drew weing dot com

I’m still having fun doing “version 2.0” character designs, though Eleanor has pointed out that I’m spending way too much time on them if I expect to be done with this pitch in the next week or two. I often find myself procrastinating by spending TOO much time on a drawing, which is slightly better than the normal way of procrastination, but still no good for your output.

While working, I’ve been listening to almost nothing but videogame music. Eleanor is mocking me for this, but I think anybody who just listened to Andrew Bird’s “A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left” literally 32 times in the last 24 hours (and I checked the iTunes play count!) is living in a glass house.

Yeah, I’m a dork. I like videogame music. I hardly ever play the actual games anymore, but listening to the music is even better, because you can actually, you know, do things whlle you listen to it.

I recommend The Advantage (nothing but NES tunes rendered in garage band fashion) and The Black Mages (the actual dude who composed all the final music’s band, which plays suspiciously hair-metal-ish renditions of FF tunes.)

I do turn my brain to more intellectual matters occasionally. For instance, I just read Camus’ The Stranger, so now I can listen to The Cure’s Killing an Arab and feel “in the know.” I didn’t actually like The Stranger very much. I suspect I should have read it in high school for maximum appreciation. If you are in high school right now, and you’re reading The Stranger, please take it with a grain of salt. Ditto for The Fountainhead, which screwed up my head until I was in college almost. “Howard Roark laughed,” my ass.

Lessee… I have been working on a kids’ graphic novel pitch recently! I’ve even got some leads – but no guarantees yet. I just finished nailing down what hopefully will be the final plot. I’ve got ten pages worth of plot synopsis that really needs to get trimmed down to manageable size if I expect anyone to read it. Now I’m working on final designs of the characters.

Here’s some sketches of the first incarnation of some of the major characters. I’m majorly redesigning a lot of them, since these versions are too boring! But if you’re curious:

I’ll post some more up tomorrow.

Eleanor and I are trying to hit every restaurant we’re interested in before we leave town (which isn’t for a while – but that’s a lot of restaurants!) The other day Eleanor, Joey, Michele, David and I all went out to Madras Saravana Bhavan, an “Authentic South Indian Vegetarian Restaurant,” Between the unwieldy name and the very specialized cuisine, it doesn’t seem destined to last very long in pedestrian Savannah – but it was very good! The seem to specialize in huge flat bread things with all sorts of veggies and cheese on top.

Other recent events of note – SCAD had a weekend where they set up a big screen in Forsyth Park and showed free movies, and Eleanor and I managed to catch “North by Northwest.” Besides the uncomfortable flirtatious banter between the leads (sample: “I’m a big girl now.” “Yeah, big in all the right places,”) that had us squirming a bit, it was very entertaining. And I got to check another movie off my big list of “movies we should see some day,” At this rate, we’ll be done shortly before we die. The last movie I checked off the list was Buster Keaton’s “The General,” which we managed to catch a few months back. That showing was actually part of the Savannah Music Festival – the score was provided by a live band in the theatre, who apparently makes their living authentically replicating the soundtracks for old silent films.