mattjordan.com » Matt

Taking care of “bisniess”

Matt — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:56:48 +0000

The office building where De works provides email marketing services. Doesn’t their ad inspire all kinds of confidence?

Taking care of bisniess

If I ever meet these marketing geniuses, I’ll be really tempted to ask, “How are
ings?”

On a more serious note, I’m trying to get used to drawing in ToonBoom’s Animate Pro. I’m not super great at it yet.

Animate Pro practice

Doodle-dee squat!

Matt — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:57:01 +0000

I didn’t have much time for plain old drawing tonight, but I made myself open MyPaint and doodle for a few minutes. Not that it did much good:

Yeah, don't ask.

I also noticed this kind of odd heading in one of my drawing books:

Say what?

Kind of sounds like some sort of deviant biology lecture.

But it will be a road to glory!

Matt — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:17:17 +0000

My fortune from Sunday’s Chinese buffet lunch:

Good news, bad news.

And some sketches, done in MyPaint:

Who are these people?

Closed source, proprietary software really just isn’t worth the money.

Matt — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:00:32 +0000

I have to work with Flash and several other Adobe products at my day job as an AS3 programmer. Flash alone costs $700. It simply isn’t worth it and here’s yet another example of why:

What the hell, Flash?

Open source is the way and the truth and the light. Why? Because closed source expensive stuff isn’t really any better plus it’s closed source and expensive. And don’t give me that “industry standard” crap. It’s only industry standard because too many sheep buy what the advertisers tell them to buy. I know from experience: whatever it is you are trying to program or create, you can do it with open source software. And if everybody who uses Adobe products (for instance) took 1/100th of the money they gave to Adobe and contributed it instead to the open source counterpart projects, everybody would win.

Except, of course, for Adobe.

Which means everybody would win.

By the way, if you need to make a .swf and you absolutely must get your proprietary rocks off, get KoolMoves. It does anything you’d want to do and costs less than 1/10th what you’d pay for Flash. And, on top of that, the developer is an actual person that you can talk to. Imagine that.

Another Romero

Matt — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 05:00:59 +0000

Still slowly working on the fantasy comic in my spare time. For now, I’m still figuring out what the characters look like. Here’s another go at Mike’s character. It was sketched way too small to make a good inking candidate, but what the heck. Oh, and the new WordPress media uploader rocks.

Mike the Dwarf

Yeesh

Matt — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 03:38:07 +0000

Not really worth posting, but it’s tonight’s meager practice.

Stupid practice is still practice

Matt — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:58:21 +0000

The main points of this exercise were 1) to learn how to use MyPaint-GIMP-Inkscape in a comics production chain and 2) to practice drawing, inking, and painting stuff (as always). I wanted to do actual backgrounds but ran out of time, so here it is. I have no idea whether boots of frost resistance actually exist in the Skyrim universe, but I couldn’t resist the SkyrimShots title, so there you go.

Boots of Frost resistance

Must practice more and faster…

Matt — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 03:55:00 +0000

Some crappy “warm-up” drawings. Never really got warmed up. Even though it should rightly be classified as turd polishing, I played around with some coloring. The uncolored sketches in the second batch are me trying to learn from some Disney drawings; the other stuff is just stuff. All done in MyPaint.

...

Warm-ups to nowhere...

Decisions, Decisions…

Matt — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 05:04:20 +0000

I had a little time to work on the Brad character for my mini-comic. I had this one look that I thought was kind of funny…

Brad wouldn't like this one.

But De said he wouldn’t like it – and Brad did specifically request to be drawn as a babe magnet – so I’ve decided to give Brad a sort of Justin Bieber look instead.

Brad the Heartthrob

Oremor the War Dwarf

Matt — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:08:20 +0000

Oremor the War Dwarf!

So I’m putting together a little mini-comic and using some of my coworkers as characters. This is one character design idea that started to look like it was in the right ball park, so I thought I’d post it as proof that I actually made headway. One of my colleagues is named Mike Romero and when I spelled his last name backwards, I thought it was a perfect name for a War Dwarf – whatever that is. Click on the image to get a bigger version. For those who keep track of such things, this was sketched in MyPaint on Linux Mint 11, so it’s full of open source goodness. More to come…