, the beast was on top of my hand.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. And to be honest, I kind of enjoyed basking in the reflected glow of the spider's celebrety.

But then disaster. Right then and there- in front of the whole class, the spider did something it had never done before - it bit. It must have known I secretly hated it, and out of pure malace it gave me a chomp. It hurt like ten bee stings all in the same spot. I flinched. The spider fell.

Later that day word went out the the student body that the tarantula had passed away. The campus mourned.

Needles to say, the last four hours of the school day represent an all time low for my popularity.
People refused to acknowledge that I had been bit, and eventually the story was twisted to the point of me spiking the thing like a football.

Lucky for me summer is long, and kids forget. I replaced the spider, and to this day I go well out of my way to be nice to spiders - because - even though I've forgotten most of what I learned in that class, one thing stuck with me. Spiders have thousands of childern - and one day, one of them may come looking for revenge.

El Tigre El Jefe

Some stories are a lot harder to pull off than others. This was one of them. But thanks to the awesome storyboard by Eddie Trigueros, great music by Shawn Patterson, and beautifully executed animation by Boulder, this one turned out in the end.

Adios Amigos

This is one of my favorite episodes for a number of reasons. It has lot of heart, a great board by Ricky Garduno, terrific music by Shawn Patterson, and stunningly great direction by Roman Laney and Tod Polson.

The inspiration for this episode came from a traveling carnival that had set up in my neighborhood church parking lot (presumably so that when the amusements fell apart, the prayers of those aboard could be more easily heard by the Almighty.) Definitely the kind of place that only people actively courting danger could enjoy. People like Manny and Frida.

Visually, we needed somewhere even cooler than a carnival to stage our climax, so naturally we went with secret volcano lair. The Pantera Pit obviously owes a lot to the bat cave, but to me it was more a nod to the greatest secret volcano lair ever, Ernst Blofeld's, rocket snatching headquarters in 1967's, "You Only Live Twice."

...If only we could have had ninjas attack at the end.

Famous Artist's School

The early 90's were a dark period in art education. Most of the instructors were of a mindset that rejected formal training in favor of, "having an experience with materials."

When I expressed my frustration to an instructor, he dismissively said, "Well if that's all you want to know, you should enroll in the Famous Artist's Course. "

So I did. And that's where I learned to draw.

The books were written by the most successful commercial artists and illustrators of the 1940's and 50's - guys like Norman Rockwell and Robert Fawcett, and they didn't hold anything back. Every drop of information they knew about the craft of creating art went into the course.


If you're frustrated with the quality of the art instruction you're recieving,
I can't recommend this course highly enough:
FAMOUS ARTIST'S SCHOOL

Fool's Goal

Jorge's hand out to us was very simple, "Make the greatest soccer cartoon, ever!" I don't know if we did, but me and board artist Kevin Kaliher sure had a lot of fun trying.

Kevin and I both played soccer growing up, and it just so happend that the World Cup was on at the time. The highlight reels of the Brazillian team provided a lot of inspiraton!