Caveman Dragging a Cat 2D Animation

40 hours. I animated my Caveman by starting out with paper and pencil and then finishing everything else with the cut-out animation workflow in Toon Boom Harmony Premium. I painted the background in Photoshop in 3.5 hours. Please feel free to ask questions or give me feedback. Thanks! Watch my process video below!

Toon Boom Blog Interview

Check it out! Toon Boom Animation featured me in a two-part article on their blog! Photoshop and Toon Boom Harmony are my two favorite software programs to use. It was such an honor to be featured on their blog! The second article is all about tips and tricks I've learned as an illustrator and animator. I hope someone finds it helpful.

Garbage Day

I've been mowing half of our community lawn for most of the summer.  The clippings fill our big city trash can nearly over the top.  A few weeks ago, I stayed up too late working on an art project and woke up after the trash truck had come and gone.  I figured I'd lost my chance to have an empty trash can for the week.  As I moped and prepared some lunch to take to work, Hope came calling through the back window.  I heard the garbage truck picking up the trash of the neighbors behind us!  In a split second, Crazy Matt kicked in and made me jump into a pair of untied tennis shoes, and run out the our front door.  It was kind of challenging finding the perfect balance as I sprinted with our overloaded trash can around the block.  After I rounded two corners, the truck came into view.  I ran straight down the lane on the street and barely caught the truck before it rounded another corner.  Phwew!  I didn't hit the gym that morning, but I got a workout in anyway.  And I was pretty dang excited to tell my wife the dramatic tale of her hero:)  Click to read the story behind the art.

Grrr.....

I sketched this guy a while ago and tonight I had fun inking and coloring him in Illustrator.  About 3 hours.  Learning from online tutorials and experimenting along the way:)  Summary:  Bring in a pencil sketch and dim the layer to 10%.  Use a 3 pt size brush with pressure sensitivity for the linework.  Because Illustrator doesn't have a rotate art board tool, do a Ctrl+A select all, then hit R and rotate until you're ready to continue (I'm used to drawing in Photoshop and Toonboom and Painter where I can rotate my artboard to capture my hand's natural gestures).  After doing this a whole lot of times and the linework is basically done, select all, Expand, Live Paint Make, Live Paint Release, now use the lasso and push delete to clean up all the lines you overshot.  With clean lines, select all,  and use the pathfinder to combine all paths.  Now, Object>Path>Cleanup.  Next, draw a colored box behind your lines.  Select all, use the pathfinder Merge command to flatten the lines into the color.  Use Direct Select tool to select color outside of character/ negative space.  Delete those areas and any other interior negative space areas.  Now, use the magic wand tool and select the linework.  Cut and paste it on new layer above the colors layer.  Use the Direct Select tool to select color regions and fill them with rough color, grouping like-color regions as you go.  After getting the flat color layer done, duplicate it.  Darken all the groups of colors where you want to add shade (such as the face in my case).  With the darkened face color group selected, open the Transparency toolbar and double click to the right of the thumbnail of your color region.  It should create a black box/ mask and the dark face color on the screen will disappear, leaving the color of the face on the screen normal from the flats layer below.  With the black mask thumbnail in the Transparency menu selected, paint white or black with the brush tool using a 6 pt brush with pressure sensitivity.  White will reveal your dark face 'shadows'.  Black will remove them again.  To get out of painting on the mask layer, click your mouse on the thumbnail of the dark color skin image in the Transparency menu.  If you want to add more shading to other color groups, do it the same way.  Finally, add a few gradients, add a highlight layer on top and then let your computer (and yourself) rest.  If anyone has any questions on the process, I'd be happy to explain it more thoroughly.