Holiday Greeting Thread

[Big Frank]

Thank you, Frank: I hope everyone realizes that the Lego card was created with a modeling program

any fool can open an illustration program or a 3d rendering app, but only somebody with demonstrable talent, perseverance, effort and hard work can output what you have done and continue to do.

lighting, shading, composition and ultimately ability are, fortunately, not things you can get a filter or a plug-in for, but that's a topic for another soap-box

[angelize]

I agree with Frank, And the candies are just amazing too!

A big Merry Christmas to All!

[wizard509]

I posted this last year (I think) but I remade it as an animated gif because many people on my list couldn't open a flash file. So with that said here you go again.

[Gare]

Larry, that's a truly beautiful animated card. Was this in the Xara Xone's Christmas Show?

I'd like to go back to something Frank mentioned; when I first set hands on my first drawing application in 1991 (CorelDRAW version negative 3), it wasn't "obeying me", because although the skills were fairly easy to acquire, I have developed a few styles of art, and they wouldn't show on a CorelDRAW page.

See, I've been drawing with pen and pencil for 40 years (probably more); my biggest "skill workout" was when I was an Art Director in NYC for one of the large ad agencies. I was knocking off 3 perhaps 4 storyboards a day, and you gotta develop a style doing that stuff!

The short of it is, I feel anyone who comes to digital design programs from a traditional, physical background:

1. Comes to the party with something and will be able to better tell a story using new tools. Phil Tippett did—he won an Oscar for his stop-motion work on Star Wars in the 1970s, and today his studio uses mostly digital animation tools.

2. Will soon realize that it takes some time to punch your own style through the glass on the monitor, so to speak. I think it took me a solid year of working with graphics programs until I was able to express what I see in my head and my heart, and not let a program's features taint the vision.

Yes, there's a little give and take: Xara's features have influenced certain ideas over the years, but mostly I've been telling it what I want, and not the other way around.

Christmas Digression Time: For a brief and glorious 3 years, Pixar's rendering software was available for Windows if you knew where to look. Today, it'll run you $4,000 and more for a plug-in for Maya, and I feel that competitors such as Maxwell Render and 3D Studio have just as splendid a rendering engine, but that ain't the point. This was one the first first completed modeled scenes I'd ever done, and I was able to use Pixar RenderMan along with Photoshop v3—and about a week's time with a 486 DX50 machine—to get it done.



They say there's no going back, but I think I'll forever have fond memories of all the sweat I put into this little project.

My Best,

Gary

[wizard509]

Thank you Gare. No it wasn't in the Christmas show. I submitted the kaleidoscope.

[Rik]

Great cards, Gary and Larry.
Beautifully done.

[wizard509]

Awe shucks, thank you Rik.

[angelize]

I agree, Gare and Larry those are splendid greetings!

[Gare]

I'm outa here until 2012.

I know it's been said, many times, many ways...



Escaping to the Real World for the Holidays ,
Gary

[guyke]

Not as artistic as many of the others - don't have those skills - but a warmhearted contribution anyway