March 7th, 2008 Ahmad Al-Mahir
My 5 year-old son Adib has outgrown his massive bus obsession (from collecting toys to surfing bus-related websites to drawing buses to riding them - as often as he can regardless whether we needed to or not - to reading bus-stop signs) and is really into bugs nowadays. Just pictures of them for now that is. We’ve bought him a few educational books on the creepy crawlies and his current favourite is “Pocket Spotters Insects”. It’s quite small and thin enough for him to bring around easily and I’m pleased to see its pages are well-worn from countless perusing. Before now, he’s been mainly looking at the pictures, reading the bug names aloud and assigning insect identities to his brothers and assorted family members (e.g. today he’s a seed bug, and his younger brothers Amil and Atif are a praying mantis and an ant respectively). Tonight, I saw him go a bit further and actually start drawing a few of them using images in the book as reference. I believe he gets additional encouragement to sketch from one of his presently favourite cartoons, ChalkZone. And I must say I’m pleased as Punch. Usually if given a piece of paper and a pencil, he’ll write down words and construct simple sentences. Now maybe he’ll grow to love drawing as much as I do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy with him loving words too!
Check out that smile on his face!
Posted in Drawings & Misc., General | No Comments »
March 5th, 2008 Ahmad Al-Mahir
I’ve installed the latest patches, reset the gallery and finally got the affected pages up and running properly again. I’ll try and upload some new content soon.
Posted in General | No Comments »
March 1st, 2008 Ahmad Al-Mahir
I recently updated to Wordpress 2.3.2 and everything looked fine until I checked out my Drawings and Sequential Art pages. They utilize a gallery plugin and it seems the update broke it. So until I get it fixed (which will probably take a few days at least judging by how little I know of web dev and code) I apologize for the inaccessibility. Good thing the other pages aren’t affected. Now I notice they have the Wordpress 2.3.3 update for download already. Great.
—
I am being swamped by multiple personal project ideas and opportunities and am not quite sure how to handle them. I have a short 2D animation piece I want to develop as preparation for my teaching. It’s tentatively titled “Coffee break”. Then there’s all the stuff I want to explore and attempt for the 3D animation module. And I’ve also been putting off entering Conceptart.org’s P.O.W weekly comic challenge, even though I was (and still am) keen on the idea, and had expressed such enthusiasm upon it’s inception. I hope it doesn’t get pulled due to low participation before I have a chance to jump in. I really don’t want to see the comic art skills I’ve been working on the past few months waste away due to complete inactivity. I guess some other things have taken priority at the moment, but that’s not really a good excuse for utter neglect. So yeah. So many things to do so little time to do it. What else is new.
—
My brother recently loaned me the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, and I enjoyed it tremendously (even though I suspect I’ve only partially understood it’s content). I do like the idea of a world defined by words, and the concept of identity brought up in the book. The artwork was beautiful and effective - ranging from stark and minimalistic to incredibly detailed - and the framing purposeful. Especially considering the book’s literally smaller dimensions. To be able to visualize the words into pictures is an incredible feat in itself and I can definitely appreciate that. I also found the use of variety within the 3×3 panels per page layout of the graphic novel to be clever and well executed. Recommended.
Posted in Animation, Comics, General | No Comments »