learning flash... slowly, eventually

I am finally starting to read my book on Flash animation. I have had this for so long, quite a few years, and it just seems overwhelming to learn. So I'm just taking baby steps with it, reading an hour a day.

Here's one thing I learned so far. If you design a website, you don't want it to end up here: www.webpagesthatsuck.com

The polls are closed. The results are in.

Out of 11 votes, 7 said boy, and 4 said girl. If you said girl, you are correct!

"Christy Moore, 9, makes friends with monsters. They are Marshal Billy-Bob Fritter and his dog, Fritter-Bitter." (From the inside cover of National Geographic World).

"That's Pat!"

Today's Quiz: Is this a boy or a girl? Vote on the right. Answer will be given as soon as I have enough votes.

thought of the day

Another little thing I've kept taped to my monitor from my
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff Calendar.

after the rain

We had a nice rain tonight.

more stuff

After the comments about my junk drawer not being a junk drawer, I'm posting these photos of my closet. This is where most of my junk resides. And it is usually not this clean. I spent hours cleaning it last month.

Looking at these photos a person would get the impression that I am very neat. Actually I work with piles of papers and stuff all around me, and it's not until I'm finished with a project that I go on a cleaning extravaganza, and then the piles start over brand new.

I like these little drawer things I keep in the closet. One is labeled "air pump needle." I love knowing where little things are when I need them.

my junk drawer

Here we go, another blogger photo exchange. This time the theme is junk drawers. What would you expect me to keep in my junk drawer? It's full of doodles. Doodles, and little scraps of paper with ideas written on them.

There is my one-armed Popeye. George glued the arm back on for me, but then it came off again. I was keeping that on top of my monitor for inspiration because somewhere I read that the guy who created Popeye worked like three jobs to make ends meet and drew his cartoons at night.

Below the drawer are the instructions for my micropets, tug and chop. There's a piece of blue fabric the same as my couch cover. I was keeping it in case I needed to match the color to something else, I don't know what, another chair or something.

That black thing is a letter opener that you can put a business card into. Right now there's no business card in it; there's instructions on how to open it and stick your business card inside.

Kaboodle

Thanks to Emma Sometimes at The Bee's Knees for introducing me to Kaboodle. I finally have a way to organize my bookmarks. I had pretty much quit bookmarking things because my bookmarks are so cluttered, I can never find anything there anyway. This site allows you to organize all your favorite stuff and share it with friends.

It also showed me that Safari has a Bookmarks bar, which I didn't even realize I had. So now all the sites I visit daily have buttons in a nice neat row at the top of my window.

I've only started adding things to this a couple of days ago, but here is my Kaboodle.

Also check out the new Cafepress shop by Emma Sometimes. More images will be added soon.

some animal doodles

Happy Anniversary to Chuck and Marci

Happy anniversary to my brother and his wife.
They have been married one year today!

Cafepress

I first discovered Cafepress.com some years ago when I was looking for a gift for my dad, and found a Frank & Ernest mug on there. Then I rediscovered it when the first "Vote for Pedro" shirts were coming out. A little over a year ago I opened my own Cafepress shop.

This is so cool, I should have opened a shop a lot sooner than I did. A basic shop is free, and a shop of unlimited size is only $7 a month.

I assume most people have visited Cafepress and know how this works, but what you do is upload your images onto products, and then you can sell those products, without ever having to invest money in a business, buying the T-shirts, etc. The images are printed after the customers make their choices, so there's nothing lost if a design never sells.

I've been immersed in a new design this week, and very busy uploading it and sorting things out. I couldn't decide which one I liked best, so I just included them all.






I'm having a ton of fun with this.

I'm reminded of when I was a kid and my cousin and I were always drawing stuff and coming up with ideas to get the art onto products to sell to people. We made up a hand-drawn catalog where we figured we'd have a waiting list of customers wanting us to draw custom placemats for them. Then there was the paperweight factory, (drawing stuff on rocks), and the plan to get rich making and selling our own playdough.

Cafepress has not made me rich, but whoever came up with this genius idea must be doing alright!





This is where I reside: http://www.cafepress.com/mytreat



cafepress

doodles

I haven't been blogging much because I've been busy with other things. Just so you know I'm still here, here's some more doodles.

some caffeine-inspired doodles

These are from some time I spent sitting in a coffee shop with a cappuccino.

I just love to sit there with a sketchbook and let my mind wander. I filled up eight pages of ideas while I was in there. We have a local coffee shop that has a nice atmosphere.

We also have one Starbucks that's ok, but then there is another Starbucks where they play the most obnoxious music full blast, I don't know how anyone can sit and enjoy coffee. That one is only good as a drive-through.

a "negative" book review

One of my faaaaaavorite cartoonists is
George Booth.

I went on Amazon.com looking for a book he illustrated for Dr. Suess, called Wacky Wednesday. It had less than a five star overall review, so I went looking for the person who didn't like it.

This woman gave it one star, and I thought her reasons were just hilarious. It is really a 5-star review in disguise:

This book will drive you crazy, August 2, 2002
Reviewer: A reader
"As a parent, I do not like this book. I have two boys and they both love it. They would read it every night If they could. I find it very frustrating, on most pages there are more things wrong they the number they ask for. For instance, if it say 4 things are wrong, my boys usually come up with 6-7. I have tried to donate this book to charity several times, but my boys will not part with it. I just don't have the heart to get rid of it without their consent. Your kids will love it, As a parent I don not recomment it."



I love this illustration of a worm chasing a bird.

concert doodles

Last night we went to a Christian concert, Mainstay.

I guess they are a pretty well known band, very professional, that's for sure. But the concert was set up very weird. The stage was set up in front of a pavilion full of picnic tables. It was raining, and there was an uncovered area between the small covered stage and the pavilion. A handful of kids were jumping around in the rain, then a bunch of other people like us sitting on picnic tables, and farther back more people just hanging out, talking and eating hot dogs.

It was next to the baseball stadium, and was supposed to be a pre-game concert but the game was cancelled because of the rain.

Nevertheless, I of course filled my sketchbook with doodles.

not too much to say, so here's more doodles

Here's some doodles from a while back. I drew these with a calligraphy pen. I really liked that particular calligraphy nib, and since it went bad, I have never found a good enough replacement for it.