Some Sneaky Peekies

Lot's of work going on right now, mostly on stuff that cannot be posted on the internet. However, what I DO have to offer is a sneak peek at the video I'm working on for Teenage Bottlerocket.



It's for the song "Bigger Than Kiss" off their Fat Wreck Chords debut "They Came From The Shadows". Which you should go buy right now.



The album is awesome. All of the songs are rad pop punk jams- there's some love songs, some sci-fi songs, some fast angry shit thrown in there too- it's sweet. I don't know why I'm not writing music reviews for a living. Anyways, if you don't believe my 90's surfer-bro critique, check out the video for the track "Skate Or Die".



My video should be coming out in late November, but I'll have more updates before then, hopefully some tests and colored-in stuff. Until then, catch ya later most excellent blog dudes.

How To Color (if you're me)

This is a tutorial on How to Color with Adobe Photoshop- or rather how I color with Adobe Photoshop. It is by no means the only method for coloring, or even the best method. It's just how I was taught to color way back in 2002, when computers were still powered by coal and Adobe's primary sales were in huts made out of clay.

I'm going to start with this drawing I made a while back, when I was first tooling around on the Cintiq.
I titled it The Questioner, because it sort of looks like she's pondering something. Though when I look at it now, it seems more like the Virgin Mary getting ready for bed. Anyways, here's the final line art I'll be working with. I added a little question mark thingy in the corner to create some half assed composition.

The rookie Photoshop user would just choose the Paint Bucket tool, and start filling things in. That's not gonna work. I mean it'll work, but it's going to look like this.

Unless you're drawing pixel by pixel, your lines will always have these gray pixels that make up the curves and angles. The paint bucket does not know to fill in those pixels. The result is this ghosting effect; little white outlines around the details.

The proper way to color is by using the Magic Wand tool, layers and blending modes.

Step 1. Use The Magic Wand To Select An Area

Select the Magic Wand tool. Set your Tolerance to 100%, with Anti-Aliasing and Contiguous checked. Then select the area you'd like to color. You can see in this picture I'm trying to select her hair, but because of some incomplete lines it didn't work. I went back and filled in the gap.

You'll have to run some tedious checks for these holes during the coloring process. This is why you don't often see cartoons with sketchy, dashed lines.

Step 2: EXPAND!

Go to Select>Modify>Expand and expand your selection area by 2 pixels. This is usually enough to bite into your line, over top of those gray pixels, but not enough to bleed outside of the line.


Step 3: Create a New Layer

Create a New Layer (duh) and here's the key part- set the layer's blending mode to Multiply. When it's in Multiply mode, the layer becomes translucent, like a transparency sheet that your 8th grade math teacher would use with a projector. It's hard to explain, but play around with it, you'll see how it works.

Step 4: PAINT BUCKET THAT SHIT
NOW you can use that Paint Bucket tool. Fill the area, deselect and VOILA! Color. The multiply mode allows the black line to show through, while allowing the color to cover up all those white and gray pixels.
You might have to go in and fill in some tiny areas that the wand missed, but otherwise it's done! No ghost lines AND the color is on a separate layer. So you can always go back and tweak or do a hue shift without affecting the rest of the drawing.

Bonus Stage: Make An Action

You can record an action so that most of these steps will be automated. Making coloring even faster.

Make a selection with your Magic Wand tool, then go to your Action Tab, select New Action, and do the following steps.

• Expand Selection by 2 pixels
• Create New Layer
• Set Layer to Multiply

Then stop recording. All that's left is to hit the G to choose your Paint Bucket, and fill. Now coloring will be a cinch.

If you're not familiar with Blending Modes, I'd really encourage you to experiment with them. You can do some cool shit.

For example, I made a layer of blue covering just the body of the girl. I tried out the Color Burn Mode, and it gave me this cool look. Next, I tried out Hard Light mode, brought the opacity down to 39%, and it looked like she was standing in the dark. So I erased some of the blue away, and created this lighting effect like she's looking at some glowing, creepy thing. Like a glowing baby Jesus. I dunno, use your imagination.

As I said, this is just the way I color drawings, not the ONLY way. It's a method I was taught based on working with scanned pencil drawings, which usually have a lot of white gaps and holes you have to tackle. Anyways, hope that helps somebody out there. Thanks for scrolling through all of this madness.

Obligatory Post About Promoting One's Boyfriend

The 11th annual sweaty, 72-hour improv fest that is the Del Close Marathon has finally come to an end. My face and feet hurt from all that respective smiling and standing. Big ups to all the performers, especially Ronin Dojo voices Tim Martin and Emily Tarver. Speaking of which-



Here's a video that was posted a lil' bit ago starring Mr. Tim Martin (Seth/Hank Henderson). It's called the Octopus Job; written by Joe Wengert, directed by my favorite improv teddy bear Will Hines, and also starring John Gemberling- whom Matt and I did a little animation for on "Fat Guy Stuck In The Internet". Naaaaaame droppppiiiiinngggggahhhhh. Sorry, I like to pretend I'm part of the scene.

And while we're on the subject of other peoples videos, For Tax Reasons will be taking part in a free animation screening this Wednesday in NYC called Midsummer Night Toons.



It will feature some sweet animated shorts and several episodes of Ronin Dojo Community College DX: The Digital Pirates of Dark Water Saga. Check out the above trailer, and come out to watch. Here's the info.

Wednesday, August 19th 2009

M1-5 Bar/Longue
52 Walker St. (b/w Church + Broadway)
9:00-9:30

Aaaand finally, I finished the poster for Carlapalooza.

It's a punk benefit for the National MS Society, September 25th-27th in NYC. Lots of sweet bands playing for a good cause.

Ok, I'm going to go rehydrate. Tomorrow, the drawing marathon begins.

A Hastily Thrown Together, Vaguely Themed Post

"Geology is a study of pressure and time. That's all it really takes, pressure and time. . . that and a goddamn big poster. . ."-- Red, The Shawshank Redemption

So here's a quick post about a couple things I've been working on. This is a rough version of the poster for Carlapalooza 2009. It's a punk show Mr. Chadd Derkins puts on to benefit MS. I drew the poster for the 2007 show and Chadd was nice enough to ask me back.

So for this year I decided to run with the battle theme again. Check it out. Looking a the old poster, I felt like it was a bit flat. I decided this year I should make the angle a bit more dynamic- throw in some perspective. It should be my official motto for 2009- "throw in some perspective". That or "fruit on the bottom". I don't know, I've been eating a lot of yogurt lately.

The project I've been steadily chipping away at is the Teenage Bottlerocket video. (this is my attempt to stick with this post's theme.)

One thing I've learned, while making this video, is it's hard to draw hands holding drumsticks. I don't know why, but it's always looks weird when I do it. I think it's the thumb placement.

It's double-y frustrating when you have trouble drawing hands. Not only are you failing at something so essential and basic, but you have the perfect reference right in front of you and you still can't figure out where a knuckle should go. Baffling.

Something I DO need photo reference for are the dreaded crowd shots.
It's always tough to come up with a bunch of random characters and poses. I usually have to look up some photos from shows and just pick out people from the crowd. Otherwise, I end with these really lame, unimaginative people cluttering up the scene.

Thank goodness for the internet and Flickr though. Because I mean, seriously, how often do you look at a man's crowd shots.

Hardly Art, Hardly Garbage

After wrecking my way through 4 silk screens- I now present TWO NEW RONIN DOJO COMMUNITY COLLEGE T-SHIRTS!

The first one is a sweet baby blue number, which you can see Mr. Tom Callow rockin' in the picture above. I don't know if anything else could make that shirt look as cool, outside of a dragon or something.
The second is a yellow and black on white number, in a very punk rock fashion aka I line all this shit up by hand, so it's got a fun DIY feel to it.
I don't have a cool picture of someone in this shirt, but feel free to order one and take some picture of yourself in it that challenges the epic-ness of flames and a staff.

Both are hand printed onto American Apparel fine jersey tees. Available in the For Tax Reasons merch section in about every damn size that exists INCLUDING the lady sizes- or "girly" sizes as they're called in the industry. Seems more polite to call them lady sizes though.

We're hoping to have some more non-clothing merchandise up soon, but until then go check them out, buy one, and take funny pictures of yourself in it. It'll be sweet.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

Still getting over the post-Otakon euphoria/withdrawal. I never went to sleep-away camp when I was young...er, but I assume this is the feeling you get when you leave camp. You're back to reality, your same old routine, and don't get to hang around all your camp friends all day who are dressed up like Street Fighter characters. That's what happens at sleep away camp right? I mean, I went to day camp. I just assumed when you went away for more than one night, dressing up was a pre-requisite.

Anyways, several news updates. Firstly, Matt and I have some made some massive For Tax Reasons plans for the upcoming months. We're hoping to release some merch to fill out our very small selection. Planning to have some posters and a new t-shirt design.

We WOULD have had the new shirts for Otakon- BUT I've been struuuuggling with silk screening lately. Everything that could possibly go wrong in the making of these new shirts has gone wrong. I've gone through 4 screens now. But I'm not giving up! I have put TOO much money into this operation and have too many blank American Apparel shirts that aren't my size.

Anyways, we should have new shirts coming up soon.

Secondly, I finally joined the Twitter machine. So if you want to see the random thoughts I have as I sit around animating, follow me: twitter.com/ben_levin

Finally, I'm back to work on the music video for Teenage Bottlerocket. We've switched things up and I'm now doing a video for their upcoming full-length debut release on Fat Wreck Chords "They Came From The Shadows". It'll be dropping September 15th, which means, I cannot reveal details of the super secret new song that's in the video. But I will give you a peek at the storyboards I just finished today. Check it out.

I know, right. Total album spoiler. Ok I'm out, my back hurts.

Holy Plug Suit Gatchaman! It's the final episode of RDCCDX: DPODW!

Whew, we just got back from day one of Otakon (day two if you count standing in the pre reg line Thursday night) and it was awesome!

Our panel "Let's Talk Animation! with For Tax Reasons" went off without a hitch, and surprisingly there were more than 10 people in attendance. In fact, the whole room was filled with fans. And they actually wanted to watch each episode of Ronin Dojo Community College DX: The Digital Pirates of Dark Water Saga. We were just thinking we'd premiere the last episode as we'd promised, but they asked for it.

So now that the otaku's have seen it, we're throwing it out to the internet. So here it is- the final RDCCDX: Digital Pirates of Dark Water Saga, it's Episode 4: "End of the Road".



Thanks to the Otakon Staff, Panel Ops, and the A/V crew for helping us out and twiddling with the sound each time I annoyingly asked. Thanks to Alan from Otaku Generation and Scott for helping us with the Otakon stuff. Thanks to all the people who came out to the panel and laughed and asked questions. Thanks to Tim Martin to providing hilarious voice acting, Matt Mayer for making some sweet 3-D titles and helping us with compositing, Darrell for coloring and taking photos during the panel and Zack for video taping the panel and giving us his advice.