CartoonSmart.com is holding an animation contest and the first prize is a full working copy of Animate Pro. All you have to do is recreate 15 seconds of your favorite non-animated movie with ToonBoom Animate and add it to this Vimeo group. (you can also use the Personal Learning Edition).

I am entering this contest and I’ve already chosen a clip from a movie I love. Here’s the animatic, although the final version might end up surprising you. Connect with me on Twitter for more updates.

Rough Animatic – CartoonSmart Animate Contest from Renato Vargas on Vimeo.

(Update: Of course that I need a better looking Jules Winnfield, and this is what I came up with. I hope you all like it).

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Hello everyone. I just wanted to show you this character design progression. A couple of weeks ago my back yard was glowing with fireflies. It was so inspirational. I thought to myself: “how would a firefly look if it were a cartoon character?”. This is what I came up with. By the way, ArtRage‘s reference pic feature is quite handy!

I inked it in ArtRage and learned a valuable lesson. Do rough pencils in colors different from black. Otherwise you can’t see where you have already inked. After that I did some base coloring. I liked the chocolate palette. I don’t know. It gave it that 20′s or 30′s Italian-American mood I was after.

I’ve been trying out this technique to add depth that I learned from a video posted by an awesome webcomic artist and illustrator. Well, in this case you don’t actually “add” depth; you substract it, if that makes any sense I haven’t been able to get it just right, but I hope I’m slowly getting there…

and finally some tones…

Love to read your thoughts. Cheers!!

I’m fine though, don’t worry. I hope you are doing great too. I just wanted to let you know that Sbass and Monica from The Inkwell Alley were kind enough to let me share some thoughts with their readers on Feature Friday. They are creating an awesome community of artists that want to make their creative dreams come true under the motto Is not who you are, it’s who you can become. A writer and an artist, these two great women have been very busy promoting their relatively new iniciative, that I know will be a great success. Make sure to check out their blog at http://inkwellalley.blogspot.com.

If you are coming from The Inkwell Alley, welcome to I’ll tell you a story…. In this blog I share the things I learn while trying to figure out how to make drawings come to life through 2D animation. Since blogs tend to be a bit difficult to navigate, I thought I’d show you around. You might enjoy these posts:

Creativity development

How I’m fighting the animator’s block

The Importance of Staying Creative

The production process

Building Character is not the Same as Character Development

From A Forgotten Piece Of Paper To Life

Illustration tips and tricks

Creating Stunning Backgrounds with TBS!!!

Animating Effects: The Best Form of Procrastination

Backgrounds: Getting your perspective right with Google Sketchup

Backgrounds: From Google SketchUp to Toon Boom Animate

I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I love writing it, but above all, I really want you to find it useful. Any thoughts? Make sure you let me know in the comments. Have a great day!

Now that things are back to normal, here’s a quick update of The Deadly Truth. This link takes you to a facebook version of the video that looks better than Youtube’s. While you are there, you can always befriend me.

Here’s the Youtube one, which for some reason is one second shorter than it should be. Just a taste:

Note: I’m thinking of releasing the Toon Boom Animate source files for this animation once it’s published so that everyone can learn from my mistakes, so stay tuned!

“The Deadly Truth” will be released on Sunday, June 7th, 2009.

Edit: For those interested, I will post more quick updates through Sunday on Twitter. You can follow me here.