Thursday, January 21, 2010

An Uncommon Hobby



If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that every once in a while I post these little cartoons; model sheets for things that I like. Outside of people I met through doing this, I've never heard of anyone with this odd little hobby-- so I was thinking I would explain it to you.

Around probably 2002 I found a wonderful website called Superbuddies, a forum where people talked about nerdy things in general and comic books in particular. Around this time, the animated series X-Men: Evolution was getting very popular. What a lot of the artists on Superbuddies did-- and what I then learned to do-- was take the model sheets of the characters, and "frankenstein" them. That is, mix and match parts, take things here and there from screenshots, to create new art from the old. It's not quite photoshopping and it's certainly not freehand art, but it does require a certain amount of skill. For the past near decade, it's a skill I've been honing, on and off.

Often, the mark that I really like something is that I'll end up creating art for it. Superbuddies is a really great community, and they were my only online friends for most of my teenage years. However, once I found the Harry Potter fandom on youtube, I kind of drifted away from 'buddies, which I still feel guilty about. Not to mention, my interest in art waned as I focused more and more on my writing. However, I'll sometimes still get the itch to make something-- especially if I know I have the "right parts," coming from a huge collection of cartoon art I've amassed over the years on my hard drive.

To make a long story much shorter, that's how come you've been staring at what is hopefully recognizable as an animated Rose Tyler while you've been reading that.

While working on her, I listened to the album Subcontrario (In Stereo) by my sister's friend Trevor Giuliani probably twelve times on repeat. If you're looking for new music in your life, here's a taste of his:



In about an hour, I'll be off for dinner with the UTO girls and our secret santa gift exchange. And I promise a slightly less media-heavy blog post tomorrow.

3 comments:

  1. Nice rendition of Rose Tyler. How far are you into the series?

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  2. She's definitely recognisable. : )

    After your tweet about Rose Tyler being a Gryffindor (which is totally right) I started to sort some of the other ones. Martha= Ravenclaw, Donna=Hufflepuff, and the companion from Planet of the Dead whose name escapes me=Slytherin. I like reading your tweets and blogs about Doctor Who. They are pretty awesome. You should check out some of the books! I just read The Feast of the Drowned which is with the Doctor and Rose and Mickey and Jackie are in it as well. It's written by Stephen Cole and he was spot on with the characters.

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