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Inktober 2016, October 19-22

I noticed some artist and animator friends were posting drawings with the hashtag #inktober. This is the sort of thing I never do. But it had been years since I’d respectfully drawn with ink on paper, and I kind of missed it. So I ordered myself some different brush pens, and the day they arrived I sat down and drew these:

No warm-ups, no practice, just bam, out they came.

It’s been more than a decade since I’ve drawn in this style, with ink on paper. I’ve avoided it due to burn-out from drawing daily comic strips. Advice to you kids: turning something you enjoy into a daily job is a great way to make you hate it. I quit my last daily comic, The Hots, in 2003 (before that I did another mainstream daily, Fluff, and before that was my self-syndicated weekly Nina’s Adventures, the entire archive of which you may download here.) I guess 12 years is enough time to recover from style burn-out, at least a little.

“Inktober” has a list of “daily prompts” and I decided to just follow them:

Squeeze_BW — “Squeeze” processed in GIMP to function as a black and white illustration. This is from the same photo I took with my cel phone. No scanner needed, apparently. Welcome to the future!

"Big." I'm really liking that Uni Mitsubishi brush pen, more than the nylon hair brush pens I used to use professionally. It'll wear out fast because it's a compressed felt tip, but it sure is clean and easy to use. — “Big.” I’m really liking that Uni Mitsubishi brush pen, more than the nylon hair brush pens I used to use professionally. It’ll wear out fast because it’s a compressed felt tip, but it sure is clean and easy to use.

"Big" cleaned up. in GIMP, sans scanner. — “Big” cleaned up. in GIMP, sans scanner.

"Little" cleaned up in GIMP, from that same cell phone photo. — “Little” cleaned up in GIMP, from that same cell phone photo above.

I actually did 2 versions of "Little." The one I posted before was outlined with the double ended Uni Mitsubishi felt brush pen. This one was with the Pentel Pocket brush. Never thought I'd choose a felt over nylon hair brush, but there you go. — I actually did 2 versions of “Little.” The one I posted before was outlined with the double ended Uni Mitsubishi felt brush pen. This one was with the nylon hair Pentel Pocket brush. I have less patience for messiness now, I guess.

Honestly I’m enjoying this so much right now I’d kind of like to take on an illu$tration gig while I’m still fresh. Too much of that and I might burn out again, but right now it would be fun.

Ye Olde Bouncygif

I am blessed with a terrible memory, which allows me to get fresh enjoyment from my own work after enough time passes. So it was especially fun to come across a Facebook post in an unfamiliar language with a gif of my animation from 2004:

By some miracle, the original .fla files were on one of my main disk drives, so I reformatted one for today’s preferred 16:9 aspect ratio, and voila:

Maybe I’ll find some way to use it in a new project, and render it as 4K video. It was originally part of a short I was going to do about depression, because in 2004 I was very depressed. Instead I made Sita Sings the Blues, which was probably more therapeutic. But I sure like this walk cycle.

The original 640 x 480 gif is here, uploaded by some anonymous archivist.

Amos Yee is one of the greatest living defiers of classification

You know you’re doing something right when Amos Yee gives you a shout-out (02:34) in the midst of a passionate, funny, enlightening rant. Praise from Caesar is praise indeed.

GNU & Improved GIFs

Big ups to my friend Barry Israelewitz, who wrote a shell script for ffmpeg (based on this article shared in this comment by Paul Wise) and taught me how to use Terminal on my mac to make much better animated gifs than Flash exports directly. Currently it’s significantly more work than just exporting .gif from Flash, because I have to instead export a PNG sequence, import the frames to Quicktime 7, and export as a new .mov to use as an input file for making the gif. This may be streamlined a little bit in the future, but for now at least I can make higher quality gifs if I need to.

Below are close-up details of single frames. “Before” is here, “after” is above.

Here’s a smaller-sized (because fewer frames) animated gif for side-by-side before-and-after comparison:

Much better, no? Plus using Terminal is METAL.

Reddit IAmA today, 2-4pm EST

Proof? Here’s your proof.

Head on over here between 2 and 4pm EST today, Friday February 27.

UPDATE: Reddit is not allowing me to post. On my own IAMA. Granted, this IAMA was set up by someone else, who said he had duly submitted my handle (Nina_Paley, created a week ago) to the mods. But it didn’t work. I was on the calendar, but I can’t respond to questions. I am not happy about this but mods aren’t responding, so I give up. You can AMA on Twitter instead.

UPDATE 2: after half an hour the problem was corrected, and I went back and answered questions.

Reddit AMA – Friday February 27

I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA next Friday February 27, along with Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge, for Fair Use Week. We’ll be on 2-4pm EST, a.k.a. 1-3pm CST. Ask Me Anything!