Designing Flash Characters and ASIFA.

This past weekend I went to my first ASIFA Event here in Portland, Oregon. We meet downtown Saturday morning and had a bagel breakfest and chatted a little before the main event. ASIFA Portland had a few speakers come for their second annual unconference, one of which was a woman who worked for RACC. This was the main discussion that I went to. RACC holds these yearly grants that they hand out to artist so that those artist can get  their purposed projects done. There are a few specifications that an artist has to meet in order to receive a grant from RACC. The first is that they must write up and hand in a proposal for the project, the breakdown of what the money will be used for, and they have to have something to show as a finished product at the end of the year. if they like your proposal then they give you half the money up front and the other half at the end when the project is completed.
Now, I don't have any projects currently that I need funding for.The knowledge that this is available; however, is great for if I do at some point down the line need money for a project. The only bad thing for those who might be reading this is that this is a Oregon thing. However, I don't doubt that other cities and states have this type of thing available as well. You'll just have to look into it.
The other discussion I sat in was on how to promote yourself. However, I hand to leave before the end of the discussion, because I had to meet up with my wife and Daughter to go to another event that day. It did not look like they were going to get very far with that discussion anyway, since when I left they had something like 10 mins left and were still discussion the use of a Blog as a self promotion tool and how it differs from a personal website. The Unconference lasted until about 2:30 pm and had several other discussions going on.

The other thing that I have been working on these past few weeks is character designing for Flash. When I do this I create everything in Adobe Illustrator and then import that whole ai file into flash. From here the different parts are turned into symbols and saved into a main Flash file. I make any minor adjustments that you cannot do in Illustrator in Flash before I am done, such as remove lines that don't need to be in certain areas like the arms and forearms.
With this Knight character I had to remove the lines that separated the Chest from the Lower Body so that the two pieces looked to be one whole piece.

The next piece I hope to do is a dragon to go with this character.