A little sidenote

Hey guys.

Sorry I haven't been active lately with this blog.

Times are rough.

I'm working on other projects that keep me busy and away from Guabaman.

But don't desperate, as soon as I can, I'll be working on new Guabaman episodes.

Hang on!

Storyboarding

Hey folks! 

Here is the storyboard for the first episode of Guabaman. As you can see, it is mostly a quick sketch of what would be the final joke. I usually work on a storyboard template, but in this case I was so anxious to see the final result that grabbed the first piece of paper at hand and started to doodles. The joke is all there in straight cartoonish detail. I usually work this way, very loose and sometimes it is so loose that you can't make anything out of it as you would see in future posts.

The Animation Process (my humble beginnings)

To talk about the way I work, I have to tell you first where I come from.

I am from Puerto Rico, the small Caribbean island just bellow Dominican Republic and an American territory. 

I graduated from high school in 1989 without a clue of what to do with my life. I knew I liked movies and cartoons, but here in P.R. there is no industry of them both. I enrolled in a cartoons class at a local art school with the idea of becoming a comic strip artist and there I found out something truly amazing. A classmate told me that there was an animation studio in P.R. 

Well, not quite an studio, more likely a little workshop. But hey, It was good enough. I showed up with my cartoons portfolio asking for recommendations for animation schools and instead was offered a job as an assistant animator. Great! Now I had a job!

But... how is animation done? Remember, this is 1989. Just a year after Roger Rabbit hit the big screen and The Simpsons were making waves on t.v. And the animation workshop that hired me was build the old way. Everything was done first on paper and then traced on cells and photographed frame by frame under a camera. Easy right?

So that's the way I have been doing things since, on paper first and coloring each drawing one by one. Only I substituted cells with a digital process, using at first a software  called "AXA" which latter became "Flipbook" and coloring my backgrounds on Photoshop. I learned the process of timing and posing by the hand of my best friend and tutor, the late Mr. Hector Virella, who at the time was the head (and only) animator of this workshop and by reading, or may I say, engulfing books like "The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation"By Frank & Ollie and the Preston Blair collection. Actually, my first animation book was "The Animators Workshop."

But the book that any serious animator student should really have and study hard is "The Animator's Survival Kit" By Richard Williams. This book helped me a great deal and the lessons are so good that I felt as a novice when I read it for the first time, and I had already a 10 years of experience on my back.

So there you have it, my little and pathetic biography of how I became a cartoons animator.

More on how I work latter. So keep in touch!

See ya!

What is a Guabá?

For those who might be asking what a heck means Guabá on Guabaman's name? 

Here is your answer:

Guabá *[goo-ab-ah] is a spider best known as the Whip Spider (Chelicerata: Amblypygi)

These are located all over the world not just in Puerto Rico. This particular one is about the size of your hand but allegedly they can get up to a couple feet wide (this would be mostly legs with the body only being only a couple fingers wide). It eats crickets, small lizards, and frogs. They are nocturnal and hang around caves and rock outcroppings. Locally there are known to bite but have no venom.

Here some pictures of what they look like:

Ugly fellas, aren't they?

I found this info here, where you can learn more about this horrendous creature. But be alert, not only the pictures are ugly, but the website have a background sound so annoying that I recommend you to turn your volume down if you go there.

Ok, enough with the biology class. I promise you next topic will be about cartoons.

Guabaman Origins

I created Guabaman in a saturday morning in 2002 while having an interesting chat with a couple of cartoonists friends of mine at my house in Puerto Rico. 

One of them was one the renowned Looney Toons cartoonist and Yenny creator, David Alvarez. Others in that meeting where JJ Esteban, who latter assisted me on many of the animated episodes and my best friend/animation teacher, the late Hector Virella.

We where talking about the new Spider-man movie that was released that year and my friends were encouraging me to create a parody of it. 

I'm never interested on trends, and for me, a Spider-man parody at the moment felt as a trend.

 It was Virella who came up with the name, almost by chance, when, on his soft and timid tone of voice blurbed: "If we where to have a puertorrican Spider-man, he should be called Guaba-man".

There was silence. 

And I asked: "Why Guaba-man?"

"Because the guaba is a native spider from Puerto Rico".

Immediately there was a pouring of jokes and laughter, everybody was spitting jokes at the same time about how ridiculous the name sounded, at leas for us. And one of the jokes that stroked me was "how Guabaman shoot his web". And that was the base for the first episode subject.

Sadly, Virella is no longer with us anymore. In December 2003, he passed away as a result of a stroke while on his sleep. He was on his mid 40's. He was a good friend, an exceptional cartoonist and a master animator. He was so good that once he submitted a portfolio to Warner and they thought he couldn't have done his drawings by hand. Here is a little doodle he send to me once in a letter expressing his love for his work.

"Hector, wherever you are right now... keep drawing, that's your blessing".