Sometime ago, I remember reading an article on John Kricfalusi's blog about color theory, where he points out that most artists nowadays are taking inspiration only from another artists, forgetting the greatest source of inspiration of all: the world around them.

After reading that article, this news and watching to this:

It's now pretty easy to conclude that we don't need to go much further to find our inspiration. The colors, gags and stories are all around us, just waiting to be into the next cartoon. =)

Found an interesting site, from a new animated series called Glumpers.

I liked a lot the quality of this production, made by Make studio. On the website we can watch and download three episodes of this jelly-like creatures . It's a simple idea, but well done. =)

So, 2007 is over...

I wish you all an outstanding new year!  =)

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Some news...

The Disney 1933 classic "The Three Little Pigs" made into the "National Film Registry" list. This list is for  aesthetically and historically relevant films and includes live-action and animated movies such "Citizen Kane" and "One Froggy Evening". You can read more about it on Animated News. I got the image which illustrates this post on Michael Sporn's blog.

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Some days ago I went to watch Enchanted. I was really amazed by the quality of the animation made by James Baxter's studio. I suggest you to don't miss the chance to watch it on the big screen. To get an idea of what I'm talking about, watch a sneak peek here.

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Found on CGTalk an interesting link to an online animation tool. It's called Shapeshifter and, although it's pretty simple, it can be useful to practice animation principles. Watch here some cool examples of what can be done with this tool. =)

Saw today on CGTalk tree cool things:

The first is a sneak peek of the stop motion movie based on the Neil Gaiman book: Coraline.

I do respect a lot stop motion animation. Its an insane amount of work, and the results are amazing. To give you an idea of the quality of it, on the CGTalk thread there was an user who thought it was 3D. =)

The other two are tutorials:

• a 150 page PDF about precise modeling on Blender. If you want to animate something in 3D, you need first to have the models. =)
• a cool video that explains how to customize the Blender interface to fit your needs.

Talking about tutorials, Pablo Lizardo wrote a cool one about using transparent PNGs on the viewport.

Last but, definitely, not least: Merry Christmas everyone!!!

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Today I got Blendernationed, and this lead to an insane use of my web server bandwidth. I must thank and recommend the great services of NewX web hosting for helping me out with some "extra" gigabytes. =)

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Yesterday (21/12) was the 70th anniversary of the all time Disney Classic Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs.

The family of the Disney animator Clair Weeks have donated to ASIFA Holywood Animation Archive a scrapbook about the movie, which will be soon available digitally. Saw it on Cartoon Brew.