The Matazone blog

Here’s a nice pipedream for you.

Pipe Dream has been voted one of the 50 greatest animation projects ever (by 3D World magazine).

So there you go.

Over in my webcomic I’ve introduced a female character called Kitsune. One of the things that I discovered when I was drawing her is that I didn’t have a systematic approach to drawing lips. This was a pretty odd experience for me, because I’ve been drawing and painting all my life, but suddenly I’m working in the static cartoon style and my old approaches just don’t work for the medium.

I had a look around for some inspiration on the net and found three really nice pages:

for creative style and inspiration, I love Funny Cute’s lips. Katie Rice, who’s worked on for people like Spumco (best known for Ren & Stimpy), did a really good post showing lots of close ups of different lip styles. She has some really nice tips in there for how to achieve a similar exaggerated look to her own. The images don’t all work as well as each other, but the number of them gives you the chance to compare and decide what you think is best.

if you’re looking for something more realistic or manga styled then try this tutorial from PolyKarbon. The images are pretty clear, but there are some nice tips in the text as well so it’s worth taking a few minutes to read.

finally, there’s this one from SheezyArt. It’s not the best bit of drawing in the world, and it’s very light on technical details, but it was actually a big help in thinking about the process of drawing in the cartoon style. I come from a background where I mix a load of paint then create the lips with a sculpted stroke of the brush, so it was useful to see the cartoon style broken down into simple steps like this.

‘Hope some of you find these useful!

Who would have thought it?

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Yes indeed, invading Iraq, showing a militaristic and insensitive face of American politics, demonstrating a sense of global imperialism, cultural ignorance, denial of flaws, and absolute lack of self-questioning has made the threat of terrorism worse rather than better for the American public. That’s the conclusion of the largest survey of global terrorism by the American intelligence agencies since 11th September 2001.

For an example of the lack of self-questioning, let’s look at a nice quote from a recent White House report entitled ’9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges’:

We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.

The Bush administration continues to assert that they are winning ‘the war against terror’ while their own agencies are saying the exact opposite. We’ve all been saying the opposite for a long time now: attacking a country in the middle-east without provocation or legitimate evidence of planned attacks, and without a plan for how to improve the conditions for people in the country after the invasion (by direct order of Donald Rumsfeld) was always going to solidify and justify extremist arguments against America and its allies.

So, invading Iraq has made America and its allies more, rather than less, at risk from terrorism. In other news: jumping off cliffs frequently results in injury. Some might consider that to simply be logic, rather than a revelation, but it appears that sometimes it really is needed that the obvious has to be driven home with a hammer.

Source.

Did you know that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are comming back to the cinema? Amazingly, the trailer looks pretty cool.

In the meantime though, why not have some fun and read through some of the old Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters comics?

Designed as a parody of the TMNT, which were already a parody of Frank Miller’s comics to begin with, the ARBBH were a short-lived bit of fun. They even released 3D comics, and you don’t get much more retro than that.

Have no ken what I be discussin’? September 19th be Talk Like A Pirate Day, so it be. Arr!

In other news, I think Monday’s post in my webcomic is possibly the best cartoon-style picture that I’ve ever drawn.

GRRagh!
Grroogh?
Grack!
*canned laughter*

My webcomic

*except if someone wants to misuse them.

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus.

Suddenly pencils and paper look even better, don’t they?

Caveat emptor! Not all pole dancing clubs are alike!

For those who aren’t on my mailing list, I’ve started running a web-comic, Trouble Down Pit.

The reason for this is simple: I just haven’t got enough time at the moment to produce animations on anything like the regular basis that I would like, so this way I can do a few panels in an hour or three and put something online that relieves the pressure of ideas-build-up in my head. Seriously, it can get quite painful if I don’t do anything about it. The doctor says I might explode. There’d be bits of Mata spread over a radius of precisely 1.4 miles, and you wouldn’t want that would you?

The comic will be updated every Monday and Friday, including a little bit of bloggy stuff beneath it. I’ll be keeping this blog running for ‘general cool stuff’ and the comic blog will often be more related to the comics or media.

After a thread on a forum dicussing computer games, the poster finished with ‘that’s my 2gil worth.’ I’m not sure if I should be horrified at the simple fact that I get that, or delighted with the level of in-joke that it conveys. I think probably the former.

A friend from a message boarb, HappyToast has done a picture of me as a zombie:

Isn’t it grand?