Category: Links

All being well, I am about to embark on an extended period producing the illustrations for my next book (a Beholder project, not martial arts related). These will be line drawings rather than cartoons, but nonetheless I’ll be inking-in with Rotring technical pens on a lightbox just as I do for Fudebakudo. Actually, most normal people probably don’t spend much time wondering about different techniques of illustration, but if you do draw, then it is often fascinating to see how other people work. This is because illustration is a fundamentally solitary activity and — unless you are at Art College or belong to a drawing class — it’s something you rarely get to see other people doing. I didn’t go to Art College, although I did both Art and Technical Drawing when I was at school (I learned next to nothing in the former, but can remember nearly everything I was taught in the latter).

So here are three links to video of illustrators at work, none of them particularly new, but relevant to me now, just for the thrill of seeing real experts doing their stuff. If you’re not moved at all by illustration technique (which is fine — why should you be?), you should perhaps just watch the last one, because it’s very short and really quite astonishing if you haven’t seen the technique before.

First, Quentin Blake in Action — the fabulous Mr Blake made this 10-minute film, generously describing the whole process of book illustration while producing the characteristic sketch-painting shown here. 

Next is Bob Staake’s mesmerising composition in Photoshop 3.0 (in case you don’t know, that’s an antique version), which runs for under five minutes. More from his website and, oh yes, he does the music too.

Finally, Emmanuel Guibert’s Drawing with Water one-minute video. You could also check out First Second Books for other excellent work published by the same people. I recently bought Nick Abadzis’s smart and sad doggie-tale Laika, and it was their blog which led me to the Quentin Blake video too.

Includes my favourite scene (in which Hattori Hanzo gives The Bride her new sword):

 

 

Made by the University of York Filmmaking Society (link via b3ta).

I love animation, and because of my nerdy background, I've enjoyed watching computer animation develop from the heady days of Tron and Roger Rabbit. I went to Las Vegas to attend SIGGRAPGH in 1991 — that's the conference where the cutting edge computer graphics stuff gets shown off. In 1991 the Teminator 2 special effects were causing all the excitement. Similarly I'm an admirer of Rolf Harris (bear with me on this) because, on his Cartoon Time show years ago, he had the foresight to interview a certain John Lasseter. Back when this happened, Lasseter was known amongst nerds (specifically, computer science nerds like me) for his groundbreaking shorts Luxo Jr and Red's Dream. This was not mainstream, but Rolf put him on prime-time children's TV. Way to go, Rolf! In case you haven't recognised the names, Lasseter went on to form Pixar, and Luxo Jr. was the little lamp that you have seen hopping across the screen at the start of every Pixar movie.

That's all a preamble as to why I'm linking to this film — I love good animated shorts and this is one of my all-time favourites.

Jo Jo in the Stars is an astonishing animated short that has just been featured on YouTube: see it here. It's not new and it's not unknown — it's from 2003, and won a BAFTA — but I think it's only recently been available (legally) online. It's just been released by Futureshorts, who incidentally almost but not quite showed the Fudebakudo animations in Dublin last year.

I saw this film some time ago because I was so impressed by the animation in the Lloyds TSB banking adverts that have been shown in the UK for some while (I didn't say I was impressed by the bank, mind you). There's a lot more going on in those little adverts than was strictly needed to sell banking services — lots of details and neat camera angles. When I see something like that I'm often curious to see what other things the person behind them has done. So a little hunting around revealed that the Lloyds ads were created by Marc Craste. After that it was fairly easy to find other pieces of his work, which obviously includes Jo Jo.

It think it's brilliant because of the way the story is told. It also contrasts with the slick, basically cute commercial work he later did for the bank. Jo Jo is very emotional, despite Craste having restricted himself to such limited facial expression, gesture or even posture. There's so much going on here in lighting, atmospherics, composition, camera angles . . . and even some nerd-impressing floppy draped cloth (that wasn't so easy to do a few years ago!). It's a masterclass in animation, and a provocative rejection of slick, shiny computer art. Brilliant.

 

Last week I went to the O2 to see the Albarn/Hewlett production of Monkey Journey to the West. My interest in such a thing—apart from a nostalgic fondness for the cheesey Monkey TV series—was fuelled mainly by an appreciation of Jamie Hewlett's wonderful artwork. The show really did manage to extend the illustrations onto the stage, and, to be fair to the sometimes rather annoying Mr Albarn, the music worked well too. It helped that I had hooked up with a long-unmet friend for the event, but even without that bonus I realised, when the interval came, that I'd had a big monkey grin on my face for the whole first half. It's a show not to be taken seriously, and it really was a lot of fun.

My favourite part was probably Princess Iron Fan, because she had a lieutenant who was incredible foxy with the best costume and great spiky hair. But I liked the way Tripitaka (played by Yao Ningning) walked the way you knew Hewlett would have animated him (her). Cao Jiangtao in the eponymous role of Sun Wu Kong (that's Monkey to you) was tremendous too, maintaining his monkey swagger and monkey bravado throughout.

Mind you, the special Chinese meal, available in the "Monkey's World" restaurant as part of the experience in the big black tent, was woeful. In fact it would have been laughable had it not been so expensive. London has great Chinese restaurants, both pricey and cheap, so it's frustrating to have given them a miss for something that was badly cooked and inaccurately served. Missed my lap; but the guy on the next table wasn't so lucky.

An intriguing aspect of the project is that the official MJTTW website is plainly based on the Fudebakudo website. This website is itself based on Fudebakudo's esoteric design principles, of course: see the FAQ on Why is everything black, white, and red? if you don't believe me.

Unfortunately the official trailer for the Monkey show is cut together so wildly you really can't make much out, so I haven't bothered linking to it. It's an odd thing to do in a publicity video because it makes you think they're deliberately hiding something by taking it away before you can see it properly. Instead, the short film Monkey Bee gives a good flavour of the music and the playfulness of the project (you also get to see some of the cast — although the film has been done in a wonderfully vintage cinematic style instead of simply using the scenes, make-up, and costumes of the stage production). What's more, thanks to the helpful subtitles, you can sing-along (in Mandarin) in Youtube karaoke!

 

Sad:

Monks brawl at Jerusalem shrine

You can see from this why David Carradine played Kwai Chang Caine as a Shaolin monk. In the original screenplay he was going to be Greek Orthodox, but the fight scenes looked way too scrappy when they played them out in slow motion.

 

Mushashi Miyamoto — Japan's legendary yet real swordsman  . . . if you don't know anything about him, the rest of this won't make much sense (but then, there's always the Wikipedia page. Oh all right then: maybe this one).

So, anyway . . . Canadian web comic artist Kate Beaton has retold one of Musashi's most famous encounters: see this fabulous Musashi cartoon.

There are several Musashi references in the Fudebakudo book. I deliberately included two conflicting versions of how he founded the niten-ryu because, since nobody ever checks their facts, I thought I might as well make Fudebakudo inconsistent. After all, that's how all good myths perpetuate.

 

It's a matter of record that Fudebakudo was responsible for revealing the forgotten martial origins of origami. Fudebakudo even gave the world downloadable slippers by combining the awesome twin-technologies of origami and internet.

But there are other people pushing back the folded envelope. Robert Lang's recent TED talk shows some state of the art origami that frankly makes the slippers look a bit clunky — the fish shown here is an example.

I particularly like his observation that, "The secret to productivity in so many fields is [. . .] letting dead people do your work for you".

If Lang's approach is all a bit too academic and impractical, just learn to fold paper the way the instant origami masters do it.

 

Like most cartoonists, when I was a child I was fascinated by cartoons. Specifically, I liked to see how they were drawn — for example, although I enjoyed Asterix books because they were funny, I also scrutinized the hands because they were so well drawn. Sometimes I'd look though a book just to compare all the hands, say, or the horses. Or the consistent way the buildings were drawn.

So Dinosaur Comics is something of an enigma: I read it more or less every day — and laugh out loud at T-Rex and his friends. Part of the amusement is that the drawings never change. Every day different words, but the same pictures. People who aren't into Dinosaur Comics (I was such a person, once) don't get how that works, how that can possibly work. Of course, the reason it does is because the characters' ideas are so smart and funny. But still, there's something disturbing, and amusing, about the implication that a cartoon doesn't need its pictures as much as most cartoonists think it should. Heh. Thanks T-Rex for pointing that out, every time.

Ryan North, the guy who does (I can't easily say "draws" there) Dinosaur Comics  gave an interview last week. This quote is a little out of context, but he said:

Heh! Me too! That reminded me of the fabulous Kliban cartoon below. I had this cartoon on my door for many years, cut out from Kliban's obituary in a British broadsheet — "Out of the way, you swine! A cartoonist is coming!"

 

Sometimes martial artists can become so absorbed in their pursuit of . . . of . . . of whatever it is that they are pursuing, that they get lost in a vortex of idiocy. For example, somewhere along the line person B was convinced by person A that this was a good idea: Fruit slice.

Fruit abuse: Fudebakudo drew the public's attention to fruit abuse in the martial arts way back at Seni 2007. But still it goes on. Who is supplying these people? Are there backstreet fruitiers and shady greengrocers who simply don't care what happens to the vegetables they are trafficking? This madness has to stop.

 

An old link, but hey.

The Guardian's film blog has a martial arts quiz.

I got 7.

See also: the Fudebakudo MAQ, which currently has close to 400 questions in its database.