I found this praying mantis out side of my house the other day. I had never actually seen one before. It was really an amazing creature. It did not seem to mind me getting in close to take its picture. I did not expect it to really do much but I thought maybe I could learn some mantis style martial arts from it. ;)

-DM

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Self Portrait

Image
Grad school has been keeping me swamped and now with some time off between semesters I have been catching up on a number of personal animation and illustration projects that have been on the back burner for too long. One nice thing is that I have been trying to get in some more figure drawing and decided to do a self portrait since I haven't done one in a long while. I am pretty happy with how it turned out considering it was done late at night my time preference of choice when it comes to all of my artistic endeavors. Hope you enjoy. -DM
Read more

Remembering Fox Kids

Image
Growing up aside from the Ninja Turtles most of my favorite shows were on Fox Kids and mostly from Saban. Above is a cover from one of several Fox Kids magazines that were sent to me as a kid. The price says $1.00 but I never paid for them. One day they just started sending them to me. My guess would be because I would enter contests they held and they knew I was a long time watcher but who knows. As a kid all I knew is that they would send me one every month or so. One issue they sent said it would be the last one because they wanted to save paper but I think it was because they were canceling the Fox Kids block. Some great shows I remember were Power Rangers, VR Troopers, Beetleborgs, Godzilla the animated series,Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog, Digimon, Beast Wars, and Beast Machines. Above is one of the covers from a 1998 issue. Good times. -DM
Read more

Ponyo

Another great film from Hayao Miyazaki!  (Possible Spoiler Alert) Yesterday, I had the pleasure of seeing the latest film from Studio Ghibli. Ponyo was creative, imaginative, and visually stunning. As with all of Miyazaki's films the layouts were amazing. I particularly loved the house on the cliff that Sosuke lived in. One of my favorite things was to watch how they animated Sosuke. The detail that really made him feel like a little kid. I especially like the shot were he has to duck under what appears to be a bamboo fence to get to his school. All of the work with the ocean was beautiful, it made my hand hurt just thinking of animating all of those waves and tiny bubbles. One of the most breath taking scenes was when Ponyo was running on giant fish that were like ocean waves to catch Sosuke. As an animator with a preference to create hand drawn animation, this was most exciting for me to see. I can't remember the last time I went to the theater to see a hand drawn animated f
Read more