The Ancient Book of Sex and Science

USE TECHNOLOGY TO COLLECT THE WOMEN!

Here is the first piece that I've done for our next installment of the "Ancient Book" series. Our next book will be playing with the themes of Sex and Science. I'm hoping to weave a little story between all of my paintings again which was fun the last time around. As for this piece, well there's really not much to explain other than it's a giant cyclops robot operated by scientists collecting wild naked women on some unknown planet. I have to say I love the logic in Sci-Fi pulp. Anyways below I've included some rough sketches of the piece and some earlier thumbnails. Check out the blogs of Lou Romano, Scott Morse, and Don Shank for updates on their awesome artwork for the book.

10" x 15 1/2" Acrylic, Gouache, and Paper Cut-Out

Yeti Vs. Sasquatch

I did this Yeti vs. Sasquatch painting a few months back as a commissioned piece. It was fun to simplify and stylize the idea of these two characters and their two different worlds getting ready to go head to head. The battle hasn't happend yet so I can't say who wins, although I was told a long time ago to never bet against a Yeti.

13" x 20" Acrylic / Gouache / Paper-Cut Out

New York Society of Illustrators

This Cyclops painting I did for the "Ancient Book of Myth and War" has been accepted into the 50th Annual Exhibition for the Society of Illustrators in New York. I'm not sure when the opening will take place, I just hope I can make it out to New York to see the show.

I'M BATMAN!

When I was younger I always thought I would be a comic artist. Well, even though I'm not, I still love drawing super heros, so I thought I would start doing some fun sketches and paintings of some of my favorites. Batman is a great character so I thought I'd start in his world and see what happens.

Ratatouille 2-D Animation

So now that Ratatouille is finally out on DVD I thought it would be fun to take a few screen grabs off the DVD of the 2-D animation that we did for the movie and post them. Now these obviously aren't the complete credits of the film, but just the first few to show the style we chose to go with. The Idea really came from Harley Jessup the Production Designer who saw some of my illustrative design work on Ratatouille and wanted to pitch the art as an Idea for a credits sequence. And as we moved forward Teddy Newton came up with all the gags for the sequence and keyed out a lot of the animation, I created the style, design and look of the sequence as well as painted some of the animation and layouts for the sequence, Scott Morse helped me paint some of the BG's, Bob Scott led the animation team, and Andrew Jimenez put everything through AfterEffects and created all the camera moves. There were way more than the five of us that helped make this happen so I have to tip my hat to them because they all did an amazing job. Everything was animated by hand, and since we wanted such a painterly look on the finished animation, we had to paint all the animation in a futuristic old fashioned way, all in the computer, but frame by frame in photoshop with no cheats or short cuts. Unfortunately we didn't get to use any cell painting gloves, maybe next time.


As for the Short film "Your Friend the Rat," Jim Capabianco had this great idea about the history of rats and humans and wanted to do most of it with hand drawn animation. Doing the production design for this short was tons of fun but was also quite challanging with trying to incorporate several different styles of animation all in under 11 minutes. In the end we used a combination of 3-d animation, 2-d animation, stop motion animation, and AfterEffects animation. There also is a shot in the short that we actually projected animation and traced it frame by frame on a large chalk board. It took me 13 hours to do and I swear I was coughing chalk for a few days after, so it's not some fancy animation filter, trust me it's all real chalk. Anyways if you pick up the DVD, I hope you enjoy it.

Viva la 2-D Animacion!

Evil Scientist

Not much to say other than this guy is probably up to no good.