going to bed soon, honest.

[perevision]

Had a crit on Monday with a professional illustrator and showed my comic and all associated material. I included the Mary Renault books, as well as The Cartoon History of the Universe, which has some great points of view on ancient myths and what they actually meant. I had printed up some pages on A3 and A1 size paper--really big. He liked those; so did my teacher. I showed them a mock-up of the comic, which they really liked despite the obvious cobbling-together.

For some stupid reason I reduced the original TIFF picture files I made when I scanned in the comics, so I'm going to rescan them all at 300dpi and print them when I've finished three chapters. Almost finished the second chapter now; have scanned the fight scene and need to do the last two pages so I can Photoshop and post it.

Today we had Lucy, a lovely and brilliant girl, come in for Animation class. Her animation is drawn and such a gorgeous thing to watch; one of her influences is Ralph Steadman and she does really stunning life drawings in pencil sketch with watercolor pencil for accents. It lends so much life to her work. I want to hang her storyboards on my wall, too. She had a
look at my storyboard--I'm doing an animatic and animating some keyscenes--and really liked my drawing style. Lucy helped me tighten up my board and decide which scenes I wanted to fully animate and which ones we could do "Monty Python" style (small parts animated within a whole). She's a huge comic book geek too! And she agrees that being into comics really helps with animation, because it gives a sense of timing and story. We really couldn't talk enough.

She told me something really encouraging: the world of illustration and animation is surprisingly small. Everyone knows everyone and people are more free to choose who they work with, plus it's better to freelance in illustration that hire yourself out to a studio. Also, the good illustrators tend to be nice to young artists and help them along instead of treating them as competition. She was just really inspiring and helpful. Of course, she said the same as Mamoru Oshii: be prepared to have no life and no friends. ^_^

Picking up my framed prints of Perseus and the Caravaggios tomorrow! Yay! Can't wait to see them on my wall. ♥