So here's part 2 of Lines from the ground the drawings. So if you haven't noticed by now I got a "tree man" thing going on. I don't know if it's some human rebirth thing I've got in my head, but it's working visually so I'm cool with it. I've decided to go digital on a few of these and create them in corel painter.

Today I'm posting part 1 of the series of drawings I've created for my tree painting series: Lines from the ground. I talked about this tree series last week and introduced the concept behind the paintings. Below you'll find the first six drawings that I've choosen to paint. Some of these drawings are more complete than others. For some of the pieces, I don't complete the drawing before the painting starts. I like to leave some of the lines undone and incomplete, this way I can finish them freehand once they're re-traced into the painted tile board.

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Today I want to talk about the rotoscoping animation technique I'm using for my animated rants. I've loved this technique since I, like a lot of others out there, watched The A-HA video Take on Me for the first time. Ah yes, we all remember that song: taaaake on meeee, take me on, take meeee ooon...ok, I'll stop my bad singing. Anywho, that video was great because of the use of rotoscoping, where you take live action and you draw/trace over it to get realistic motion in animation. The A-HA video took it one step further and used the popular sketchy look where the animation is styled with pencil textures, cross hatching, etc. It looked really cool and was a neat concept, especially if you're eight years old.

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?