Sleeping Giant

Gather around y'all and sit down. It's Dropping Gems time.

What I'm showing you today is a new illustration. I have to confess that there's not much progress made since the last one I did regarding skill, I'm just not drawing enough. I did recieve a lesson from a personal teacher on how to give more depth to the objects being drawn and while I started with good intentions, in the end, the result looks practicly the same as the older illustrations, a pretty flat image.
My teacher must be cringing right now while foam comes out of her mouth, but I have no regrets, new work is new work.

The villagers travel from far to come and pray to this colossal animal, and ocasionally sacrafising food to earn good fortune in their lives. For them, it is a God, but in reality, it's just an overgrown animal who couldn't care less and is sleeping during the process of being worshipped.
I'd like to think that the image takes place in the same universe as the one from Small Visitor, namely, in the Valley of Giants where towering mystical beasts roam the land. Maybe one day, I can can combine them in a child's story.

Also, I've been part of an expo in our cultural centre. They asked people to send in pictures based around rituals, so I took one of my little nephew who looks under the bed before he goes to sleep. Truth be told, the scene was set up because trying to make a thought out picture with a five year old without some sort of guidance is near impossible. I made a deal involving candy with him so it turned out as a win-win situation.

                                            (Credit to Art Lover for the pic below)

The picture in question:

Something came to my attention, a few months in and I still haven't uploaded something from my own country. Time to change that and Ozark Henry is a great way to do it. I must tell that, to me, his latest work isn't at the same level as it was years ago, but the old Henry is top notch. I went to a concert of him where he played his music acoustic on a piano and it was truly fantastic. I still don't understand why they haven't put his acoustic versions on CD yet, but I guess the marketing people know best....Anyway, here's These Days, I just love that finale.

And now just shut up and enjoy.

                                                     Ozark Henry - These Days

Blast from the past

Hi there, work kept me a bit away of doing much creative work lately, but today, I'll give you a small update.

It's no new work I'm afraid, I hope to be able to present new stuff next time, what I do have to show are some old drawings from my childhood that hadn't seen the light of day for many many years. For me, It's really funny to look at them, (for you, maybe less) and see how my imagination worked.

Here I made a small comic about a baby chick wanting lemonade:

Next up is a comic spreading over 7 pages over a boy who finds a treasure chest with a note in it that says to steal a key from a witch and starts an adventure where he gets abducted by aliens and so on:

The boy even comes across a "sex schop"

When I go back to drawings from a younger age, it even gets more sinister. Nature is wrecking havoc.

Just look at this clouds face, it's filled with hatred:

The poor people can do nothing more then to stand by and watch the brutality taking place, it's so bad even the house is crying.

From here it gets just downright sick. The people here are all on a path to sudden death it seems, on the right you even see a bird molester, enjoying the sight of the birds falling down after hitting them with a rock.

In closeup, we even witness a suicide and a man about to fall in a fire.

Funny, but also a bit disturbing. Kids can be cruel they say, right?

In other news, I had a surprise visit from a six-legged friend. Rogerke came by again. (If you missed it, here's his story: http://droppinggem.blogspot.be/2013/10/small-visitor.html) It was a while since I last saw him but he didn't have time to chat too long because everyone in the treetrunk outside was busy preparing themselves for the upcomming cold that mother nature is about to unleash to all things living outdoors. And they were already running behind shedule (try setting an alarmclock with beetlepaws and you know why). Luckily for them, winter is also on the late side this year in our town. I took a picture of his passing because who knows how long it'll be when I see him again, right?

Anyway, he told me about something that made him worry. He sadly admitted that, apparently, the sales of his instructional dvd's where a dissapointement, even so much, that his house was stacked with boxes of unsold stock collecting dust. "I can barely get to my room without knocking a staple of boxes over, let alone get to the bathroom unharmed for an urgent disposal" he said quietly. He stared into the blank untill suddenly his antenna's snapped upwards "Well, no time to keep pondering about my own misfortunes, the fate of our beetle tribe is of utmost importance!" Rogerke spoke firmly, "There's still much isolation to be stuffed in the tree bark! Gotta run my friend!" and scattered away.
"Hey, wait up" I quickly shouted, "Couldn't you use your unsold dvd's as isolation? That way they're atleast usefull, just a thought." Rogerke's legs grinded to a halt. "You know what, that might just work!" he spoke surprised, "That's exactly what I'm going to do! Thanks mate!", and vanished between a crack in the wall.

Still, I couldn't let go why his instructional dvd's didn't catch on, surley there where many other bugs that needed coaching to develop themselves from a larva to a bug worthy of the name? Some deep thinking didn't reward me with a reason why, so for distraction I began sufing the net. The slow internet connection I experienced lately really got on my nerves and then it struck me........could it be that someone was stealing my wifi signal? And if true, then who was it? Immediately I started looking in the settings of my router to see what users had taken access to it the last few weeks and the result was quite shocking. It appeared that litteraly hundreds of users had been using my signal and the names definitely sounded like nicknames..........a bug would use. Some examples: Beetle_Babe22, 6Legz4life, LeafL0v3r, AntzzinyopantZ, and LorBel666.

Scrolling down the list, the pieces of the puzzle came together. Rogerkes dvd sales are in a dump and all the bugs in the neighbourhood are using the internet like there's no tomorrow...........they are all illegally downloading Rogerkes dvd!!! These bugs may be small but they're not stupid! First thing I did was changing my password to hopefully put a halt to these shenanigans and I really hope to see Rogerke soon to tell him about my discovery. Let's hope he can still sell the dvd's after using them as isolation, feeling kinda bad about my idea know....


As far as music goes, I recently came across this piece, Colour from Pete Joseph. The name didn't ring a bell so I tried to google him and there's nothing to be found of this artist. Which is strange because after listening to this song, you'd think he should be known, it's definitely quality stuff. Here's where I come in and do my part to give him some exposure. Given there's no pictue of him around, I took the liberty to attach one of my own on it. (btw, I updated the link to Joan Baez in the previous post, I noticed it didn't work)

And now just shut up and enjoy.

                                                       Pete Joseph - Colour

Method of the act

Hi everyone, this week I wanted to make an adjustment to an earlier work.

I'm talking about the small animation "Midnight Dreamer" I posted a few weeks ago. You might have seen it. During a rewatch I thought it might be cool to try and make a version with an altered soundtrack, using ambient sounds to be more precise. This way, I think you feel more pulled into the world, like you're a fly on the wall observing the scene, instead of creating a distance between the viewer and the animation by letting them listen to a piece of music the whole duration of the clip. There's still some music in there but just minimal.

All the sounds you'll hear are recorded with my camera, with the exception of the crickets and small pieces of music. The sleeping part gave me some trouble as I wanted some snoring to be heard and normally, I never snore. I didn't want to fake it so to solve this problem I used some dedicated method acting. From my own observations it seemed to me that the loudest of snoring occurs when people are intoxicated with a good amount of alcohol and nicotine, by preference after a wild night of partying, and to simply crash on a mattress without being bothered by who or what may lay there already.

I took upon this method, which I call 'The way of the snore", very seriously, so I positioned my matras in the ideal spot beforehand (just behind the frontdoor if you walk in) so I could get that part absolutely right. The next step was to jam a 100 Gigabyte SD card in my camera that made it capable to record the whole night through. When the whole setup was complete, the first bottle of Polish bisongrass wodka I stashed in my room was quickly in process of being emptied, followed by some fat joints I purchased the day before. This whole process went well but you better believe I didn't stop there. It was time to head to "Ceasars Club" in Turnhout, a place well known for it's willing women and nights to remember. In short, the perfect spot to develop a good snore according to my theory. Unfortunately I don't recall too much of what happend there (there goes that "night to remember") but did found several phone numbers in my pockets the morning after. "Call us, André & Ferdinand xxx" said one note, so I'm sure I had a good time.

It was around 4 P.M when I woke up the next day. It seemed I missed the mattress on my way to the floor that night causing some bruises on my chin and my clothes were all sticky with an afwul smell filling the room but I couldn't have been happier, this felt like the ultimate snorefest had taken place. The feeling of happiness quickly vanished when I discovered someone had forgotten to turn the camera on....This was definitely a setback but I didn't want to let the disappointment sink in so a back-up plan was already thought of. I knew my dog occasionally has a natural snore and he sleeps multiple times a day so it wasn't that hard to record the snore I needed for my animated movie. It all worked out pretty well in the end.

Anyway, this is what became of the revisited Midnight Dreamer:

                                             Midnight Dreamer (Ambient sound)

Let me know which one you prefer.

Well then, let's listen to Joan Baez. She was a protest singer who in the 60's and beyond developed quite a name for herself. Even now she still preforms and when I think of a hippie woman, it's her face that pops into my head. That she was a beautiful girl in her youth surley helps too. The song Diamonds & Rust is probably one of her most famous songs I think and you'll understand why when you hear it.

And now just shut up and enjoy.

                                                  Joan Baez - Diamonds & Rust

Chill & Sketch

'S up?

I hope y'all had a great time celebrating New Year's eve. If by any chance you've woken up just today since then, finding yourself in a different timezone than usual with all your money gone, recent memories replaced with a black void and a tattoo of a raccoon on your back that has no business being there, I say don't worry, I'm here for you. This blog will let you forget about all that for at least two minutes. If you read slow it could be even five.

Just recently I too found myself in a different timezone. Attentive readers know I headed to London last week and I have to say, the city is a blast and has a lot of cool places to visit. If you're into art, many museums are free of admission and I definitely advise you to check out Brick lane if you're looking for alternative art, clothes, people and music.

It was also surprising to see just how close France and England really are. This photo was taken on the shore of France, Calais and you clearly see the white cliffs of Dover in the distance.

To cross the Norh Sea by swimming like some do didn't seem that hard to me anymore but my friends managed to talk some sense into me just in time. They needed my share to pay for the ferry or it would cost more for them and I didn't want to let them down. Still, I've got some unfinished business with that plane of water.

Since my return I haven't had much energy to spend on drawing or making movies but I did make a few sketches. It's nothing much but I'll let you take a look at it just below.

There seemed no group more convenient to present this week than London Grammar, who I already mentioned last time. You wouldn't think the voice belongs to the young girl you see in the picture below but somehow it does. It reminds me a bit of Florence and the Machine. The song Metal & Dust doesn't represent the range she has very well, but it's definitely worth a listen.

And now just shut up and enjoy.

                                                 London Grammar - Metal & Dust

Power to the people

HO! HO! HO! Dropping Gems is wishing you a Merrrrry Christmas!! Welcome back. Hope you are having a good time.

Some of you are probably double-checking your calender right now, scratching your head feeling confused and thinking: "Isn't this update a bit soon for his doings, am I dreaming?" Make no mistake about it, this is real life. If it's necessary, pour a bucket of ice cold water over your head if you don't believe me. Make sure the water is freezing for full effect. I'll wait and don't forget to record it so we can all enjoy......



.......Are you done? Great! Now, first dry yourself before continuing your way onto the world wide web because I wouldn't want you to ruin your keyboard with those wet hands. I just post a bit sooner because I'm leaving for a small trip to London for the next couple of days and wanted to give you something to read in the meantime. Right, now we are all set, I'd like to show you a bit how "professional" I'm making these small animations of the last few weeks. First I was doubting if I should let my secrets known, but knowledgde is power they say and considering I lack a lust for power I decided to give the knowledge to the people. It may surprise you but the creation proces is really as amateur it can get I'm afraid, but I'm willing to give you an insight for your amusement.

The drawings are made on A4 paper so it looks like this:

If the background won't have any movement in it I use a black marker around the outlines to make them more obvious. If an object or character is planned to move in front of something in the background I just use a pencil so it can be erased and redrawn easily. Unfortunately, it's difficult to completely erase every step in the animation so you always see the previous poses, like here:

I could of course press a little more gentle on my pencil but then you would hardly see the drawings. If you have a Wacom tablet, you wouldn't have these problems obviously. Once the background and pose is done, it's time to take a picture. It was a bit trail and error to set it up but the end result looks like what you see below. Yep, just some books and stuff and a flashlight.

At first I just thought of simply using sunlight but the light always changes, clouds, time of day, so then I tried to use my chamberlights. The problem was that they send out a yellow-ish coulour that's even more obvious in pictures. I then remembered I have a LED-flashlight that emits white light so used that instead, but it can only been seen in a dark environment so that's why the movies are so underlit. In a way, the darkness fits the atmosphere of the movies so it's a positive side effect. But even using the flashligth, you see the light have different levels of brightness in the movies, that's the result of the batteries losing power sometimes......

In the end, about 140 drawings were made spread over 17 scenes. A scene counts as a new drawn background. Here you see a few different scenes together:

When all of the drawing and picture taking is finished, the editing begins. That's actualy the most fun part of it to me, you can also see the animation coming together. The drawing is more of a grind. It's also the time to choose a fitting soundtrack, but that's not much of a problem because I have a lot of this experimental and ambient music on my Itunes. I am planning to make a version of Midnight Dreamer with ambient sounds I made myself and maybe I can post it in the next update. The animated short in editing fase looks like this:

Here I can make some images overlap or fade out, to have a better continuation effect. It's all really basic stuff. Et voila, now you know how these were made. If in the next year you see movies of Pixar and Disney using afwully familiar techniques you know where they got their "inspiration". Spread the word.

Talking about familiar things, you should know Valerie June. This American singer/songwriter of Memphis Tennessee had her breakthrough this year with the great album "Pushin' Against a Stone". For me, it's one of the better albums of 2013 along with London Grammars "If You Wait" among other things. I'll let you listen to "On My Way" but the whole album is worth a listen honestly.

And now just shut up and enjoy.

                                                  Valerie June - On My Way

Midnight Dreamer

What's up everyone? Long time no see! What a crazy few weeks it has been. I wanted to update the blog way sooner, but a problem with my editing program decided otherwise. I had finished making a new small animation but during the process of making the individual parts into one movie, the program got stuck everytime just at 99% and therefore I wasn't able to save it. I now deleted and reinstalled it and for now it seems to work but I lost some effects in the meantime. Still, at least I'm glad I can edit movies again.

The long radiosilence on this blog did have a positive effect though. In one of my previous posts I offered a link to a Ravensburger puzzle to keep people occupied if they had to wait a while until my next blogpost. Well, since this one took a few weeks to post, Ravensburger saw a huge uptake in it's puzzle sales. Not only that, the company's shares hit an alltime high and this caused the cancelation of necessary layoffs they were planning. Their web masters reversed enginierd the origin of the internet traffic hitting their site and found out that they all came from my blog! With this information they found out who I was and got hold of my phonenumber. Not long after their discovery I recieved an emotional phonecall of Ravenburgers CEO, thanking me of saving him the trouble to tell 150 employees they lost their jobs just before Christmas.
He offered me a sum of money earned by the extraordinary puzzle sales but I politely declined and said I'm not doing it for the money but only to give people some distraction or inspiration. The CEO, who I will not name, said he was honored to have spoken me and hoped that all went well for me. I told him he didn't have to worry and we said goodbye.

Now, back to the animated movie. There are some problems in there that you'll likely notice, for one, sometimes, the hands look like meat clumbs like at the first sleep scene and I have trouble to make some shapes consistant in different frames like the main characters head, he looks a bit different in every frame....

You can watch "Midnight Dreamer" here and I advise you again to put it at 720p:

Midnight Dreamer

Feel free to give feedback and before I forget: Merry Chirstmas to everyone!


Like last time, I was digging into some Daft Punk covers and found another one worthy of your demanding ears. This time the credits go to The Stepkids, who bring an acoustic interpretation of  "Get Lucky", THE hit of last summer. I'll see you after the jump.

And now just shut up and enjoy.

The Stepkids - Get Lucky

Mist Obscura

Hi everyone. The blog update is a bit late this week and this caused some trouble for me and the people who run Blogspot. I got an angry message from them concerning my irregular posting schedule, and even got threatened with a delete of my profile. Apparently thousands of people were pressing F5 or refresh all day in anticipation of my blog update. As you'll understand this caused great stress on the servers of Blogspot which made access to the site slower than usual. I don't need to tell you this wasn't an ideal situation for the site's owners and for that I apologize. Please understand that I can't always update on the same day of the week all the time and if it takes a little longer than you're used to try to do something else to keep you busy in the meantime. Of course, I am willing to help: Just one thing you could do

Today, there was a bit of mist creeping over the landscape so I thought of taking some pictures. I like walking in mist, everything seems more shrouded in mystery.

I was walking next to the canal and took some pictures of the reflections in the water and then flipped the image which makes a nice effect in my opinion:

Wandering a bit further off track, I found myself in a forest where after a few minutes of walking an open gate crossed my path. Not knowing where it led to I decided to follow it and see what lied beyond.

The path went on for a long time until, strange enough, a bicycle in the middle of the road stood there abandoned.

I stepped closer to investigate it's odd placement when on the bike's left, I saw some barbwire with a pacifier attached.

Now this was getting awfully strange but my curiosity was spurred so I continued my way crawling under the wire and into this strange area.

After a while, my eyes were drawn to an isolated pine-tree.

Underneed it, there seemded to be dug a hole by hand, which isn't that weird in it self, but the persons gloves still lied there in a way as if he or she suddenly had vanished in thin air by my approach..

Feeling a bit uneasy about all this I wanted to retrace my steps was it not that a soft voice could be heard between the trees. I felt obliged to go see where it came from and carefully stepped in the sounds direction.

Then, what I found wasn't the comforting thing I was looking for. A hoodie hang on a branch with a pair of shoes underneath. Again, as if somewone just vanished when I got nearer. The shoes were still warm.

Just when I thought it couldn't get any stranger then this, there seemed to be wooden camp a bit further. It wasn't my intend to meet it's habitants so I only took a picture from a distance.

All these things were enough signs for me that I should get out of this place and that's exactly what my feet commanded me to do. Not looking behind I walked in a fast pace back to where I came from untill I came to the gate again. Weirdly enough, it's form was changed since the first time I passed it but it led my to the same road home so it couldn't be a different one. 

I didn't want to think about it too much, but sitting at home now I can't figure out what happend there.

Now, to ease the mood a bit. Let's put up a tune. You know Daft Punk? Probably. These guys get covered by other groups quite alot with mixed results, but the one I found recently is pretty groovy if you ask me. Senor Coconut does a great job to bring some new life into the well known "Around The World". Feeling like shaking that ass? Please do.

And now just shut up and enjoy.

                                               Senor Coconut - Around The World