Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Facing It

Bizarro is brought to you today by camouflage.

One of my father's-in-law and I were driving through Florida recently, saying things with our mouths and we came across this idea of having your eye teeth dilated. So I made a comic about it. I'm blessed with funny in-laws all around, so it's fun to visit CHNW's family.

I'm happy with the character who is speaking in this cartoon because he actually looks like he's thinking about the way his food tastes. Achieving the proper facial expression is important to me and is something that comes from experience. It's a difficult and subtle art, moving an eyelid up or down, or a mouth a fraction one way or another can completely change the character's expression. You just have to do it enough to develop an intuition about it.

Somebody who has tons of great opinions about character design is John K, the dude who did Ren and Stimpy. I spend lots of time on his blog, just because it's fascinating. No modern animator that I know of has John's amazing level of expertise and talent. I often wish I'd worked for him when I was young instead of getting into newspaper comics. But I've had a good run and have no complaints.

3 comments:

shane said...

Love the John K. stuff - very talented. But I will always remember my mom's comment when she first saw "Ren and Stimpy" - "What are they? Bugs?"

I still have an original stuffed Stimpy - the g/f at the time got the Ren.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20493921@N00/2862775359/in/set-72157604179496905/

julie said...

I like it. Hey Dan, you need to hang out on Twitter more!

Mulled over driving up there this Thursday, but too much going on here. More notice on the comedy shows next time.

mamallamadingdong said...

Funny, but what's with the firecrackers?