New York Comic Con 2011 Pt.1

Here's the New York Comic Con 2011 Piece I produced with CDBerrios with the help of Associate Producers Mikyle Yuvienco and Julianne Wilkinson and production assistants Kathleen O'Donnell and Anne Zhou.

Watch New York Comic Con 2011: Through the Artists' Eyes on PBS. See more from THIRTEEN Specials.

A YouDorks Production

Picturing America

Near the first summer after I started interning at WNET, I worked for the *Emmy Award Winning Series American Masters -- a department I'm back in as of now. It is here that I met Gail Levin, a producer that was working on a for web series of short documentary segments funded by the NEH called Picturing America.

At any rate, they're all up now and you can watch them all at the provided link above. Go watch it and learn a little bit about America's history through art.

Elementary Educators and History teachers, you may want to check this out to see if any of this is of any use to you.

*Sorry, had to do that.

Painting Pt. 1

When I was a child I loved painting using water colors. At the same time, however, I hated it because I could never get my pictures to look nearly as good as the afro-wearing instructor Bob Ross whom I watched regularly on PBS. Despite my frustration I still loved playing with paint and it helped that painting and art was an old hobby of my mother's (actually, something she did in college alongside her mathematics and computer science studies), which meant that there were always plenty of water colors and brushes around for me to experiment with.

I discovered that one thing I loved to paint, mostly because I discovered that it was relatively easy to me, were sunsets. Maybe it wasn't easy for me to do at first, but the bright and saturated colors, alongside the wonders of mixing colors to create another, was enough for me to thoroughly enjoy making them enough to pratice enough to get to the point where I felt as though I did a good job.

Fastforward 15 to 17 years. The old watercolor sets (which were, in fact, older than me) no longer reside under the sink, neither does the cup full of stained and poorly cleaned brushes. They've all been moved... or thrown out. Searching for them I stumble upon a box in the living room holding most of the old art supplies I used so many years ago. The oil and acrylic paints sit in their jars or tubes, dried and crusted after years of neglect. The brushes lay, some stained and mistreated others brand new, never removed from their original packaging. The tins of watercolors, what I was looking for, however, are not there, probably thrown away years earlier as they ran out of paint.

I however, still wanted to paint with watercolors in preparation of a short animation idea I've been playing with in my mind, so I went to Blick's and bought a set and a brush. The following are the results of my more recent ventures into the world of painting: