Red Hot Riding Hood Continues

After uploading the super-zooms on Red's face, I noticed how bad some of the lines were. I'll be uploading updated vectors soon.

UPDATE: Here it is. The lines are much better, now. This is a FULLY EDITABLE .png file. You only really need this if you want the most recent lines for your own backgrounds or images.

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Red Hot Riding Hood Wallpaper 1 at 4:3, as promised.

I said I'd upload it, and here it is.

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And while I was at it, I did some palette swaps and made some clean, simple backgrounds with the image.

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I tried making the silhouette look of my Betty wallpapers, but Red's outline isn't iconic enough to really make any sense out of it. I really liked the black & white image, so I blew it up into a couple of other zooms of the same image and general layout.

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And just for fun, a few more.

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More Red Hot Riding Hood Wallpapers

Yes, my first wallpaper was called #2 and this is #1. I jump around in my work. Hell, I still haven't uploaded Betty Boop #1.

This image had a lot of gradients in it, so here it is in .png. If anyone wants it in .jpg or .gif, just post a comment. I tried it in .jpg and, at 100%, it looked fine, but the image was nearly 700kb. This .png is only 350-ish. Much more efficient and it looks better to boot.

This is a 16:10 ratio at 1920x1200 resolution.

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Red Hot Riding Hood Wallpaper 2

Here's a trio of wallpapers made with my most recent creation. I figured three with differing colors mixes it up effectively. These are all 16:10 ratio at 1920x1200 resolution, but I'll upload 4:3 ratio wallpapers soon.

Again, these are all .gif files. I lose a lot of color information, but it doesn't have any compression artifacts like .jpg, which looks like crap. I'd upload them as .png files, but setting those as wallpapers seems to not go well with some video cards. Since I usually rely on solid colors, I'm not worried. I have some wallpapers with a lot of gradients, I'll likely upload those as .png files, damn the video cards.

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Red Hot Riding Hood Final

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As I promised, here is the first high-res Red Hot Riding Hood final image .png.

Remember, when you click on the image, click on the "This image belongs to Cartoon Vixens" on the right to bring up the proper gallery. You can then re-select the image you want to download the real, high-resolution image.

This file IS EDITABLE. So feel free to use this to make cartoon porn, you beast. Perhaps we could work out a profit-sharing arrangement.

Red Hot Riding Hood Prototype 1

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It took awhile, but here she is. My first prototype of Red Hot Riding Hood. A lot of the lines are pretty messed up, but that will be fixed with time. As usually, as soon as I feel the lines are decent and final I'll upload the .png file so you, yes you, can tweak the lines for whatever perverted purpose you have.

UPDATE:

I thought I'd point out that this image of Red was taken from Little Rural Riding Hood. It was the last of the RHRH cartoons.

Coming along

I haven't actually forgotten about Red Hot Riding Hood, I swear.

The more I work with Tex Avery's lines, the more I love them. They're so fluid yet so firm and complex. I think I've finally nailed what I like so much about later, more advanced cartoons in comparison to early Betty Boop: the solidity of the base character.

Unlike early Betty, the character changed from frame to frame, but had little consistency. Throughout a cartoon, her appearance and proportions would change drastically. There was no firm base off of which distortions and flexing would occur. Unlike later cartoons, where there is a very solid basic character design, and while that design can flex, curve, stretch, and distort to any degree the animator wants, that basic design and proportions is always kept in mind and the character, after the distortion occurs, always falls back to it. It's like the non-energetic resting point of the character's design. When energy, action, and emotion are required, distortion is used. The base design can be anything, too. It can be bizarre and malformed, but it must be solid.

Look at the two different takes on cats in A Tale of Two Kitties, which starred the Abbot and Costello spoofs Babbit and Catstello. It also introduced the character of Tweety, who I've always hated. Regardless, both characters are solid, but flexible. Babbit is all arms and legs, and Catstello shouldn't have enough room for bones in his appendages, but that's the wonder of cartoons.

Red Hot Riding Hood Proto 2

She's coming along. Slowly.

Character.

I discussed character a couple of posts ago, and how it exists more so in the eyes than any other element of the cartoon construct.

After working on Red Hot Riding Hood for a number of days, I think that requires a qualification. John Kricfalusi (who recently posted about Betty Boop), the creator of Ren & Stimpy and the Ripping Friends, is something of a cartoon evangelist. He is a true believer in the hardest sense. He is hyper-critical of most modern animation, sacrifices animals to a shrine for Tex Avery, and says that the best cartoons use the cartoon medium to express character and story through graphic manipulation not possible in reality.

This is actually somewhat necessary, since an animator can never capture the multitude of minute details in reality that bring life to our perceptions. They must exaggerate and extend beyond the bounds of physical possibility to capture the finer details in a gross fashion. So while I stand by my statement that the eyes make the character, the best animators use the full breadth of design, warping, and motion to capture character within the entirety of the construct.

Compared to simplistic designs and rigid animation, like Freddy from Scooby Doo, the more advanced characters literally pop off the screen. There is zero character in the body and motion of simpler constructs. Take for example, this very early Betty Boop cartoon (and also witness Cab Calloway performing moves that Michael Jackson would later take to the moon).



Watch the warping, the fact that appendages and facial features rarely ever maintain aspect ratios for more than a few frames. Arms grow and shrink, eyes double in size, and, perhaps obviously, his head turns into a phonograph. It looks crude by today's standards, but it's actually much more skilled and more advanced than Scooby Doo and most of the television animation being produced today. Everything bleeds character, as opposed to animation today, like anime. Character in anime constructs exists almost entirely in the color of the hair.

This actually all gets to the point. Betty Boop's design, being very bold, translated easily into mathematical representations of lines called vectors, which are perfect lines. Tex Avery was so good, that the character of Red Hot Riding Hood exists in the very fluctuations of the ink. Translating the lines into perfect vectors robs a great deal of the character. It is proving very, very difficult to faithfully capture everything that Avery injected into Red. I guess that my stumbling is a testament to the skill of the golden age cartoonists.

Documentary Time, Students.

Since I'm working on my first Red Hot Riding Hoods, I've been reading up on her creator, Tex Avery. I found this great documentary from the late 80's about Avery's life and work. This was done about eight years after the maestro's death.

Red Hot GRANDMA?

What the hell is this? It's so random. I just had to share.

Ah-ooooooooo-ga!

I've started work on my second favorite cartoon vixen, Red Hot Riding Hood.

I have no high-falutin' feminist ideals in this case, only an extreme admiration for the animator behind her. Tex Avery was a genius of the highest order. He, Friz Freleng, and Chuck Jones completely defined American skit animation. While Disney's rigid, more "mature" animation dominated the theatrical releases, skit cartoons, and eventually television cartoons, were the domain of Warner's band of merry maniacs in Termite Terrace.

When Red Hot Riding Hood premiered, many people in the animation world assumed that Avery had rotoscoped a real dancer. Rotoscoping was a pretty common practice even at that early date, and the fact that Avery had not done this, instead using free-styled movement so fluid and real, is a testament to his skill. That the cartoons also have some fan-freaking-tastic slapstick is icing on the cake.

So yeah, this is an early framework build of Red in a dance pose. You can make out some of her grosser characteristics. I'm working on this in between my second Betty Boop and my first Jessica Rabbit.

Here's a video of the Toonheads broadcast of Red Hot Riding Hood. I always laugh hysterically when the wolf drinks the giant cocktail.