Hey, it's Ed Siomacco's SpaceCat Creative Corner

SpaceCat, Exciting new stylized animated shorts in Unreal Engine, Ashoka, and legendary Disney artist Vance Gerry

Welcome to the first SpaceCat Creative Corner newsletter. I’ve moved my newsletter and my comic to SubStack. I hope you all don’t mind, and I hope this helps build community.

For me, it simplifies things. I was paying MailChimp to keep a Newsletter and a hosting service for my Comic.
With them both on Substack, it makes things easier and saves me some money. My hope is you all will stay on board and maybe even tell your friends.

🚀 SPACECAT

“The Adventures of SpaceCat” is still a fun part-time project for me and I appreciate your support over the years. I will be applying to Emerald City Comic Con, FanExpo Vancouver, and Vancouver Comic Arts Festival (VanCAF), so lets hope I can see some of you there.

Substack also works as a blog, so I’ve posted all my pages of SpaceCat here under their own group.

https://edsiomacco.substack.com/s/spacecat-comic

Soon I will get spaceCatComic.com to also take you to this page.

Like many of you, I have a variety of creative interests, and I hope to share some of those will you all in this Newsletter.

🎞️ ANIMATION

More and more animation productions are using the Unreal Engine. For those that may not know, Unreal Engine is a 3d game engine, made by Epic Games, that powers a lot of popular video games, but it has also been used in part to bring more traditional stories to life. Usually with Unreal Engine we often see examples of the engine’s impressive photo-real abilities, but many artists are using it to bring stylized animation to screens. Some of them with very small teams, which is exciting. Yuki-7 from Keven Dart’s Chromosphere, The Tape Deck is a Time Machine by Patrick Osborne, Spice Frontier from Steamroller Animation, and Mark Andrew’s Super Giant Robot Brothers are all using Unreal Engine’s real-time rendering and camera layout abilities.

Epic Games has just opened up a free Unreal Animation Fellowship Workshop with some exciting video lessons on creating animated productions in Unreal Engine.

🖌️ DRAWING TABLE

Vance Gerry was a Disney artist and storyteller. He was heavily involved in the Story Department for many years.

Born in Pasadena, he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute before joining Disney in 1955. He began his career as an assistant in-betweener. Moving on to layout artist, he contributed to such Disney television shows as “The Goofy Success Story,” “Goofy’s Cavalcade of Sports,” and “How to Relax,” and such featurettes as “The Truth About Mother Goose,” and “Donald in Mathmagic Land.” As a layout artist, he also worked on the features, “101 Dalmatians,” and “The Sword in the Stone.” - Variety, after his death in 2005

These are handouts from Vance Gerry that I found years ago on Mark Kennedy’s old story blog. They are really great at showing how selecting and exaggerating features of a drawing can strengthen clarity and appeal in your drawings. I thought they were pretty great, and something that I don’t think about enough when I am drawing. Its easy to think that the goal is drawing is to duplicate what we see exactly. But, if this were the case, we would only need photographs.

“Vance was one of the finest graphic artists of our times, and he also was a great storyteller.” - Joe Grant

🎬 SCREENING ROOM

Ahsoka!

How are you all liking Ahsoka? Had watched Star Wars: Rebels before watching Ahsoka? I would love to hear reactions from you either way.

I work at Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company created by George Lucas in the 70s to help him bring Star Wars to life. ILM has an amazing legacy. The VFX industry has changed a lot over the years, but ILM is still doing amazing work and some days I can’t believe I get to be a part of it.

Most recently I got to be a part of the Creature team on Ashoka! I wasn’t originally crewed to the show but I was asked to help them in their last few months as they completed the show.

If you are interesting in learning more about ILM’s history, check out the Disney+ documentary series Light & Magic. It’s pretty great.

🔎 FOLLOWS

Go check out Matt Ferguson’s art. He is an amazing poster artist.

Ok,

Take care and have a good week,

Ed