Holiday Break Challenge!

Fall quarter is over and so ends our normal, weekly sketch challenges. However, since we don't want to waste away during the holiday break we're going to have our first Blog Header Challenge! (If you're asking, "What's a header?" It's the graphic at the top of this blog.) Your challenge is to make the blog a new header graphic for 2009! Here are the requirements:

Title: It MUST say "Temple of Cartoon Mojo" somewhere on it and be legible.
Dimensions: 900px wide by 254 px tall (see below)
Color Mode: RGB
Resolution: 72 dpi
ALL ELSE GOES!

Here's a template you can download to make it easy to create your artwork at the proper size as well as drop it in for the final PSD. Above is a picture of the template and you'll see a tabbed area at the bottom. This area needs to remain! It is made up of two Color Fill layers in the template PSD and all you have to do is change the colors in those Color Fill layers to match your artwork. You can also download an example of the current header as a PSD to see how it all works.

Once you're done email Nolan the PSD before the beginning of Winter quarter. We'll post all entries but we'll judge the best to use for all of 2009!

John Constantine Challenge!

This was the last sketch challenge of the quarter. Thanks for all the hard work, everyone! But don't forget about the Blog Header Challenge while we're all on holiday break!

Dominike Stanton
Irene Strychalski
Doug Dabbs
Nolan Woodard

Festival of Trees

Even though this event isn't technically a SEQA event, so many people in our department worked hard on it we wanted to share. While we already had plenty on our plates, President Wallace came to the ATL campus with a project: The Festival of Trees. It's an event hosted by the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta where custom Christmas trees are made for patients in their care. The SEQA department had two kids to make trees for. One wants to grow up to be a marine biologist and the other loves Spider-Man. Hundreds of man-hours went into creating these trees. Check them out below!

Pat Quinn took on the Spider-Man tree with amazing results. We weren't sure how he was going to do it but it turned out great!




Nolan Woodard, Shawn Crystal, and a ton of SEQA-ATL students, who donated their precious time away from finals, created an island with undersea environment for the hopeful marine biologist. Turned out pretty well. Thanks for all the help, guys!




But not to be outdone is Pat Quinn's assistant Nicole Dabbs. She worked with the other Academic Director Assistant Kori Wiltz to create this amazing carousel tree! It's phenomenal and we consider it to be the best out of all of the 30 or so trees created for the event. Nice work, ladies!

Indiana Jones Challenge!

Brent Morris
Pat Bollin
Rick Lovell (ILLU faculty represent!)
Chris Schweizer

10,000 Hits!

We reached our 10,000th hit today and it came from Brazil! In less than a year we've managed to build a wonderful department blog with hits coming from more than thirty countries across the globe. (If you've not done previously, check out the "Recent Visitors" map at the bottom of the column on the left to see where hits are coming in from all over the world!) Visitors have included faculty and students from other departments and even other colleges, comic news sites/blogs, editors, publishers, artists, and other professionals. Yeah, we're patting ourselves on the back a little but we not lost sight of the fact we wouldn't have become as strong as we are without the wonderful students and alumni who take an active role in this blog and our department. Thank you! Keep up the good work during finals!

Adventures Into Digital Comics

Our illustrious leader, Academic Director Pat Quinn, has artwork (inked by Dean Lowe) featured in a new documentary called Adventures Into Digital Comics. The IMDB says, "In the 90s, comic books lost millions of readers. Can the Internet win them back? The film observes the events surrounding the sudden decrease of sales of comic books in the US in the early 90's, followed by the surge of webcomics on the Internet." They interview creators about the advent of webcomics. It's over ninety minutes of interviews of domestic and European artists of both print and web comics. Much of it focuses on the downfall of sales in the nineties so if you're not familiar with the recent history of the industry (novelty/comic shops, newsstand, and the direct market with the rise of graphic novels, webcomics, and TPBs and why) please take some time to watch it. The quality is a little low but the entire documentary can be watch on IMDB here!
Pat Quinn and John Lowe credits at 91:49 and Roy Richardson is given Special Thanks at the end!

The Batman Challenge!

Doug Dabbs
Cara McGee
Colin Geller
Nolan Woodard

VANDALS!

Someone vandalized the drawing boards in room 347 portraying our dear and illustrious faculty in less than the beautiful ideals they truly are. Such atrocities will not be allowed and justice will be served. How dare Nolan's brilliant head shine like a cue ball! How dare we feel the wind blow through Shawn's luscious hair! How dare you make it look like Chris is a fountain of knowledge! We know who did it. Those of you that are innocent best say your goodbyes now. Those students responsible aren't long for life.



And unless you're really thick in the head you got that we're totally joking. Which we are. Joking. Totally. There's always some sort of hijinx here and it really says alot about how strong our department is when we can work as hard as we do (producing great results!) yet still retain a light heart and sense of humor. These little drawings made us laugh so we thought we'd share. We faculty are proud of our students and we'd just like to say in response: SHWEET!

Nate Powell next Wednesday

Nate Powell, Ignatz Award winner for "Outstanding Debut Award" with his book Swallow Me Whole from Top Shelf, will be visiting on Wednesday, November 12th at 2pm in room 347. Please join us and here what Nate has to say!

Jack Skellington Challenge!

Alex Hamilton

Dianna Bedell

Colin Geller

Pulishers Forum

A boy and his toys...Pure Bliss.

Axel in da house!

James in da house!

I think i smell a job coming on. Go Cara!

Starros in da house!

The publishers forum kicked off and was a HUGE success. Thanks to Axel, James, and Starros for being so generous with their tie. Thanks to Nolan and Schweizer for being so involved and making sure everything went as smoothly as it did. Lastly, thanks to all the students that participated, you made us look GREAT!