Tuesday, October 30, 2007

New Inks

Here is a Peter (Spider-Man) Parker/Mary Jane page, Cesar Feliciano penciled.
I Inked it for the Ink-Well.
Hope you like it.
Jimmy

Friday, October 19, 2007

Gene Colan

Gene Colan, Artist of Many comic book titles including War books, to Daredevil, Batman, Tomb of Dracular and more, from the 1940's thru to 2007, when he did the last pages of Blade.

His work is really powerful, with dramatic lighting and expressive style.

I love his work and so it was a thrill when he told me I cold ink any of the sketches he has on his web folder.

I was kind of quick on the first one because I did not use reference to get my feet wet. So now I see I missed the mark in some areas. But I thought I would post it anyway.

The subject is Sherlock Holmes and Dracular. I love the calm demeanor on Sherlocks face.

It's funny trying to "read pencils from an artist. Some artists have very little rendering and some go nuts with lines, Gene's is more like a painting and subject you to interpret the lines needed. Blue lines are tough because they loose some fine detail.

The inkers on Gene's pencils over the years did a wonderful job. You have to be an artist to interpret the lines correctly, so as not to lose his style and effect, while popping the page.

This was done on 11"X17" with a W&N #2 Series 7 brush and 102 crowquill.

Hopefully the next one will be a lot better.

Later... Jimmy

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Topsfield Fair!

America's Oldest Fair. Well my Honey and I went to the Fair.

After All these years you would think they would have something new and exciting, besides Tractor Pulls, Horse Shows, Pig Races and Sheep Shearing.

The Art Show is my Favorite.

The Trade Building use to have really cutting edge products but now it is old rehashed "only available through Television" type products that couldn't be sold on television anymore.
Food was plentiful and if you are looking to put a cork in an artery, Topsfield Fair is just what the doctor ordered.

Another newer staple of the fair is a south American Band featuring Pan Flute music. They are very Soothing and are a crowd favorite.

The Fairway is littered with runaway's trying desperately to get you to part with a buck on their Games. I won 7 straight Games the Skeeball type game and won all the kids toys last year so this year I passed.

The old Hauned Houses are still there and bring back memories s a kid going through them for the first time.

It is a lot of walking and there are Animal and music shows that are entertaining. The only real killer are the women that bring infants to a place that mobed, and use their carriges to push through crowds. I like to kick the carriges every once and a while and then scream "Hey Watch it!" (Not Really:-))

It is wonderful for first timers, because there is so much to see, but for people that have been going for years it is soso. They really have not brought the Bar up in the past thirty Years.
The Sand Sculpter is nice and had an assistant with him. He has been their for a few years and is really talented.

The Petting Zoo is nice, but bring a lot of anti Bacterial soap and bleach because they are patheticaly looking animals.

The Budweiser Clydesdales were there this year. They are really great looking animals and so massive, They have the really big ones, and they are cared for extremely well. There is only One Wagon, One Organ Cart and a stable of 27 top notch bred Clydesdales they own. I used to see them every year in Savanna, Georgia during the Saint Patricks day weekend (It is Huge in Savanna). Rides are plentful.

Anyway the art, Sportsmen and trade buildings are my favorite. Here are some Pictures...













Have a nice Day!
Jimmy...

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Wow...

OK I ordered ordered Fiber Optic ISP and Cancelled AOL after just shy of 30 Years...WHOOOAAA! I didn't think I was on the web that long. It was like yesterday with my brothers trying to get a 6502 chip to respond.

Tape storage systems that stretched and you went through hell trying to retrieve the data. Using CPM80 to get systems up and running before Bill Gates bought it from the author and sold it to his mother's workplace making billions since then.

But it was cool writing your own programs and teaming up to figure out how to do things.

My brother built his own rs232 port to get peripherals linked in.

$1,000 per meg of storage on a hard drive when the price came down and memory that was $150.00 to got to 32 K of RAM!!!

My first 8088 then 286 and so fourth. I remember typing a program in to the system and after a week of typing code I jumped for joy, kicking the plug out and loosing everything I got.

My first disc drive was $300.00 from a friend with a switch he put in two read both sides of the disc...That means I had a whopping 720k of space on my drive.

going to a blazing speed of true 8 megahertz clock speed with my Evergreen chip and really flying in style.

Pentiums that broke the gate at $1000.00 per unit at 90 megHZ.

Basic - Cpm80 - Dos 1.0 - MS DOS 3.3 - Dos 5.0 (My Personal favorite) - Dos 6.0 - Windows 3.1 - Windows 3.1 - Windows 95 - Windows 95b se - windows 98 - windows Milenium (Here we went backwards) Jump now to 16 bit Windows NT - 32 bit - Win 2000 pro - windows xp - VISTA! (Now we go a bit backward.

Smart People jumped on Linux and kids that got an Apple in school had their parents by those.

My goodness I seem to remember formatting my Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) encoding hard disc by start and end, bad sectors, etc..

Anyway it was a struggle to keep those drives up and running with voltages and bad sectors cropping up on flimsy software. Thank Heavens for Peter Norton in the early years. His was the only software that truly worked. Somewhere along he line they lost it though and others stepped up to the plate.

Then the shareware, Wow that was cool. People went to those early computer shows buying software up like junkies going to the pusher man. I was one, yes. Couldn't wait to see what each author was going to do.

Anyway I see those years were spent in the world of repairs and building and learning every software under the sun. Watching the evolution and we are still some thirty years later working on bad chunky software that is prone more now to bad clusters and viruses then it ever was.

And yes Apples have been about 8 to 12% of the computer market til they crashed and Bill Gates threw some millions there way to take the heat off him. Then they used a ton of dishonest ads like the recent ones that were forced off the air in England for violating the truth in advertising laws. We in the US don't really worry about that, lying on TV is an American way of life it seems. Anyway the should be back to 12 to 16 % about now and so they don't worry about Viral attacks because they are too small for the authors to attack. Now with their guts by LinusTorvalds [pronounced LEE-nus], Linux [Pronounced LEE-nus, he named it after himself but it is so mispronounced now I guess it doesn't matter] Kernel, they are pretty secure but still closed Architecture and twice the dough for te same speed. They run windows software because their was not enough vender's to write for them for a while with such a small market. Music is primary support for Macs but television used mostly Amiga for years and most of the larger studios I worked with, used both Mac and Windows units.

Anyway Atari would be considered the precursor to the PC crowd. Most every tech I knew over the years cut there teeth on an Atari. With their 800 computer you could actually burn 8 bit EPROMS (used for making Game cartridges). You could write your own program and put it in an EPROM.

They had user groups that flourished on the WELL and Internet. When the WWW came in thanks to Tim Lee in Cambridge (Lot of smart Guys in Cambridge, MA), People had 8086's then There 8088's, I joined with an 8086 to America online and talked with friends in Germany who where on CompuServe. I then Beta tested AOL's new venture GNN and got a lot of free time on the web. GNN had a great browser and the newest Firefox is much like it.

Anyway I am boring the pants off you so I will just say that Computers are here and they are not really going anywhere soon. Once they can get those millions of switches in a cpu to run cooler, we will be looking at multi-chip computers for a while. But once someone figures out how to make a casing that can dissipate heat super fast in a tiny footprint we will be in the true age of robots.

OK I am done rambling...
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