Post Super Summer ComiCon update

Hey Everybody!

It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to sit down and do a blog update so there’s going to be a lot of stuff in this one. Last weekend Kris and I were at the Super Summer ComiCon in Windsor and it was a great time! Thanks again to everyone who came out to check out our stuff and chat, we will be doing a few more cons very soon so we will start talking about those soon.

So a lot of the dailies lately have been Dragon Ball themed because I was re-watching the series in preparation of Dragon Ball Super. Also there is a Ninten drawing because of the announcement and release of Earthbound Beginnings.

Also since I’ve been going into ComiCon season I wanted to start doing some original pieces (one of a kind rather than prints) so I went out and bought some 140lb watercolour paper and started doing these.

I’m not too sure if people will be into them but I’m going to be doing a bunch between now and Fan Expo so if you have any ideas about characters you might want to see let me know.

As I mentioned earlier we had a great time at the Super Summer ComiCon in Windsor and we can’t wait for the next one!

The album suggestion for this week is one of my all time favourites, Say Anything – Is a Real Boy.

Also if you haven’t been keeping up with the podcast you’ve been missing out on so much dumb goodness.

www.comics-that-exist.com/podcast (There will be a new episode up tonight as well as one on Sunday)

So hopefully everybody has a good week and we’ll meet back here next week for some good drawing adventure stuff.

You can follow me at these places:

https://www.facebook.com/JamesMarontateArt

https://instagram.com/jamesmarontate/

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/jamesmarontate

https://twitter.com/JamesMarontate

and of course at the mothership

www.comics-that-exist.com

Animal Crossing challenge continues…

Hey Everybody,

Hope everyone had a good week. Today will be a bunch of updates on the animal crossing challenge thing I’ve been doing as well as some cool stuff I got from TCAF last weekend.

First off the Art shtufffffff

      

So lots of mixed materials this week, still my standard stuff like microns for some inking, sometimes copic multiliners depending on the paper (The moleskins I usually use the microns). Then copic sketch markers for colour and Prowhite for the highlights. I’ve been trying to experiment with different inking techniques trying to find something I like, the art challenges are good for stuff like that I find. The slime monster thing is just a little test I was doing with some of the markers I had, like going over a colour with the same colour after it has dried to darken it, yay for experiments.

Also last weekend TCAF happened, I went both days and got my hands on a lot of cool books.

Cynthia Liu put out a few new books for the show so I was really excited to get those.

and I stumbled upon Ben Sears book Double+ which was a great find for me because I’m a huge fan of his work on tumblr and instagram, and his comic turned out to be amazing.

Seconds Helping was a really cool book about the process of being an assistant on a gigantic project, very interesting story from Jason Fischer.

I did not expect to find something like Die Homer but I’m so glad I did. Tyler Hutchison’s amazing retelling of Die Hard using cartoon characters from his memory, amazing project.

The rest I’m in the process of reading so I will talk about them in the future possibly (maybe on a podcast I don’t know)

Hopefully you’ve been checking out my podcast (which updates on Sundays) http://www.comics-that-exist.com/podcast we appreciate any feedback and topic ideas so feel free to give us a shout in the comments.

Also as many of you know I’m pretty into music so I decided with each blog post I’m going to give an album suggestion, feel free to take it, or don’t, it’s still a free country. I’m going to do it in a really basic way of just listing the album and you can go check it out if you want. I’m going to talk about the album less than this description telling you about telling you about the album itself.

One of the good drawing albums I’ve been listening to is Set Your Goals – This Will Be The Death of Us

So hopefully everybody has a good week and we’ll meet back here next week for some good drawing adventure stuff.

You can follow me at these places:

https://www.facebook.com/JamesMarontateArt

https://instagram.com/jamesmarontate/

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/jamesmarontate

https://twitter.com/JamesMarontate

and of course at the mothership

www.comics-that-exist.com

Gotta Catch Um All (Finale)

Hey Everybody!

Sorry for no post last Saturday, Kris and I were at Toronto Comicon. Thanks to everybody who swung by our booth and checked out our stuff. We had a great time and met a ton of cool people, but more on that later.

As you all know I’ve been slowly working through the original 151 Pokemon as daily doodles, and have finally come to the end. I want to say thanks to everyone who stuck around for the whole process and supported the pieces. So here it goes…

             

Hope you enjoyed those!

Now for Comicon goodness.

Above is a picture of our booth, look at how fancy it is. We had a great time meeting new and exciting folk and we will be at Fan Expo Toronto this summer (more information to come in the future) as well as some other cons.

I did a bunch of Yoshi prints, because Yoshi is rad.

One thing I always like to do at conventions is check out the other artists work in artist alley, so when I get a chance to get away from the table I go out into the wilds and buy stuff.

Lots of cool zines and comics this year as well as some postcards and an original sketch of Hellboy that is super cool. I also came across some really cool resin sculptures, which I will be painting up sometime in the future.

The convention was great but when I got home I immediately got sick, which I suppose is part of being around a ton of people. But the next day I received a cool package in the mail from one of my favourite artists Jake Parker.

The two books are “Inktober” and his newest art book “Drawings II”. Both are amazing books that you should definitely check out.

Also last week I wrapped up on the show I`ve been working on for the last year, Daniel Tiger`s Neighborhood. It was a great experience and gave me the opportunity to learn and work with a lot of super amazing people. I start my next project next week but just wanted to take a second to let you know what I`ve been up to.

Thanks for everybody who stuck it through this long winded post. See you all next week!

New Year Wrap Up Part 2

Hey Everybody!

Welcome to part 2 of the wrap up. This post will be more text heavy since I covered all of Inktober in the last one. For a lot of people it seems like the New Year is a good time to reflect and evaluate your progress and set goals for the future which I do try to do more than once a year but I figured for this post I would go into what I am proud to have accomplished and what I plan to do in the future.

One of the biggest life changes that occurred this year was moving away from my hometown into the city to pursue my career. It was an extremely difficult step to make, leaving your comfort zone with a large risk of potential failure looming overhead, but fortunately I had a great group of friends/family and well-wishers who made the process pretty easy. After a month of living in my new apartment I was able to get a job in animation at an awesome studio, and am still at that. It has been a great opportunity and has allowed me to meet/befriend and learn with some awesome artists.

As for personal projects I am divided, in some aspects I have been more productive than ever doing many conventions, putting out new zines, and prints. But in other areas I have not been as productive as I’d like with my comic, personal animation. One cool thing that I’ve begun to do with my buddy Kris is a podcast which is a process we are trying to learn and understand more about as we go (episodes will begin popping up soon (there will be a post about it)).

Moving forward I have a few things I would like to change. I am going to put all the effort I can into being more consistent with projects. I would like to finish another short film this year as well as some collaborative work. I want to put more of myself into learning and improving in my field, hopefully that will be hand in hand with some confidence towards my work.

Aside from improvements for the future there are also just a lot of things I do that I would like to keep moving. I want to thank everyone who is interested in the work I do and those who support my work by consuming it, it’s been a great year full of cool stuff and next year will be great too! Happy New Year Everybody!

Today is a day

I wanted to let everybody know that I will be doing a couple cons in August so if you are in Windsor ON on August 17th swing by the Summer Comic Con and Fan Expo in Toronto ON August 28-31. I will be boothing alone for the Windsor con but will be sharing a booth with Kris Auger during Fan Expo, so be sure to swing by and check out some of our new cool stuff. Also the temporary hiatus on Super Space Boy Adventures will soon end and there will be a ton of new stuff for everybody (Physical copies of chapter 2 at the Windsor Con?). Aside from new prints I will also have some new zines which I’m pretty excited about, I’ll post more info when I figure out a printing method.

Also Super Space Boy Adventures has started updating weekly on my Deviantart page, if that’s more your pace http://rokusho1345.deviantart.com/.  It moves a lot slower on there (1 page a week) and it will never catch up to www.comics-that-exist.com so it’s up to you where you want to read it, I may also start the same thing on Tumblr.

Since the last update of this blog a lot of cool stuff has happened, including but not limited to TAAFI (Toronto Animation Arts Festival International) which is a great festival to check out if you’re an animator or someone interested in the industry. There were a ton of very interesting and informative panels and awesome workshops. I was able to do a workshop on Storyboarding hosted by Natasha Allegri, Steve Wolfhard, and Vera Brosgol, which was an awesome time. Animation is pretty cool. If you’re an animator you should definitely come next year!

I guess that’s all I have to say this time, here are some doodles!

Have a good weekend everybody!

 

Animation is fun, and time consuming

Lately I have been spending an insane amount of time behind my Cintiq making lots of cool and some not so cool stuff. Aside from Space Boy (my new webcomic, posts about it somewhere on here) I’ve been doing a ton of animation (some professionally, some for fun).

One of the new just for fun practice pieces I’m working on is an animation which I’m adding a second or so to every day, it’s on 1s which means there are 24 unique drawings for each second of animation, I’ll likely post renders as it goes on, and will definitely post still frames every so often. I’m hoping to keep this going over the course of the year just for fun.

If you’re interested in seeing maybe bi-weekly renders let me know and I’ll see what I can get posted.

Back from Taafi

There was a lack of posts on this blog over the weekend because I went up to Toronto to attend Taafi (Toronto Animation Arts Festival International). It was an amazing weekend with plenty of informative workshops and panels. I think that I will start adding some of my favourite shorts from the festival (That I can find on the webs) so you can all check them out. But first, I have an updated animation reel, you should check it out and let me know what you think.

http://jamesmarontate.com/

I also drew a selfie.

Anyways… One of the shorts I was really into at Taafi introduced me to the fantastic band The Beards, check out their music video Got Me a Beard http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlgbKIswpzI

Fun stuff to the max!

 

 

 

 

 

Hello everybody,

So continuing with the theme of the posts lately here are a few more days of the palette challenge I’ve been doing. I’ve been trying more blending now rather than just using the colours provided (probably should have thought of that earlier, but the point of these things is to learn). So I’ve been doing a lot of monsters which I find a fun subject to work with. Aside from Retro Randy which just had me feeling nostalgic (I’ve been recording footage of some old Gameboy games for commentary purposes).

 

For those of you who have been waiting for a new animated short after High Hopes, I have semi-good news, I’m in the middle of working on a new short (among several others in early development) so that is exciting. Today I was with some friends who were lending their voice talents to the current project and I ended up doing a little doodle of a yeti.

Also! If you don’t already you should follow my facebook page for some cool stuff https://www.facebook.com/JamesMarontateArt . And subscribe to my youtube channel so you know right away when I release new cool things that move! http://www.youtube.com/user/jamesmarontate

 

That’s all for today!

 

More Gifs!

I’ve been working on a new animated short that I will be posting this week but felt like I’ve been neglecting these little gif animations so I took a break from the short to make a couple. Enjoy derpy Mega Man (Who I’m becoming quite fond of) and Cactuar.

 

 

Things that are cool

 

Finally got around to framing some of the prints and sketches I have from some of my favourite artists. I think I’m going to set this one with a black background instead of the white. These pieces are from Jake Parker for his kickstarter of Antler Boy and other stories, you can check out his stuff on his website http://mrjakeparker.com/. He also has a new kickstarter http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jakeparker/drawings which has 14 days to go.

I’m a huge fan of his style and find it as a good source of reference and inspiration.

Also I’m just putting the finishing touches on my new quick short :

 

Hoping to have it up tomorrow or Saturday.