Some Cool Kickstarter/IndieGoGos

Let me preface this by saying I am very discriminating about promoting Kickstarter campaigns or other crowdsourced projects. That doesn’t mean ones I don’t promote here I do not think are great ideas or worthy of attention and support… it simply means I don’t want my blog to become riddled with pleas crowdsourced projects. Fair warning if you write me and ask me to promote your project…not that I am some kind of internet powerhouse. Drop a note to Kim Kardashian of you want real publicity, then write her a check for ten grand and she’ll send out a tweet for you. Incidentally, that’s about $72 per character for a full tweet… and considering it’s likely Kim is only familiar with about 3/4 of the letters of the alphabet, that’s an amazing rate. But I digress…

Here are two recent crowdsourced projects I would like to point you to:

Pose Drawing Sparkbook- by Cedric Hohnstadt

This in an interesting project by fellow Minneosta illustrator/character designer Cedric Hohnstadt. It’s a combination of instruction and inspiration designed to jumpstart your animated character design skills and the poses your draw with any character for comics, cartoons and the like. It’s interactive, there being blank pages throughout for you to draw out the challenges (aka “sparks”) that are like mini-assignments of storytelling and character creation. Sounds like a very innovative concept, and Cedric is a top-notch character designer who know of what he speaks. As part of the prmotion of the book, Cedric is giving away a download of 100 sketchbook ideas, no strings attached.

The Norm graphic novel by Michael Jantze

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbXNX3Fywxo[/youtube]

Fans of “The Norm”, Michael Jantze’s formerly syndicated daily comic strip, will want to jump all over this. It’s a graphic novel called “Knocked Out Loaded”, which was originally published in 2007 online at Jantze.com as a color daily strip. Written as a long-form story using short-form techniques, the story is 80% complete and will be fully completed soon thanks to a successful (and ongoing) Indegogo campaign set to end on Thursday. The original goal has been blown away, but “stretch goals” remain, including the return of “The Norm” as an online color comic.

Visit these project sites and support if you are so inclined. That means you too, Kim.