The Alaska Robotics website has officially launched. If you come across any bugs or have suggestions for improvements please let us know. We’ll be making a lot of changes and adding several new movies to the site over the next couple weeks. For the launch we’ve got all the shorts from our DVD posted along with the first comic strip.
Enjoy the show!
Harr matie, hold fast a moment and I’ll introduce the members of the Alaska Robotics Crew!
This Ruby of the North Sea has salt in her blood to be sure. She works undercover as a clerk for the imperial navy by day and spends her evenings marauding with the rest of her rugged crew. Her sharp sword and steady hand have already earned her a well deserved reputation amongst the locals as a true artist with a blade. One day she hopes to horde enough treasure to complete her master swordsman training.
Self proclaimed captain, Race constantly fights off his scurvy with lime Popsicles and tall glasses of gin and tonic. He often gets caught doodling in his log book when he should be plotting courses and is constantly rigging fishing lines when he should be manning the rudder. Despite all of this day dreaming he hasn’t stuck the ship on the rocks and manages to somehow maintain an overinflated reputation in pirating circles.
Suring, the calm and quiet first mate can often be found reading in the crow’s nest or just gazing out over the sea. In his wilder youth he claims to have lost his leg to an ice giant and even served in a secret branch of the imperial navy. He has earned the moniker of the Red Ghost because of his pale skin, red beard, and tendency to vanish for days at a time, returning as mysteriously as he left. Without his steady hand on deck and keen eyes on the horizon this tiny ship would have been blown off course long ago.
Logan bathes in whiskey and eats gun powder for breakfast. The word mischievous doesn’t begin to describe this bilge rat. He has no tolerance for planning and is easily distracted by attempts to blow up sea gulls. When he seems most volatile his personality will turn like the wind revealing a meticulous attention to detail and a fascination with the mechanics of the ship and the sea.
The packaged DVDs have arrived and will be available for sale Friday, December 1st for gallery walk!
I’m really pleased with how they look, NYCD did a bang up job and even got them shipped to us in time for the release. I hope we get a good turn out tomorrow and sell enough shirts, prints, and discs to fund our next creative cycle!
There was a great writeup on us in the Hooligan today so that should help.
Our Plastisol transfers arrived today and I cranked out my first shirt! The design is a cleaned up version of the squid sketch I used as a place holder image on the Lucid Reverie website. For me the giant squid represents adventure and this is the first step in a new one for us!
Here’s a picture of emo Aaron wearing Sarah’s tree tee!
I chopped up my first round of ink sketches and made art cards out of them for the First Friday show in the Ruby Room. It was a hasty cut and paste job but I managed to trade the happy bunny card for a tomato sandwich and some soup so I’m glad I got it done for the show.
We had over 200 cards on display and I have a lot of favorites but the best by far were submitted by a kindergarten art class. I don’t know what they feed these kids but I think it’s the same thing Salvidor Dali ate before he did The Persistence of Memory.
I also have to tip my hat to Lou and Carol Suring for the most creative materials in the show. Lou used acid burnt glass and Carol made beautiful little quilted cards.
Layout honors go to Mitch and Glenn from Copy Express. Mitch had a bunch of pen and ink people singing Roger Miller’s “You Can’t Skate in a Buffalo Herd” and Glenn made a mini comic about a miniturized Captain Perfect with some very nice overflowing panels at the end.
When I was down visiting my sister I decided to buy myself some art supplies. I went into one of those giant craft stores brimming with heaps of wicker and scented plant detritus. I navigated past the witches brooms and halloween decorations and managed to find the ink pens in the back buried under a bunch of old wreathes.
Dani uses ink in her sketchbook and I love the way it looks, especially when she washes it out with water to get grayscale shading. Here are some of the trial sketches I did when I got back to my sister’s place:
I used Speedball Super Black India Ink
The life drawing classes in the ruby room are going well and it’s giving us a good excuse to keep the doors to the gallery open. Stop by and join us Tuesday nights at 7:00 if you want to do some drawing. The cost is $10 and we usually do about fifteen one minute gesture poses and then several longer poses.
So far I really suck at the short poses but I feel like I’m picking up on the longer ones. I’m also getting a fair amount of doodling done between poses and it comes a lot easier after trying to draw something realistically.
This morning one of Juneau’s oldest buildings burnt to the ground. Many will remember McPheters Hall as a church but for me it was a theatre. It was used by many organizations as a performance space, most notibly by Juneau’s Theatre in the Rough. Aaron Elmore and Katie Jensen founded the troupe and put on some wonderful shows in the hall, the funniest and best play I’ve ever seen in Juneau was their production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).
There really wasn’t much left after the fire so I imagine they lost about every costume and prop they had stored in the building. I only hope a puppet or two managed to escape.
