Playing with some #BobsBurgers fanart to get back into the swing of things after a mini-sabbatical in Japan. 🎨✈️
Every couple of years, the hubby and I take a 6-week "mini-sabbatical" (heavily inspired by Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding). This year was a return to Japan! It was a total reset—so much so that unfortunately I had found my drawing skills starting to atrophy...
While a bit discouraging, it was the perfect excuse to dive back into illustration. I’m leaning into a Louise/Logan "enemies-to-friends" trope. My headcanon: An older Louise takes over the burger mantle and franchises out, with Logan handling the quality control. 🍔
The Process & The "Adobe Thumb" 🛠️
As with most of my projects, I started sketching in Krita, and brought it into Affinity for the finishing vector work. I needed the practice with both the drawing and software, especially since I don’t have the same decades of experience with this software as I do with Adobe.
Honestly, I really enjoy being out from under the "Adobe thumb." If you’re not an Adobe power user, the Affinity suite is a wonderful alternative for vector work and page layout. Krita, on the other hand, has been a powerhouse for digital painting, sketching, and light hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animation. Between those and Blender for motion graphics, I’m loving building my own custom creative suite!
📢 Shop Experiment: Remember to comment on my shop experiment and tell me which of my illustrations you'd like to see on specific types of products and apparel: Link to Post
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Colors belong to everyone.
Rokudenashiko is in the running for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Graphic Novels category, and winners are announced Friday, so look for those updates on our Twitter and Instagram accounts! Twitter: @gaymanga, Instagram: @massivegay.
Nashiko has just cleared another hurdle, taking 2 steps forward and a step back with the Higher Tokyo Courts who announced a verdict earlier this week upholding the Lower Court’s decision: not guilty on the one count of indecent artwork (for the manko dioramas based on 3d and plaster castes of her vulva), and guilty on the count of distribution of obscenity for releasing technical data files of the 3D rendering of her vulva as a reward to crowdfunding participants. Nashiko seems hopeful though. “The Higher Court at least heard what my defense team had to say about defining art projects, whereas the Lower Court didn’t give us a chance to do even that.” The country continues to observe how we parse the boundaries of digital versus compositional art, as Nashiko’s defense team immediately filed an appeal to the guilty conviction and will see the judges in Japan’s Superior Court next, pending a 400k JPY fine.
Read this fascinating interview and history of obscenity cases in Japan at the Japan Times published Tuesday 4/18.
It’s just around the corner: another week up on Onaway Island with the Brigade for their Leadership Training Conference (LTC)! 🌲✨
Being early risers ourselves, the hubby and I often help lead the “early bird” activities for the LTC campers and leadership. As a little incentive to join in the fun every morning, I created a few water bottle stickers for them to take home at the end of the week, which now serves as the artwork for this animation project!
This Blender project actually went remarkably smoothly, giving me some much-welcome momentum and enthusiasm to dig back into some other projects that had me a little more stumped. Most of the work for this project was done on the front end, making sure all the artwork was created in a way that would be simple to animate, while maintaining that fun hand-drawn, cartoony look. 🐦🖌️
There were, of course, some challenges. For this project, I decided to use instances instead of placing scenes in the video sequencer in order to allow a bit more interaction between the various scene elements like the birdies. While it may have simply been the version of Blender I was using, making updates to the instances was a challenge—they were not live or automatically updating. I had to basically replace the instance manually whenever I made any changes to the artwork! 😅
The flat, 2D-style artwork I was going for served as yet another, though fortunately simple challenge. I remembered I was actually working in a 3D space and could avoid the front/back sorting issues of the art by simply adding a bit of dimension to certain elements with extrusions on the curve shapes. 🧱📐
Every project really is a new learning opportunity, which is why I love sticking with open-source software like Blender (and it’s free!). I’m hooked on the problem-solving, and as I get more comfortable with the toolkit, the more “Follow the Fun” energy I can bring to the creativity.
Creating animations for my favorite organizations drives so much of my motivation, and hopefully, it can lead to some new collaborative opportunities!
💬 Let’s talk shop: What are you currently animating in Blender, or are you hoping to learn Grease Pencil? Let’s swap notes in the comments!
☕ Support my "Student of Life" adventures: ko-fi.com/lindseyabendschein
Continuing my motion design journey in Blender with this project dedicated to the Boys and Girls Brigade and their Leadership Training Conference (LTC) camp! ⛺️✨ I have the absolute joy of volunteering for a week up on Onaway Island every summer, and this piece was a fun way to bridge the seasons.
In the animation, you'll see our winter snowman (paddle-arms and all!) melt away into the bright, sunny waters of Waupaca’s Chain ‘O Lakes, revealing the LTC letters. It’s a bit of a visual metaphor for the transformation that happens up there every summer. 🛶☀️
This was definitely a more ambitious project than I initially anticipated. Incorporating 3D elements and camera movements presented quite a few "learning opportunities" (to put it mildly!) as I continue to navigate the complexities of Blender.
My goal is to transition the motion graphics and animation work I’ve traditionally done in After Effects and Adobe Animate over to Blender, working entirely outside the Adobe suite. 🛠️
As free software, Blender is incredibly accessible, but it comes with an exceptionally steep learning curve. It’s not always intuitive—especially coming from outside the 3D modeling world—and I certainly have a litany of gripes and frustrations as I go! However, I’m truly enjoying the challenge and seeing the results. Blender definitely keeps me questioning and developing along this creative journey. 🎨
The Brigade has played such a key role in my life. For many years now, the hubby and I have volunteered with the LTC camp, and we’ll be back up there again this June! I always feel like I’m growing alongside the amazing leadership and students who attend. It’s a transformative time for everyone involved, and I highly recommend checking it out. 🌲⛰️
🔗 Registration for LTC Camp: bgbrigade.com/camp-onaway
📢 Shop Experiment: Don't forget to check out my previous post and let me know what products or apparel you’d like to see in my new shop: https://www.instagram.com/p/DTz9lOKjXOr/
“La creación y el uso del ‘open source’ va de acuerdo al ideal de que con el libre acceso y la colaboración se pueden alcanzar mayores niveles de innovación.”
El código abierto ha cambiado completamente la manera en que se distribuye software y hardware alrededor del mundo y poco a poco, esta ideología ha estado llegando a ámbitos distintos a la tecnología.
El código abierto es un medio importante para encontrar soluciones a problemas en varias áreas; de la variedad de problemas se trae la variedad de soluciones.
Como dice Sara M. Watson “Hoy, el ritmo de la tecnología se enfoca menos en la tecnología en sí misma y más en cómo la tecnología se cruza y transforma todo lo que la gente tiene que ver, desde la política hasta las relaciones personales.”
Si bien en una primera etapa el código abierto estuvo enfocado en la programación y el desarrollo de código y algoritmos, la creciente comunidad que impulsa la innovación por medio de iniciativas de open source ha atraído e influenciado a personas de distintos campos, como el diseño, la arquitectura e incluso el arte por un motivo: compartir.
El arte, un sector tan diverso como sus técnicas, se vio influenciado no sólo por la tecnología, la creación de código y programación, sino también por las posibilidades de compartir entre artistas.
El Dev Art fue una iniciativa por parte de Google que buscaba a nuevos artistas que hicieran su obra con código y programación, y la condición para ser partícipes es que debían necesariamente tener un proceso creativo abierto, que sirviera no sólo de inspiración sino también como herramienta de trabajo para todos.
La ventaja de llevar proyectos de código abierto es que hay más manos, ojos y opiniones sobre lo que se está trabajando lo que lleva a crear un espacio en el que la creatividad puede ayudar a encontrar soluciones a problemas más rápidamente e incluso detonar nuevos proyectos.
