Tag: Notebook
Come See Me At APE Last Weekend!
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments [0]
Okay, I am horrible at self-promotion. In all the chaos of preparing for APE 2009 in San Francisco this past weekend, I forgot to post to the notebook that I would attending.
Or that I would be selling prints of some of my illustrations.
Or that I would be doing personalized sketches for anyone who bought a copy of the new Haiku Comics book.
Or that I would be selling coffee mugs of Zombie Baby.
So, if you were in the San Francisco area and would have paid my table a visit if you had only known I was going to be there, my apologies. Mea culpa. Or, as we say in english, “My bad.”
For those of you who did stop by the table, it was a pleasure to meet you. I know there were a few people interested in purchasing prints that were not able to do so at the show – I promise to get a store up as soon as I can. In the mean time, please contact me if you’d like me to keep in touch and I’ll notify you when the store goes online.
Thank you!
Haiku Comics
Thursday, January 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments [0]
I recently began work on a new project with my brother, Robert Olsen. We’ve developed a web comic called Haiku Comics. Bob writes the poems and I draw and letter the strip. It’s been a lot of fun to work on so far.
Neither of us really knows where this thing is going, so our goal is to publish a new strip every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and just see where it takes us. If you’re interested in watching the strip develop, you might want to bookmark the site or add it to your RSS feed. I’m pretty proud of the strips we’ve put out so far and I only think they are going to get better.
New Book
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments [0]
![A photo of Nathan Olsen's new book, Will Someone Open This [Censored] Jar?](http://www.nateomedia.com/images/notebook/newbook.jpg)
I have printed and assembled the first copy of my new storybook, Will Someone Open This [CENSORED] Jar? The “first printing” is a signed & numbered edition of twenty copies made using archival inks and acid-free paper.
One down, only nineteen more to go!
Cue Guitar Solo
Sunday, October 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments [0]
I’ve been meaning to put this up for a couple of weeks now. It was on display last week in the graduate advancement show at California State University, Long Beach.
I Think It’s Done
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments [2]
Well, after working on it for a good week-and-a-half, I think the illustration I’ve been working on is done. A week-and-a-half? I am ridiculously slow.
New Work
Sunday, August 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comments [0]
Well, it’s been a rough month. After getting back from Japan, I was hit with a couple of health issues that completely blew the deadline I’d set for the animated film I’ve been working on. I’m fine now, but I’ve had to push back the completion date for the film until January of 2009. Fingers crossed.
The main reason why I’ve pushed the date so far back is that I’m back in the saddle again, so to speak. I’ve been hard at work at the drawing desk pulling together some new illustrations. I just scanned in some rough pencils tonight. Here’s what I’ll be working on tomorrow:
Yep, more Lovebot! He now has a nemesis, however — the dreaded Lollypop Squid. Oh boy!
The Film II
Thursday, July 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments [0]
I thought I’d post an update about the film: a crazy, impossible project that I just can’t seem to give up on.
I wrapped up another scene last night which brings me to, oh, say, NOT NEARLY ENOUGH FINISHED SCENES. As I wrote previously, I really didn’t understand what I was getting myself into with this project. But, now that I’ve invested so much time, I am determined to finish the film.
In the past few weeks, I’ve had some pretty big breakthroughs. In order to deal with some rigging issues, I invested more time in just learning Blender 3D and really got a handle on some of the more powerful ways of using the program. And that means I can work faster. And working faster means that I can finish scenes faster. And finishing scenes faster means that this film might just get completed before I die.
Sigh.
I am proud to report that the scenes that I have finished look pretty amazing. I’m really happy with the way the project is coming together. I’m also really happy that the last few scenes have only taken two to three days to complete. Which, of course, is still too slow.
Anyway, here are a couple of backgrounds from the film. I think they give the film a really unusual look and give the piece a lot of character.
The Comic
Monday, June 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments [0]
Last year, I started work on a little comic book story and, like many things I seem to do, I never finished it. I have six of eight pages inked and some preliminary lettering finished as well. It’s a little sci-fi story about an astronaut that gets separated from his ship and has to figure out how to get back.
I experiment a lot. I’ve never hit upon a working method that I’ve ever totally comfortable with so I’ve continued to try new things rather than sticking with a single style. The experiment with this comic was that I inked it using Adobe Illustrator. I thought that it would allow me to work faster than I was able to all those years ago when I was inking with a brush. I figured that it would also allow me to more easily correct mistakes (by either undoing a brushstroke or tweaking the anchor points on the vector path). I was wrong.
This project became a nightmare. Inking with Illustrator is a painfully slow process for me. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to ink quickly with the program – I just never figured out how. I used a Wacom tablet to create my brushstrokes and, on tight curves, Illustrator had a tendency to create weird, super-fat brush marks that required individual tweaking to fix. This really slowed me down.
I kept thinking that the process would get easier that more I worked with Illustrator but it never did. After six pages, I just couldn’t face inking with the program anymore and gave up. I also knew that finishing the comic any other way at that point wouldn’t work — there’s no way I could mimic that inking style. It’s just too clean. I love the effect, but the process is unbearable.
Now that I have Adobe Illustrator CS3, I’ve been tempted to go back and see if I couldn’t finish this story. Maybe the brush tool has been improved. I’ve very please with the pages I’ve finished so far and I’d really love to see this thing through. Maybe I’ll find some time this summer to work on it. I have no idea what to do with it when it’s done though.
