10/04/07 - Conan Tut, Squidoo and Drawing Board.org

This is a jam packed post as I am going to talk about at least three different entities but they all related: as being great educational resources. Leave a comment if you like this post! Lurkers tolerated but not advocated!! Join in and let your voice be heard!

www.drawingboard.org
This is a great forum based site that deals with comics and illustration. There are a ton of great categories, I especially enjoy the the Superhero Jam discussion moderated by Euan MacTavish out of Scotland. He is a wonderful digital illustrator and great at capturing celebrity likenesses and applying dramatic and novel color schemes to his digital paintings. Check out Euan's blog for some way cool art and a peek into how he digitally creates his work. He appears to have a very efficient work flow - something a lot of digital artists lack (you will see them make major edits halfway through a finished piece - BAD, VERY BAD!!). Here is the link to the drawing boards' page about Squidoo.com.

www.squidoo.com
This site uses a format called LENS to create web pages (follow this link if you want to create a lens!). I guess there is a reward system for building and then having web visitors go to your lens (or single web page) - but they seem to have some good art instruction pages? You get royalties from each visit and can disperse those as you wish. Seems like a creative and benevolent exercise in capitalism! I will update this post once I get a better handle on this technology. IF anyone else can explain it better please post a comment!

Gannon Beck - Illustrator http://gannonbeck.com/
Gannon has a cool Conan Illustration Tutorial (http://www.squidoo.com/conandrawing) using the LENS format on squidoo.com. And I really appreciate his sentiments about sharing knowledge and mentoring - Bravo Gannon! Help make Gannon independently wealthy - send all your friends to his page!! (LOL)