7 years

In other news, on April Fool's Day, Powerhouse will celebrate it’s 7th Anniversary. Pretty hard to imagine it has been that long since Bruce, Frank and I signed the "doing business as" papers at the courthouse.

Here are the 3 of us, back in 2001 at our first office:
Hehe…tools.

Here we are now...

And here is the new 2008 crew. We have come a long way.

Happy Anniversary everybody! Thanks to everyone for making it a great 7 years! Here's to 7 more!

Animaticizing

I don’t have a lot of cartoon stuff to post still. I have been working hard on the Alabama in Space storyboards/animatic, but don’t have a lot of “post-able” images. I am kind of going overboard on the animatic. This is because I know the final cartoon won’t have a ton of animation. Making animated cartoons, in your spare time, by yourself does not really allow for a lot of animation; that is if you want to have any kind of life, or don’t want your wife to leave you. Also, I would rather make a few quick cartoons per year than some magnum opus of animation. I probably only get an hour-or-so per day to work on these silly cartoons, if I am lucky. If I am going to accomplish I have to cut some corners.

Since the cartoons won’t have awesome animation, I am concentrating on layouts and beats in the animatic. I am doing boards really rough, and trying to apply a lot of thought to the layout. I am using the Spumco layout notes and Brad Bird’s King of the Hill notes a lot. I have also been looking at Will Eisner’s books on comics, and have been looking at a lot of comic cover art to get really over the top dynamic layouts. This cartoon’s concept is so silly that I think it makes it even funnier to put this much thought into such a stupid concept. Considering the subject manner making dynamic layouts is pretty ludicrous.

Since I have no images, here are some photos:

Here’s me in the boxing class that I did the caricatures of the teacher for:

This photo was taken by the very talented Ms. Licarone:

Here are some pics of a trip I made with Mandy to a petting zoo recently in Johnson City.

Business Busy-ness

Hello folks,

Things have been extremely busy. Work is hopping. I have spent the past several weekends setting up computers for new hires at Powerhouse. I also have had to work a bit at nights on some things that have kept me from Captain Capitalism and Alabama in Space. At the New Year, I made a schedule to complete 4 cartoons this year. I am way behind on that schedule. Don't get me wrong though, all of this is a good thing, but my personal stuff had to be put on hold a little, but I think I can get back on track.

Some other things the Graeber's that we have been up to, in the meantime:

My wife has been working for the Obama campaign, so we went to one of his rallies the other day.

The business busy-ness has cut into my excercise program. I will be going back to boxing for the first time in the past month this week. But I have had time to do a few sketches of Bruce Acuna, the proprietor of "Bruce's KO Boxing." Bruce hosted a boxing event in Austin we went to a few weeks ago, he is a fantastic boxing coach and trainer. He is also a living breathing caricature, very reminiscent of a cross between George Liquor and Burgess Meredith in Rocky:

I hope to keep working on getting a better likeness, and then clean-up some sketches and making a nice color caricature of Bruce. I will probably drop it anonymously at his gym, and run like hell...

I also got a chance to meet one of my best friend's daughter for the first time. My friend Garland's wife, Jenny, was down from Minnesota with their daughter Tate.

She is a beautiful little girl, and was great seeing Jenny and her mom, and meeting Tate.

I am working on a project at work that has givien me the chance to do some caricatures of Obama and McCain:

When the piece is done, I'll post a link.

That is all for now folks...see ya soon