Hey y'all, my latest for The Atlantic just went up! It's an animation I adapted from a 1932 article that Helen Keller published in The Atlantic. She wrote, "I am tempted to think that the perplexed businessman might discover a possible solution [to] his troubles if he would just spend a few days in his wife's kitchen. Let us see what would happen if he did."

My little four-second snippet for Liam Clisham's Cel Corpse! Oh MAN, I love cel animation. https://dribbble.com/shots/3062491-Cel-Corpse

What is the true cost of piracy to an independent creator?

I just saw a torrent site that had more than a thousand illegal downloads of my Photoshop Megapack … in 24 hours. Seriously, how many people use Photoshop out there?! I mean, of course I’m upset, but I’m equally baffled by this number - I didn’t realize that many people had an interest in making digital art. It’s nuts.

Artists stealing from artists. I can’t understand it.

And I am always afraid to raise my already insultingly low prices BECAUSE I am afraid of more piracy. So, what am I supposed to do here? 

The sad truth is that I either DO need to raise prices to make up for the gross number of thefts and keep my income stream from diminishing (which would, of course, make them less affordable for students and young pros), or I need to completely change the business model somehow to somehow fight piracy. I don’t know how to change it, exactly, but since piracy of my products has been steadily increasing every year since I started, I need to figure something out.

Final thought: If just 5% of those people had bought legally, I’d have made $750 today. Okay, okay - that thought will definitely not improve my mood.

If you are a victim of piracy of your creative products, and you have some thoughts on this topic, I welcome them in comment form. Also, if you agree that this behavior is disgusting, and that we artists should be supporting one another, rather than acting like cannibals, then PLEASE REBLOG. Perhaps, if we make a little noise, it will at least make people reconsider using torrent sites when they realize that working artists are behind all of the creative products they love: music, art, film - all of it.

Thanks for reading. - Kyle

A big ol' post of clips from my work at The Atlantic since I started in January. I've worked on so many amazing projects so far this year!

While attending Blendfest, consuming several wines after many coffees, Shawn Hight, Ira Hardy and Kyle Martinez got to talking… how can we be more collaborative?

Chainamation was born.

Each contributor was given 72 hours to animate 1-2 seconds adding to what the previous animator had done.

–

Contributors:

Remington McElhaney Francisco Quiles Jamil Lahham Zach Christy Paul Slemmer Qais Sarhan Emilia Metzel Will Fortanbary Caitlin Cadieux Timmy Allen Kyle Martinez Mario Ruggiero Fabio Valesini Daniel Schreiber Chris Long

Music / SFX:

James Moscardini

Gouache is totally rocking my world right now. Can't believe it took me this long to start playing with it!! Now I need to get a desk or something so I'm not painting on my bed...

Some recent fun with cel stuff!

I recently gave a talk at the University of Akron as kind of an intro into the Exciting World of Motion Graphics. These are some slides I illustrated for said talk!

https://dribbble.com/caitcadieux

http://drbl.in/pXTM

CRAB. http://drbl.in/pVsM

http://drbl.in/pOwp

I recently finished up this project, illustrating some paper dolls for OU students and fans to play with in celebration of the Pride of Oklahoma's new uniforms! This was a HUGE challenge for me, as the human form is my eternal artistic stumbling block, but I learned so much from it and had fun trying to emulate a vintage paper doll aesthetic. I absolutely love working on projects for my alma mater, and I miss her dearly. Working with my old department there as well is also an immense treat.

Reblogging for... uh... Tuesday!

Finally finished with this, essentially my first finished short. It started out as an all-encompassing practice/exercise for stuff like layout, design, and character animation. Here, here, and here are some examples of it in its baby infant stages. As I kept working on it, it just kind of ballooned into something crazy, and I adapted it into this short type of format! I had an amazing time working on it, and I can’t wait to get on the next short, once I’ve nailed down some of the ideas I have kicking around. I have some process stuff I’m excited to show, and might do a brief writeup about my experience working on this in a day or two!

Extra shout out to Alex Thomas for giving me a hand with the sound design and helping me kick this up a notch! And thanks to those who gave me excellent feedback on the earlier drafts, without which it would be much poorer.

A little sample of some process stuff from making the short I recently wrapped up. I figured I'd do a more extensive write up, but it's difficult, as I mostly made it up as I went along. It started out as some fun with DuIK and Illustrator. I've been really trying to work on fundamentals, so as I tinkered, I started thinking about making a little .gif or two out of it. I developed layouts and color schemes, and started experimenting with texture. I wanted to communicate depth and show the back of the cave as being pretty far in the distance. Every textured graphic in the short was made by running gradients in Photoshop through as 4-color .gifs, pulling them into Illustrator and scaling them back up 250%. I used an action in Illustrator to crop them to the size of their final shape so the AE project file wouldn't be too bloated. I actually animated the entire thing fully once before, ending with the wizard marching away triumphantly. The animation (which you can see an example of in the last .gif above) was very slow, with unnatural, deliberate movements, and lacked character–unfortunate in a character animation exercise. I ended up getting some excellent feedback and went back, re-illustrating some pieces and reanimating the entire thing from start to finish. It was pretty late in the game when I realized the dead-eyed look for the dragon wasn't working, and implemented a more dynamic and expressive eye to give him a sense of life. I'd have liked to figure out a way to give him some realistic breathing and sighing animations as well... In my initial plan, I'd wanted to build something that could loop perpetually, but as it developed, I thought it would be awesome to try and take it to another level as a little short piece. I think the final piece's greatest weakness is the story element, which was an unfortunate result of working somewhat aimlessly on it over time. That being said, I'm now kicking around some ideas on the next big step, which I'll develop with a more story-oriented workflow. This began almost entirely as a technical exercise, and I learned SO much. I really couldn't be happier with the entire experience.

Finally finished with this, essentially my first finished short. It started out as an all-encompassing practice/exercise for stuff like layout, design, and character animation. Here, here, and here are some examples of it in its baby infant stages. As I kept working on it, it just kind of ballooned into something crazy, and I adapted it into this short type of format! I had an amazing time working on it, and I can't wait to get on the next short, once I've nailed down some of the ideas I have kicking around. I have some process stuff I'm excited to show, and might do a brief writeup about my experience working on this in a day or two! Extra shout out to Alex Thomas for giving me a hand with the sound design and helping me kick this up a notch! And thanks to those who gave me excellent feedback on the earlier drafts, without which it would be much poorer.

He-Man for today's Sketch Dailies. The mysterious form of the human being continues to elude me, but I greatly enjoyed attempting it and lavishing attention on Battle Cat.