Channel Frederator Blog

There’s a great interview with animation artist Pascal Campion over at Character Design Blogspot. Pascal has a uniquely delicate style which flawlessly integrates complex arrangements of background and character. Most of his work is done in Flash:

I use color differently than most artists I know, more like a painter actually. I don’t do a clean drawing . I just sketch very loosely something in flash, and I clean it up in color! Which is why my colors are as essential to the piece as the composition itself because they ARE the drawing.

Click here for the interview and gallery.

For more on Pascal Campion, see his website and blog.

After the jump, a short video interview with the man, conducted by ChicagoAnimators.com at San Diego Comicon 2008 [Read more…]

Via UTNE
UTNE’s Kari Volkmann-Carlsen has been noticing a rash of Facelift epidemics… on Eighties Cartoon Characters.

She also ponders:

“So why are companies reinventing old cartoon characters instead of designing new ones? According to Kolodenko, playing off of parents’ nostalgia has proven to be a safer investment than creating unknowns in our poorly functioning economy”

Sigh.
Go check out the rest of her article at UTNE.
-Jeaux Janovsky

As the hoards converge on Comicon this weekend (and I sit in sticky, hot Brooklyn, recalling the days when the Gaslamp District was still scuzzy and you didn’t have to book your hotel room two years in advance) let me tell you about an upcoming, far more intimate event that promises to be fascinating: Pictoplasma NYC: Conference on Contemporary Character Design and Art at New York University’s Skirball Center, from September 5-6.

Described as a “character design Mecca”, Pictoplasm will spotlight “the importance of character design in contemporary visual culture.” Today’s popular graphic personalities cross cultural and commercial borders and it’s becoming commonplace to see the same character on both museum walls and pencil sets. This is an opportunity to learn, talk, and schmooze with some of today’s most innovative icon creators.

Guests include Tim Biskup, Gangpol Und Mit, and Friends With You. Saturday has the bulk of the animation talk with Akinori Oishi (Japan) and Studio AKA (UK) appearing.

Registration info and more after the jump. [Read more…]