Now back to more tree drawings for me. My goal is to have 20 solid drawings to choose from by the end of next week for my tree series of paintings.

Here’s some other tree art that I’ve created:

The Creek

Beneath

Waiting on You

Title: Waiting on you
Size: 32 x24
Medium: Acrylic on tile board
Price: $300.00

Sluuurp...ahhh...mmmm, I love hot tomato soup. Sorry...lost my train of thought. Ok, back to this tracing over live action stuff.

The next big impression rotoscoping left on me were Ralph Bakshi's films from the late 70s and early 80s. Fire and Ice, Lord of the Rings, and American Pop are the three Bakshi films known mostly for their use of rotoscoping. Lord of the ring was kind of shitty though, in terms of the quality of the rotoscoping. The biggest problem with Bakshi's use of rotoscoping and some rotoscoping you see today, is trying to trace every single frame where the edge of a line matches up perfectly to the live action frame underneath. This gives the animation jitters, wiggles, or vibrating. This vibration/jittering/wiggling never worked for me, and makes rotoscoping too distracting in the end. American Pop is the best use of rotoscoping during the 80s that doesn't have too much vibration/jittering/wigglin and is a good film to boot.

Rotoscoping began way back in 1914 when animator Max Fleischer invented the technique and used it in Superman, Popeye the Sailor, and Out of the Inkwell. Fleischer's process involved projecting live action film, frame-by-frame, on the underside piece of a glass. On the top side of the glass is where the artist traces the live-action film frame by frame. Disney even used rotoscoping on their earlier films like Snow White and Cinderella. Disney stopped using rotoscoping when they started using more stylized animation around the 1960s. They still used rotoscoping, but only for animation tests and to archive realistic motion for films like the Lion King, Little Mermaid, Etc. More modern films such as A Scanner Darkly and the Charles Schwab commercials use special software to makes rotoscoping easier, take less time to produce, and look tens times better than back in the 60s, 70s, or 80s.

A Scanner Darkly:

Max Fleischer's Superman:

Below is an example of a rotoscope animation I did back in 2004 for a flash site I was working on. Look Ma, I can wiggle and Jiggle:

I think a better way is to trace every 4-5 frames, tweak the frames in between to complete the motion, or draw out the motion for the missing frames as needed. The video that I'm rotoscoping for is shot at 30 frames per second, so i'm tracing about 6 to 8 frames out of 30. This is my biased opinion, since I have a unique style of art that I'm trying to maintain in my animated rants.

And last, but certainly not least, here's a video of Ralph Bakshi from comicon talking about how he survived the collapse of theatrical animation, getting off your ass, and making animation. Like he says in the video, the technology is there to create and distribute your work. A great inspirational rant!

Here are some other sites that cover the history of rotoscoping in more depth:

CAT385 — Visual Effects: Rotoscoping History

Through a 'Scanner' dazzlingly: Sci-fi brought to graphic life

The Rotoscoping Saga

Unreal World

Here are some instructions on how to clean a Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph Technical Pen. These pens are an artist's & illustrator's best friend. They're great for drawing, sketching, and they come in every size your could possibly ever want. Rapidograph pens have been around for 50 years or more, are awesome, and if you're a line obsessed artist like me, they are tops.

The biggest pain in the ass part of using these pens is that they are supposedly annoying and hard to clean. All of you artist types know the pain of ink drying up, ink leaking out, cleaning the pen but still not getting good ink flow, and all sorts of other problems. In my opinion, these pens are easy to maintain and use. I've found that if you use the pens on a regular basis, you should clean them about once a month. If you use your rapidograph pens every now and again, clean them every six months and they should be good. So what do we need to commence with the cleaning?

Stuff you will need to clean:

Hot Water

Koh-I-Noor Rapido-Eze Pen Cleaning Solution
Some people use alchohol or windex (yes, some people have recommended using windex.) to clean their pens, but I would not recommend it. The Rapido-Eze Cleaning Solution is cheap, works great, and you don't need to use that much unless you've got a pen that's been sitting at the bottom of an art supply box for over a year with dried ink flaking off. If your pen has that much dried ink, hell, don't even use any water, just use all cleaning solution and let the flaked out pen sit in the there overnight. For the most part though, you'll just need to use a little bit of the cleaner solution with hot water (add as much cleaner as you think you need depending on how dried/clogged up your pen is).

Last, but not least, is your pen.

Step 1:

The pen has several different parts. The first part you want to remove is the pen body. Start unscrewing the pen tip area, casing, and ink container from the colored part (Clamp Ring). Unscrew the pen body and set aside.

Step 2:

Take your pen tip tool which looks like a small black gear. Put the pen tip/nib key over the top on the tip/nib where the little color band is near the top, and just turn until the pen tip/nob comes off it's casing.

In the photo above are the four main pieces all seperated.

Now I am going to go completely against popular wisdom and recommend NOT removing the cleaning pin (the tiny piece of metal sticking out of the end that the ink flows from) & clear plastic bottom. Eveyone says you have to remove these two parts from the tip/nib, but I think this is a bad, bad, bad idea. More often than not, you will bend or break this tiny piece of metal and then you're out 30 bucks. So my advise, leave these pieces in tact and save yourself some money.

Step 3:

Next, pour as much cleaning solution as you think you need into the hot water.

Step 4:

Put the Rapidograph tip/nib, it's casing, and the ink cartridge into the water/cleanser and let it sit there for a length of time based on how dirty/clogged up it is. I let my pen sit for about 15 mins (the last time I used this pen was one month ago. It was a little clogged up, but not bad)

.

Step 5:

After letting the parts sit in the water and cleaning solution, rinse throughly with water and sit them on a paper towel to dry. Your're done! Ok, ok...I get that it's a pain to clean these rapidograph pens, but, they're worth the time to clean and maintain. They'll last a lot longer and give you better line quality in the end.

Here are some drawing I created using my rapidograph pens:
Civil War Soldier
Creek Drawing
Morgan Webb from G4TV