I’m building a head library for a web series or, as the British say a ‘nettie show’, that I’m making.  The stuff I tend to write is pretty dialogue heavy, so I create a group of mouths and expressions (or a library) that I can reuse to save myself some time.  I have three heads I’m creating for this.  A three-quarter head:

And then another, that’s almost in profile:

And finally, a front-facing head – which I’ll mostly use as an in-between for head turns.  See if you can pick it out:

 

I don’t spend as much time on the front-facing head.  In my experience, characters rarely look directly into the camera.  Usually you’re staging shots at an angle that provides depth and clarity as you cut back and forth between subjects.

I put everything on layers so that I can animate each part of her face.  Even the hair is on a layer – just in case I want to do a weird hair gag without having to redraw everything:

 

Tell me something weird to put on her head – I’ll do it, man.

I feel bad I haven’t been posting about this on my actual website, but Steven Universe is on the air!  We premiered on November 4th and it was fun.  It’s really cool that the show is out there in the world and we can we can see people’s reactions to it and how THEY’RE GETTING EVERYTHING WRONG!!!  Just kidding.

I’m super pumped about tonight’s episode of Steven Universe – Catfingers.  It’s one of my favorites, and a lot of the crew majorly collaborated on it (Rebecca Sugar, Ian Jones-Quartey, Kat Morris, Hilary Florido with additional boards by Stu Livingston).  Thus, we have like 18 promo images for it.  Or really five.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this episode marks the debut of Joel Hodgson as Mayor Dewey!

And Zachary Steel as the conspiracy theorist – Ronaldo!   Zach actually voiced “David” in the first animated short I ever made with Matt: IM IN UR MANGER KILLING YOUR SAVIOR.  From web cartoons to TV cartoons… that kids will watch illegally on the web.

The first episode of Steven Universe is up on iTunes for FREE!  Go watch it HERE. The episode is called “Gem Glow” and was written & storyboarded by Joe Johnston & Jeff Liu.

In honor of Steven Universe being out in the world, I thought I’d post one of my submissions to the elusive Steven Universe zine.  Punk Rock Crystal Gems!