Summer Vacation

As the summer closes this weekend, I've posted some of my summer vacation pictures from last July to South Carolina. It's been a long summer, what with the house and all. Finally back to working on my own projects, which are slowly coming together. The blog will pick up.


Duke ready for takeoff.



Stephanie and Ginger in the water.



Baby's first hole.



After much struggle, the kite was in the air.



An 80 pound fish caught by...me. Yeah. Sure. That was me...



Me and some complex looking food. I am so happy to be eating it.

The Census Atlas

In a little diversion, back when I was a cartographer (map-maker) at International Mapping I spent three years on and off working on this book for the Census Bureau all about statistics from the 2000 census. The bureau hadn't done something like this for I believe it was 90 years. Even though I've been away from there for three years, the book showed up today, and on my birthday no less. Here are some pictures.

More Little Jims

I've put the tool I'm prototyping on hold for a little bit to work on the animatic sketches. I've got about 5 pages of these little Jims so far and these will all go into the tool with audio to get a feel for the flow before I start animating. Still playing with a design for my cartoon self, but certain features are becoming more and more consistent as I go on.

From the Attic

Last weekend I went up to New Jersey to help my mom and my brother clean out the attic. We found a whole bunch of boxes with stuff all four of us Miller kids had made in school from nursery school on. I pulled a couple of nuggets out and scanned two of them for the blog.





This was from kindergarten and it must have been my ideal zoo. Animals, dogs, dinosaurs, and even Care Bears in the clouds.





I don't know what the gold star was for. Dimetrodon lived about 100 million years before Apatosaurus and was much smaller. Just another example of the sliding science standards in our education system, although this was while I was in Catholic school so I give myself credit for not having them being ridden by Adam and Eve.

New Website

My new website is up and running. The content has been updated to include k12 work and the site in general has been reformatted.

http://www.jmspark.com

A Little Jim

Here's a sketch I did of myself for a prototype I'm working on. I'm going to use myself as the main character. It'll be good illustration/animation practice in flash.

Christmas Card

Made my first personal Christmas Card this year. What a process. Below I posted a step-through of how one of the pictures of my fiance came about (yes, she's holding a taser). I still feel like I'm having a lot of trouble inking.