HARVEYJAMES™

GO FOR THE GOLD 3

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:23:26 GMT

Hey! I am not so good at taking pictures of myself, but look! My copy of Meathaus' GO FOR THE GOLD 3 arrived just now. It's a collection of artists' sketchbook pages, featuring people like Ines Estrada, Brandon Graham, James Jean, Peter Chung, Katie Rice, Rebecca Sugar, Nick Gazin and more. I am also in this book. Some mistake?!?!

You can buy the book from here. If you want a closer look at any of the sketches I did which are collected in the book, they're on my flickr photostream .

I don't have an online store website that collects all this stuff in one handy page, so I should say: Don't forget you can also buy stickers from here (along with stickers from pals Inechi, JFISH and Lala) , the issue of Electric Ant I'm in here, Christmas decorations from here, and a t-shirt from here. More stuff to buy coming soon! HJ™ has Christmas covered like a jimmy hat!

Cats in Christmas Hats

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:24:34 GMT

Hey! What are you doing for Christmas? I will be doing this: GETTING RICH, because these cats you see here are available to buy as honest-to-goodness christmas decorations at etsy, thanks to "Amanda Gourmet Gamer Girl" Irwin.

If you want to buy some for yourself, they're right here! Better order quick if you want to get them in time for christmas, ok

Christmas traditions depicted here include: Rudolf Cat, Santa Cat, Christmas Pudding Cat, Falling Asleep In Front Of The TV Cat, Kwanza Kake Kitty, Cherub Cat, Heart Attack Induced By Over-Consumption Cat. There are probably many more I never thought of! If you wanna draw some Christmas Cats and post them in the comments, this is a practise I fully endorse!

COLE TRAIN

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:58:10 GMT

I'm posting a lot of quickie illustrations on here lately, huh! The trouble is, most of my more worked-up drawings I've been doing lately I can't show you, so I guess I'm just going to have to come to terms with this blog being pretty sparse for a good while. This one's for Game Developer Magazine- it is Gears of War's sensitively-depicted and thoroughly researched African-American character 'Cole Train'.

Gears Of War, to my tastes, is a pretty horrible game. Did you know that less than two percent of the world's game developers are of African heritage? And the rest are really awful white guys who listen to Dragonforce? That second fact was made up, but it's the impression one might get from games like this. Let me give you an example of how dumb-as-a-rock the writing is in this game: see, there are these hulking gorilla-like aliens who shout 'BOOM' at you whenever they fire their weapon. Then your black wingman Cole Train's catchphrase is
'BOOM, BABY!' Give or take one word, they gave the hulking ape and the black guy the same fucking catchphrase! Not only that, but they took that catchphrase from the wacky black sidekick in a Dreamworks animated movie, so it's not even their own racism. That line is in the trailer, in fact! That's pretty lazy! Although, to be fair, I think if I was to write an epic drama about the horrors of war on a faraway planet, I would probably research it by combing through the DVD extras for Shrek and the Emperor's New Groove, too.

I am still totally up for adding Wii friends, hit me up with your friend code so we can trade miis, lolcats, pretend it is christmas 2007

Wiiiii

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:29:42 GMT

Hey! My Wii friend code is 3504 6941 3246 8657. Message me with your code, I will send you secret christmas miis maybe

TL:DR

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:16:38 GMT

Ironically, given the title, this blog post will be very short:

My friends and I have left Livejournal alone lately; tumblr and twitter seems to allow us to do all this stuff a lot more easily, at the expense of the wordcount. The luddite in me worries: the biggest fear I have is that the emergent culture of microblogging (where our attention spans have shortened to the point where anything over two paragraphs is answered with 'TL:DR') will ultimately limit thought and expression on a wider scale.

As the invention of the ballpoint pen caused a worldwide decline in the art of penmanship, our new methods of communication could leard to verbal and literary articulacy becoming a dying art, too. Unlike grandpa shaking his fist at mobile phones and pudding pops, I think this is a legitimate concern; the less we can articulate big concepts, the less we can even think about them, and synthesise new ones. As other commenters have said, our TL:DR culture fulfils the same function of 1984's 'newspeak'; a self-imposed Orwellianism.

Though it's easier for humans to communicate now than in any point in history, generally the users of digital social media choose to stifle the exchange of ideas through peer pressure, too: introspection is sneered at as being 'emo', any lengthy discourse is 'TL:DR'. The aforementioned seem to be a right afforded only to those who create a pedestal for themselves, not the online proletariat, the average user- who has as much room to talk as anybody.

I'm as guilty of this as anybody; perhaps even more, since I'm not as full of words as the people I admire- but to me, it seems as if with TL:DR we're rejecting our own evolution, choosing to hide in the sea despite the legs we've been given.

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:05:10 GMT

I drew this on the bus home from the studio last night. Rebecca is my sister

Electric Ant #2: Exquisite Corpses

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:06:02 GMT

My copy of Electric Ant arrived!

You can buy it from here: http://electricantzine.com/

I made it to the back cover.

Awww yeah!

Also: look, here are the packages I sent y'all

I have been dipping in and out of this thing on the bus to work, and there's a really interesting article about the Takarazuka Revue in Japan - the all-female form of theatre that informs the sensibilities of a vast chunk of japanese comic books. If you've ever wondered why even the dudes in japanese comics look like girls, Takarazuka theatre is kind of the rosetta stone to understanding about that. There's also a lot- a LOT- of amazing art by some of my favorite people, like deforgeo , Hellen Jo, and Derek Yu, and a collaboration by Anthony Ha and Anthony Wu, forming a creative team which if they've not at least once thought about calling 'WuHa' then something is up. All in all, i give it three thumbs up. Recommended!

Oh yeah, and see some more work I did for the zine here: http://blog.electricantzine.com/maybe-next-issue-of-electric-ant-zine-should

New Illustration up at Kotaku

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:45:52 GMT

I illustrated Tim Roger's column at Kotaku.com, 'can videogames be our friends?' The plan is that this is going to be a monthly gig.

Here's Tim in his Mii Plaza, full of identical miis of the same woman which he creates obsessively. I didn't really have the time to make sure this illustration conveyed the emotions I wanted to capture! PROTIP: in a pinch, a black rain cloud with an x in it is a pretty cheap stand-in for "an undefinable sense of 21st century ennui"

Hopefully next month's illo' will be a little less dashed-off. It's funny- even though I busted it out on an extremely quick turnaround, this is the most professional-looking, magazine-y drawing I've done in a while. Turns out the visual tropes that characterize modern magazine illustration are also the devices you employ when you want to make something with as little time or effort as possible. Who knew!

Shirt!?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:35:47 GMT

Third time's the charm, perhaps? From the description: "I drew this to help myself come to terms with the fast-approaching moment of my death, fighting space apes in 2012." You can vote for this shirt by clicking the picture below.

Stickers

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:39:42 GMT

Hey! Thanks to inechi and Cafe Con Leche, you can now buy stickers of my designs (featuring such popular characters as Qraka Sutin, Sherrif Lava, and a turtle) at http://web.me.com/inechi/cafe_con_leche/stickrshj.html

Yours for only 20 pesos!

Happy Hallowe'en

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:46:44 GMT

This time last year, I was in South Korea teaching English; I don't know if I ever detailed our Korean Hallowe'en on this blog, but myself and another teacher, Marika, spent all day turning one room of our school into an honest-to-goodness Hallowe'en house, complete with cobwebs, gravestones and bowls of peeled grapes and a jar we told the kids were eyeballs. We even dressed the gym teacher as a zombie and laid him in a cardboard coffin, daring the kids to sneak past him to retrieve a token, redeemable for a green food-colouring witch cookie.

Somehow this adventure playground failed to ignite the fires of their imagination in the way we intended- I guess if you have no concept of a make-believe haunted house to begin with, no very special garfield halloween specials telling you what to expect, and the only adults charged with passing down the flame of the tradition around are two pale idiots dressed as a zombie and a zombie horse respectively, who don't speak your language, it's going to be hard to see a bunch of chairs with a black sheet over the top as a haunted labyrinth. The one aspect they did get a firm grasp on was that at some point, grown-ups are going to give you free sweets, and so our halloween room quickly became an orderly queue of kids lining up to say 'GIMME CANDY'. I don't even know where they got that phase from! I had taught them to say trick or treat!

These drawings, here, are from last Halloween. As much as I could, I tried to work drawing-themed games into my teaching, such as asking the kids to describe to me a monster, in English, which I would draw on the board - 'He has a big face, he has seven eyes', and so on. I'd also let the kids take turns to draw, too, and we would end up with some pretty amazing creations- surreal , compound, imaginitive characters with no precedent in either fact or fable. Above right, you can see my redrawing of a doodle one little girl did completely independently of our drawing games. It's an original work by one person acting alone, and yet the tropes of our drawing games are all there- two pig's noses? So I guess I was pretty pleased with how things were working out- their drawings were becoming influenced by me, and mine were influenced by them- a cross-cultural feedback loop.

The drawings I've posted below are all pretty faithfully based on the kid's Halloween drawings, refined by me whenever necessary, but mostly unchanged from their originals.

So, our hallowe'en drawing game- in it, I wrote descriptions of the standard Hallowe'en monsters on a piece of paper, and the kids had to write which monster was being talked about, and draw a picture of it. That's where 'Qrakasutin' comes from. The name might need a bit of explanation! See, native Korean speakers have difficulty saying the constenant 'eff', pronouncing it more of a 'puh' sound, which I guess led Jin Jin to think the famous movie monster was called 'Prankenstien.' Added to that her creative, scattershot approach to spelling English words and a backwards 'p' and you've got a pretty triumphant piece of mispelling.

Above left, my take on what 'Prankenstien' might look like.

I love how effortlessly the children abstracted and reinvigorated the well-worn visual tropes of the Halloween monsters. For instance, without having learned aurally that Frankenstien's monster has 'two bolts in its neck', they've seen fit to add the bolts wherever they like, and as many as they like. I think this kind of naive irreverence has been very influential to me in the past year or so, informing everything from the cats with hats I drew to t-shirt designs and logos for rap groups. I think I stopped being a teacher just as I started to feel like I was getting good at it- however, through my work, the experience I had there continues to bear fruit to this day.

Have a great halloween!

Hey!

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:31:52 GMT

Hey, a while back a reader told me she was planning on dressing as a 'Harveyjames girl' for Hallowe'en. To that reader: Are you still planning on doing it? Take pictures!

To the girls who asked for fabric swatches: They're in the post

To Liz Greenfield: your t-shirt is in the post

To Ashlee Simpson: You don't get a t-shirt :(

Speaking of which, the first batch of attractmo.de game girl t-shirts arrived about a week ago. Here's our model daphaknee, with hers:

Mine arrived, too. If you got one, take a picture of yourself wearing it and post it in the comments, maybe Adam will use your picture on his site or somethin'.

Oh hey, also, if you don't have a t-shirt, get the handheld gaming object of your choice and re-enact the shirt design! I will be upfront: you won't win anything, for doing either of these things, I just get off on telling people what to do

This is where I go every day

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:22:03 GMT

Me and the two other guys who're sharing this space with me only moved here a month or two back; if you would like to send us gifts to brighten up our studio, we would like to announce that we are currently accepting those gifts:

James "Harvey James" Harvey
Studio 5.23a
art's complex, st. margaret's house
151 london road, edinburgh, eh7 6ae

Hey, now I have access to a digital camera and can take pictures of things, I can guarantee that whatever you send me I will review on this blog and probably take a picture of it

Extra-Curricular

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:20:00 GMT

Boy I hope that threadless shirt comes through because I could sure do with a new computer

Did you know the full stop ('period' to yanks) button on my computer does not work! Which is why I've developed this strange writing style! with! All! These! Exclamation marks where a full stop would do! This also accounts for all the trailing sentences which end in no punctuation

I'm right now between issues of the comic book I'm making, so I'm taking a few days out to study, hone my skills a little, and get a little more confident in what I do. (I copied and pasted that full stop from the address bar, by the way.) Something I've been obsessed with lately is making previsualisations of what I want my work to look like, ideally- right now, I'd feel like I need to get a lot better at drawing things like anatomy, mechanical objects, and compostion of panels and pages before I get to a level of ability befitting the work I want to make. When that happens, though, what will my work look like? I've been taking pages of comics like Akira and reworking them, to see what my personal aesthetic tropes and preferences might look like when applied to such technically accomplished comics pages. As well as being an interesting experiment, it's also a test of my ability to ink and finish a page to a professional standard.

Just to be clear: this is a redrawn page from Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, not my original work

I don't know what the deal is with her hair!

So besides giving the ladies nicer heads and butts and whatnot, I also removed a sound effect in panel 4 and replaced it with a puff of steam- I've never really liked the convention of using onomatopes to convey sound in comics, and I try to convey all action visually wherever I can. I think, though, my approach to colour is what is ultimately going to make my work distinctive, but like a dipshit I left my stylus pen at the studio, so I can't colour it in like I wanted to this evening. Instead, here it is with the autofill macro applied to it:

That looks nuts, I love it

Tomorrow I think I'm going to either do a lot of anatomy drawing or try to tackle a scene with a lot of industrial, hard edged backgrounds, something I usually try to avoid. If you are interested maybe I will let you know how it goes!

Winner's Circle (also, Entrant's Circle)

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:19:38 GMT

DOSHIWA RECORDS
AND HARVEYJAMES™ COMIC MAKIN' COMPETITION

WINNERS!

Alright, well! So the idea Sam from the Dekata Project and I had for this competition was- man, if over 250 people will submit something to my livejournal for free, how many will do something for a cash prize? A lot, I bet!

Um!

The idea was that we were gonna count down the top five comics we recieved day by day across the week, but that doesn't seem like that great an idea when there were only six entries in total. That is not as many as I had hoped for! I have my theories as to why this is, though.

See- in hindsight, the competition seems pretty ill-concieved, for which the blame lies squarely at my feet. It's a very big ask, for one thing- comics are hard to make! And a number of people who read this are professional illustrators and cartoonists, which will discourage a lot of people who just draw as a hobby from bothering to enter- it's like a hosting a public basketball competition, and the other competitors are Michael Jordan and Shaq (and the competition is being held on top of Mount Fuji (but only Shaq has a ski lift (probably))). Likewise, since there's no capper on the length of the comic you were asked to submit I can imagine a lot of people who only have time to make a 1-page comic might feel a little like it'll be wasted effort when some lunatic might have enough time on his hands to submit a 100 page masterpiece and scoop the prize (not that this happened). Also, how do we judge this? If the idea is that the winning comic is going to go on a flyer, do we give the award for the best comic, or the comic that'll make the best flyer? See what a clusterfuck this is!

Lastly, I feel that in some way the way I presented this competition was out of step with the D-I-Y, collaborative, independent spirit that people responded so well to the first time around. In fact someone sent me an email recently that mentioned Doshiwa Records as 'that record company which you're the ad guy for', which is a pretty sure sign that my Livejournal hasn't really been striking the right tone lately.

Still! I am, all the same, pretty damn impressed by all the (six) comics people submitted! My main motivation for doing this was to encourage people to make cool shit, and that is certainly what happened, albeit on a smaller scale than I'd hoped. Behind the jump are all the entries in no particular order, though the winner has been saved for last.

First up: This comic, from our only male entrant, is ridiculously clever. Also, I totally believe in the little universe he's created. I'd love to see more comics set in this world!

badmspaint "A Meal fit For A King"

denji "At Least We Can Dance"

I'm a big fan of the colouring, loose linework and bold layouts of this one, as well as the realisation of the environment they inhabit. Also, I like that you can pretty much always see the one girl's pants.

Corey Lee - "Rain"

Not that I consider myself in any way an expert at making comics, but in my professional capacity of 'competition judge' I feel obliged to remark on this -l really like the layout in panel on

flapperjane21 - "At Least We Can Dance"
I was originally gonna make 'At Least We Can Dance', the title of a Dekata Project song, the main theme for the whole contest, but I guessed it would have been too restricting- seems like the idea would have been a gimme, since 50% of the entrants went with that title anyway. This one is crazy well-drawn!

nikkinacks - "At least we can can dance!"
Nikki's drawings are always rad, and this is no exception. I like the lion girl's tail in the third panel! Although, I have to deduct points since this is basically the plot to the movie 'Grease'

Finally, the winner! 19-year-old Ines Estrada from Mexico City wins the £100 grand prize! So cool! Our people will be contacting your people shortly! Remain calm and stay in your homes!

inechi - "1990 - At LAST We Can Dance"

All right, that's it. Thanks, all!

By the way, if I can hijack this post for a second- thanks everyone who's voted on my shirt at threadless so far. It's doing pretty well, from the looks of things. If you feel like giving it an extra push, you can still vote for it here:

More shirts to come soon

The Knitting Of The Dead

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:59:43 GMT

Yeah, I am pretty pleased that Threadless did not reject this shirt! I thought maybe the boobs and guts might present a problem

If you like it, please go ahead and vote! Sometimes I feel like I ask a lot of you guys BUT I GIVE SO MUCH BACK, DANG IT

Shirt!

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:36:47 GMT

I've got a shirt up on Design By Humans. This is my backup shirt idea- I have a cooler design which was rejected (because it's designed to bleed to the edges of the fabric- turns out that's a no-no), which I will retool and put up later in the week. In the meantime, this one is available for voting on right now. http://www.designbyhumans.com/vote/detail/63962 Give it some votes and make me rich!

Competition winners will be announced later in the week whooo

Hayao Miyazaki facts

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:27:38 GMT

- The bathhouse in Miyazaki's Oscar-winning film Spirited Away is based on a real location! It's closely modelled on a high-class brothel Miyazaki still frequents. The dirty river god is based on Miyazaki himself, a self-deprecating riff on the lewd and antisocial conduct that makes him such a memorable fixture of the clientele.

- The world-famous Ghibli Museum in Mitaka has a ornate tomb under the main building, which Miyazaki designed to be his own family's final resting place! His son, Goro, is scheduled to be buried there next week.

- Hayao Miyazaki's favorite kind of food is a kind of chinese long noodle!

- Hayao Miyazaki has one finger that is solid gold, with clockwork innards that make it move! It was made by the finest craftsmen in europe at a cost of £70,000. Other things miyazaki has replaced with clockwork automatons: his original reference model for Totoro, the roof of his house (it opens up mechanically at 5:30 am every day to let the sun in), Goro Miyazaki.

Hayao Miyazaki's next project is a heartfelt autobiographical film about his relationship with his son. It's rumoured to be titled 'This is MY house, motherfucker!'

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:31:26 GMT

HEY!
SUBMISSIONS
to our comic makin' competition
HAVE ENDED

winners will be announced on FRIDAY

Commission

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:01:09 GMT

Behind the cut: a picture I was paid to do of a naked lady wielding an electric guitar like a club

I am a pen for hire, 'why' is not in my vocabulary

The commissioner of this piece actually paid me extra bucks after the drawing was finished to remove the shell (not the tortoise's). I'm thinking this is a pretty good business model- what if I drew someone a robot, and then told them it was £50 to 'level up' any one attribute? Or I drew someone a portrait of their grandma, and told them it woud be an extra £50 to put her false teeth in, and an extra $1000 to remove all the dildos? It bears thinking about.

Tomorrow is the HAND-IN DAY for the competition, as you know - I am going off to work in the studio now, but I will create the HAND-IN DAY post for HAND-IN DAY when I get back

HOME STRETCH

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:42:36 GMT

Hey! As of today, you now have A WEEK LEFT to get in your entries for this £100 comic makin' competition! I'm going to leave this post up as an unofficial receptacle for entries, in case anyone wants to submit early, but if not I'll make a big mega blowout post on the eve of the hand-in day. Man, my blog DOES sound like an advert for a bargain basement warehouse what the hell is the matter with me

Also, I found something neat out on daphaknee 's blog: Apparently there's a Russian superheroine called Octobriana, supposedly created in the 60's a group of dissident Russian artists calling themselves Progressive Political Pornography (PPP). She was conceived as a Slavic Bridgette Bardot, a warrior fighting for true communism, as opposed to the communism happening in Russia at the time.

Apparently, "The nature of Octobriana's genesis means that she is unique within our modern capitalist society. She was created by a communist group who believed in the spirit of true communism, so consequently no-one actually 'owns' Octobriana -- she belongs to no-one and yet, at the same time, she belongs to everyone."

I like this idea a lot! It's certainly in the socialist spirit of the collaborative art projects and competitions we've been having on this livejournal, in fact. Basically, hypothetically speaking it would be TOTALLY OK for any of you to take the character of Octobriana and put it into your own comics- whether for this competition, or any in the future.

The idea of a character that belongs to everyone is completely in the open-source spirit of the internet, and so is a perfect fit for livejournal. I'd like to see a rash of comics pop up that use Octobriana.

more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octobriana

DOSHIWA RECORDS AND HARVEYJAMES™ COMIC MAKIN' COMPETITION

£100 CASH PRIZE
no foolin'

ONE WEEK
LEFT TO ENTER

WHEE I have no dignity

Tricks O' The Trade

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:55:34 GMT

Hey! What is up! Today I'm gonna give ya'll a glimpse BEHIND THE MAGICIAN'S CURTAIN and show you how I created that t-shirt image for Attract Mode, over a year ago. It seems to be pretty popular right now so I thought it was a perfect time to TOTALLY RUIN THE MYSTIQUE (buy my shirt)

I got the gig to draw for Attract Mode while I was working as a schoolteacher in South Korea last year. The brief as given to me by Adam Robezzoli was basically 'A cute girl playing a game boy' . I made a few sketches, but nothing that came out felt striking enough to be used on a t-shirt.

You will notice that the girl has two left feet! can you see how rusty I was

Alright, that wasn't working, so I hit upon this sort of unique way of using photo reference where I gathered a bunch of pictures and kind of Frankensteined them into a rough approximation of the image I wanted. Check this shit out:

So, lemme break down how I made this thing- firstly, the head is that of web cartoonist Liz Greenfield. I always liked this picture from Liz's myspace, and the headphones seemed pretty perfect for conveying the sense of absorption I wanted our character to have in her game.

Liz is a good lookin' lady, so her face became a partial basis for the girl in the final drawing. Awkwardly, when I got back to England I actually got introduced to Liz at a con and sort of chatted to her briefly. I briefly toyed with dropping the HURUDR I BASED A PICTURE ON YOU bomb but ultimately decided to keep it in the hangar. Needless to say, I felt (and still feel) a little creepy about this but whaddyagonnadu.

The body is actually from this picture of terrible pop star Ashlee Simpson. I always thought it was a cool pose, so I changed the angle of the head, leaned her back a bit, and removed the arms.

Although I'm very pleased with the final image, I think the lesson I learned here was that if I was ever to use photo reference again, I should probably use much more culturally neutral sources- a number of people spotted that I'd used a drawing of Ashlee Simpson as a large part of the basis of this design, and once it was out there I felt sort of bad, since I guess one's opinion of terrible pop star Ashlee Simpson could conceivably colour one's opinon of the shirt. Had I done it today I might have had more confidence in inventing a pose and outfit from scratch, but what's done is done, I guess.

Lastly, her new arms are from a photograph I got by google image searching 'woman playing gameboy', and then scrolling through the results until I got a picture that fit my collage. I put them all together and then started sketching from the image on my computer screen.

On the left's the original drawing- on the right, the same drawing after digital manipulation. During this time I used Photoshop's warp and selection tools to touch-up my inking to a very heavy extent, to the point where I could make good drawings out of bad drawings, pretty much. As you can see, on paper this was actually a terrible, terrible goopy drawing with a huge head and hardly any torso and god knows what else wrong with it, but I basically used photoshop to bend it to fit around the original photomontage it was sketched from and correct all the mistakes.

Yeah! Our character, who for reasons I cannot legally disclose I am calling Ash Greenfield, is born!

Finally, I multi-layered the inks over themselves, and converted the original photo-montage into benday dots and selectively added it into the composition, too, to provide shading and visual interest. It took a lot of experimenting, but eventually I ended up with something I was happy with.

Flash forward a couple of months, and here's Attract Mode's Adam wearing the shirt at the Giant Robot show in San Francisco. The shirt is complete! I think the finished article went over pretty well, since apparently at the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo a bunch of people were telling Adam they wanted to 'date the chick'. Now it's available to buy online it seems to be sellin' out pretty fast. I think Adam is finally starting to see some money coming back off this venture!

As for me, the flat fee I got paid went straight home to my mum in England, so I didn't actually see a penny from the shirt- but! New shirts from me will be coming soon from the Attract Mode store! Maybe I will get rich at some point, too

Eight days left to enter our competition!

Turtles!

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:28:08 GMT

I did a whole bunch of pirate-themed art way back in 2006, and my big thing at the time was drawing little turtles in the background of all my pictures, each one totally different. I guess it was what I was best known for, back then! Someone asked me to bring the turtles back for the background of a recent commission, so here's a page of warm-up turtles I drew beforehand.

You can see the pirate art here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/34927237@N00/sets/72157594481101286/

Only nine days left for this competition!

T-SHIRTS

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:44:32 GMT

Oh man, you asked for 'em and GUESS WHAT

$22.00

Portable games + headphones are all you need for an afternoon of happiness.

Printed on American Apparel
Fine Jersey cotton t-shirt.

Sewn and printed in
Los Angeles

BUY 'EM RIGHT HERE

Congrats to Adam Robezzoli for finally getting the Attract Mode store up and running. It's been a rocky road, but dang if his hard work didn't pay off! All kinds of cool stuff to buy in here, so have a look, why don'cha

Only two weeks left to enter our £100 Comic Makin' Competition!
denji already got her entry in, and it is freakin' rad! Click here to read it. Amongst other things, I really like that the default camera setting in this comic is an upskirt one. Keep 'em coming!

1-800-YOR-FACE

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:03:25 GMT

A friend of mine who goes by channingkennedy on livejournal (and in real life) writes for racewire.org. Sometimes I will ask him, 'hey, how about that President Obama!' It is a legitmate question, because here is a true thing about me: I don't follow the news at all

This is what I do every morning on the bus to work: think about reading the Dostoyevsky book in my bag and then instead read the free paper they leave on the floors for you there which is one third celebrity gossip, one third funny videos to watch on the internet, and the remainder is news about gorillas

This is what I do every night when I get home: think about reading the political blogs Channing shares on Google Reader and then instead watch the same three or four Youtube Poops over and over

I already did a pretty big post on Youtube Poop- if you're still in the dark about this stuff, you can read about them in the post I made here. Youtube poops rarely have much of a narrative to speak of, being mostly 3 minute videos of videogame cartoon characters cut up to create surreal juxtapositions and dick jokes, which is why the poops I'm about to share are so remarkable to this jaded poop fan.

'Link's On Strike' by SwishFilms Inc.

This is an epic piece of storytelling by Youtube Poop standards. It's pretty dense, and very quickly paced. I think the way the story resolves itself is incredibly clever, too! I like Swishfilms inc because, unusually, his videos always have a clear beginning, a middle and an end- he also uses sentence mixing incredibly well. 'The Cowardly King' and 'The King's Unreasonable Demands' are my other favourite videos of his, as well as 'Hyrule Dating Videos'. I think there's something satisfyingly formalist and conceptual in the way he limits himself to using the same clips of the Phillips CDi Legend of Zelda games to construct a different narrative from in every video. I also enjoy hearing Link tell Gwonam to 'go suck a penis, you old queer'. So it's a winner all round, really.

'I. M. Meen Vs. Mr. Roboto' by Mr. Roboto

I. M. Meen is a videogame no-one's heard of outside of the context of Youtube Poop- it's an educational game for Windows from about 1994, with animation by the same company that made the terrible CDi Legend of Zelda games, hence the reason it came to the Youtube Poop community. This poop is a textbook exercise in self-reflexivity- I.M. Meen is shown to be angrily griping about Youtube Poops themselves, in particular those of this poop's author, Mr. Roboto. We then see Mr Roboto himself, who- in a post-modernist masterstroke! responds to Meen with a Youtube Poop of his own about I. M. Meen being a 'secret nazi'. Cleverly, the Youtube Poop within a Youtube Poop is edited in a more traditional Youtube Poop structure and rhythm. It's amazing how quickly young artforms obtain this kind of self-awareness and the ability to satirize their own tropes and conventions. I think that by making himself a character in his own video, Mr Roboto has probably made the ultimate youtube poop about youtube poop.

'One More Final: I Need You (Tube Poop)' by Walrusguy

<

Walrusguy is probably one of the most famous and prolific of Youtube Poopers, but I guess he felt it was time to move on to greener pastures: this video is his farewell to Youtube Poop, and is a victory lap of all his most beloved memes and jokes framed around a tragic narrative about Zelda dying and Link being left to live without her, before tying the whole thing off with an uplifting, optmistic finale. Somehow, he manages to take the limited medium of youtube poop- a medium where, unlike music or film, I doubt anyone will ever make money, get laid, cry or fall in love as a result of it- and uses it to create what I think is a genuinely heartfelt and affecting farewell to his viewers.

'Hyrule Dating Videos Part 2'

This is SwishFilms Inc again. This is only really good if you're familiar with the original Hyrule Dating Videos, which felt pretty high concept the first time I saw it- this is more of the same, although it's a lot patchier than the first outing. The interludes where Swish inlcudes clips from MASH and the Rick Astley video feel like dead airtime, for instance. It is still fun, though!

As a bonus feature, here is something I have no understanding of whatsoever: it's a playlist of six different Poops made by six different people, all of which feature a short clip in which someone is edited to sound like they're saying the word 'fucked', followed by a slowed-down clip of Mario's brother Luigi walking to odd music. Youtube Poop is such an incestuous, viscously fluid and constantly evolving artform that some pockets of it seem completely baffling to outsiders- in this instance, one's left to wonder how this incredibly arbitrary set of rules came into being, and for what purpose. Why did this happen!

I think this chaos and confusion is part of the beauty of it, however, and long may it continue. If you've seen Swishfilms Inc.'s terrible webcomic, you may get some idea of how Youtube Poop has unlocked a creativity and talent in these kids that might not manifest itself in any other aspect of their lives. One day they'll grow tired of this hobby, probably about the same time they'll have to move out of mom's house and get a job, with their skill in editing Zelda characters to talk about dongs unmarketable in the real world- but for this moment, in their bedrooms, in the brief coruscating glow of their adolescence, they can shine as brightly as all the stars in the night sky. So in closing, here's what I like about Hyrule Dating Videos Part 2: I like how he reuses the 'my penis is awful' joke from the first Hyrule Dating Videos. I like when Ganon says 'you must be kinky', and when Fari says 'Hey! Hey! Hey! Gay!' What you've bascially learned is this: I like really retarded humour made by 14-year-olds