It’s been a busy quarantine, so much so that I haven’t had time for a lot of unfinished business, and that includes something I promised you all back in OCTOBER, a report on my 20th and most recent 24 Hour Comic!
David Chelsea is reading:
Becoming Richard Pryor
by Scott Saul
Continue reading Back To Report After The Day
With nearly everyone confined to quarters for the foreseeable, everyone has a quarantine story to tell. This is mine.
I was leading pretty much my normal life up to the week of March 9th. On Wednesday the 11th, I had lunch with my publisher- ordering actual food from a restaurant- and had a studio visit from a friend’s high school-age son in the afternoon. Thursday I had a date to go to the theater to see a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with my sister Teresa, but had one wary eye on the headlines- schools had already been closed, and the governor had banned gatherings of over 250 people. I checked the theater’s website that morning to see if the show was cancelled, and saw that a planned matinee was going ahead, but that the status beyond that was uncertain. A few hours later they cancelled the rest of the run.
I had my usual Friday visit on the 13th with my hangout buddy and sometime assistant Jacob Mercy, in which we were careful to avoid standing too close or god forbid, shaking hands, but that is the last social interaction I have had with anyone not in my immediate family. The store my wife Eve manages was slipping into closing by degrees- first, closing one day a week, then taking a planned two week holiday, then shutting until further notice.
Our daughter Rebecca flew home from LA on Tuesday the 17th- classes at UCLA had gone online, but she had intended to stay in the dorms through finals week, but we were worried that flights might be cancelled altogether. The three of us stayed in the house together, apart from a two-day trip to the coast, for the next ten days.
David Chelsea is reading: The Last Cruise
by Kate Christensen
Continue reading Notes From Quarantine
I haven’t written here for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. I’ve been posting content regularly on my Patreon page, which of course you would know about if you were one of my sponsors. My main effort has been going to instructional perspective videos created in Adobe After Effects. Since the last time I wrote about this project, I’ve posted three more:
Drawing Perspective with David Chelsea: Simple Two-Point Perspective
Drawing Perspective With David Chelsea: Simple Three-Point Perspective
Drawing Perspective with David Chelsea: Three-Point Perspective Axioms
David Chelsea is reading: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Continue reading Stuff I’ve Been Posting On Patreon
If you’ve been following these posts, you know that I’ve been acquiring chops little by little in Adobe After Effects. Well, I now feel adept enough to have launched a series of animated videos about something I was already good at- perspective. The first in my series of step-by-step perspective tutorials dropped on Patreon in May, and as of now, I have posted three of them:
Drawing Perspective With David Chelsea: Simple One-Point Perspective
Drawing Perspective With David Chelsea: Constructing One-Point Perspective Over A Reference Photo
Drawing Perspective with David Chelsea: A Hexagonal Floor In Perspective
David Chelsea is reading: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Continue reading Perspective Videos on YouTube and Patreon: The First One’s Free!
Just a heads-up that I’ve posted an Adobe After Effects video promoting my webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?- which ran from 2015 to 2017, and is still viewable on Patreon (and which is soon to become my next book from Dark Horse)- on YouTube and Patreon. The video takes the form of credits sequences for imaginary Reality TV shows such as KIBBLE KITCHEN and CLOSET CLEANSE, which appear as part of the story. I’ll be posting digital art created for the video in the coming weeks.
Watch the video on YouTube
Watch the video on Patreon
Read ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon
The other day I blogged about the first Adobe After Effects project I posted to YouTube, a morph video of my son Ben’s Presidential portraits. Today, it’s another morph video, a survey of famous Round Black Glasses wearers both from history and popular culture, including Harold Lloyd, David Hockney, Sigmund Freud, Barton Fink, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Edna Mode, Poindexter, Simon Chipmunk, and MTV cartoon star Daria. The video can be seen here.
David Chelsea is watching: Ruby Sparks
starring Zoe Kazan
Continue reading Round Black Glasses: The Morph
I haven’t blogged about this very much, but one of my main activities this the past year has been learning to do motion graphics in the software program Adobe After Effects. It’s been a steep learning curve, but my efforts are beginning to bear fruit. This week, I posted two short videos to YouTube, both of them morph sequences created in After Effects. The first is a collaboration with my son Ben.
David Chelsea is reading: A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel
by Amor Towles
Continue reading Happy Presidents Day! Ben’s Presidents Morph In Adobe After Effects
My first foray into Adobe After Effects, this animated logo is taken from the Cellar Dwellers chapter of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, a graphic novel about Reality TV which ran from 2015 to 2017 on my Patreon page, and which is forthcoming in book form from Dark Horse Comics. My eventual plan is to make animated logos for all the Reality shows in the story as a video promotion for the book. I got a major assist on this one from Milan Erceg, After Effects wizard and director of 24 Hour Comic, the recent documentary I appeared in. I did the illustration and lettering, but Milan added the creepy blur-in effect and lots of digital noise to simulate the look of a vintage TV show. My hope is to eventually acquire enough chops to be able to do this kind of thing on my own with no help. Wish me luck!