My Little Miss Perfect

One of the best things about having your fiancee as your best friend is when you're at home after work, you always have your favotite person around to hang out with. However, when playing guitar hero with your same favorite, things can get competative. My fiancee Crystal and I are hooked to this plastic guitar shredding game and it's awesome! And since we both too want to be awesome, when it comes to battling, the gloves come off. We both really enjoy the old little Miss and Mr. series ( sorry but I'm terrible with names, and can't remember the guys name who created all these little characters ) anyways, we both love his work and those little characters always remind me of her, so I thought I would make one special for Crystal and all her awesome guitar hero playing skills. I had such a blast making this cute little sour character for her, and everytime I see this drawing it just reminds me of how I love how competitive we get, and how I love how much fun we have playing those little plastic guitars.

Waiting at the Bus Stop

So my apologies for the extreme lack of posts this new year, things have been so busy for me, that all the stuff I've been wanting to show, I've been working on. As I finish stuff, I'll be posting it, so basically the flood gates are about to open. As for the drawings, here are a few rough designs I did for a project I'm currently in the middle of. There is something fun about drawing un-attractive 50's era businessmen. They can be out of shape, hung-over, un-organized and strung out, yet they are still appealing. I feel like I could draw thousands of these guys, and I probably will, so If it's dead beat dads or creepy office co-workers your looking for, I'll supply them here!

Justin Wright

All Photographs taken by Debbie Coleman

This past week has been such a hard week for so many of us. We lost an amazing friend and a wonderful animation talent. I met Justin almost 6 years ago when we were both freshmen at Cal Arts. Before I even knew his name I knew of him as "The Pixar Guy." He had the shirts, the hats, the posters, he had everything. He had been a PA at the studio before he came to school and it seemed like his only goal in life was to return to the studio, only as a story artist not a PA. He had such a vibrant and contagious personality, if you weren't laughing with him about something stupid, you were probably arguing with him over something far more stupid. We went through animation school together, and than after school we both ended up at Pixar working together. When I look back at my time with Justin there are all sorts of memories that stand out.

One in particular was getting to work together on the end credits sequence for Ratatouille. We needed people to animate on the credits, but because animation was so slamed, we couldn't have hardly any help from the animators at the studio who had 2-D expirience with the exception of a few. So Teddy and I had to recruit some other people who we new had animation experience. Since I had a bunch of my friends from Cal Arts who were working at the studio at the time, I had plenty of guys I knew could animate and would have a blast doing so. One of those animators was a story intern at the time, my friend from school Justin Wright. Since we had gone to school together and been in the trenches together during film time at Cal Arts, I knew the guy could animate and he did a great job. It was so fun to share the experience of doing 2-D at Pixar with him. It felt like Cal Arts all over again, crazy deadlines, too much animation to do, only now the stakes were too high to really understand at the time, so we all just enjoyed the hell out of that time. In the credits, Justin animated the Rat doing the cannon ball into the ranch dressing, and all the lovely rats at the food hair saloon. I've included abouve some photos of him working on the credits that were taken by the amazing Debbie Coleman ( the in house amazing photographer here at the studio.)

The other great memory that I have of Justin came about 2 and a half years ago. Everyone who knew him knew that his biggest dream and goal in life was to work at Pixar. And when I left before my last year at school to come up here and work, Justin was one of the first people to call me and congratulate me on getting the dream job. I just thought that said so much about his character, that he could see someone else get what he had always wanted, but that he was such an amazing person, that he could put his dreams aside to put someone else before him. That type of attitude will stay with me forever and I have Justin to thank for teaching me to have that type of positive, caring , and inspirational attitude towards everyone I come across. Even though we know you are close by, we will miss you so much.

Future Project

So I have been working on so many side projects that I haven't had time to put anything up for a while so sorry for that. Anyways here is a rough color study of two characters from an up coming side project I'm working on, I'll post more when I have more.

Cereal Killers

So just before the break I was asked to be in this great book "Cereal Killers". I'm sure many of you are familiar with the great work that's being done for this book, but for those of you who don't here is the scoop. Doktor Viktor Von Kreep is assembling this great book which features a whole assortment of awesome artists illustrating spooky versions of some of their favorite cereal boxes.

For mine I wanted to do a fun sort of homage to the "Frostyo's" cereals from the past. So I came up with "Abominable Frost Bites." I just love the designs of their boxes and thought it would be fun to play with some of the visual ideas and text that they were using. I also tried to play with the balance of flat limited color, with some texture where needed.

The work that people are doing is really fun and inspiring, here is the link to the Blog that Viktor has set up featuring many of these pieces. Cereal Killers

!Happy Holidays!

This year my Fiancee' and I decided to send out some holiday cards for our friends and family. And rather than picking some out at the store, we thought we should create our very own, so I painted this little piece of our Yeti friend decorating his tree and getting ready for Christmas. It's probably the one time out of the year he takes a break from killing mountain climbers and sasquatches, and for good reason. I hope everyone out there has a great holiday!

7" x 10" Gouache and Paper Cut-Out

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.

King Sized Development Art

So About a year ago my friend from Cal Arts Devin Roth was developing a show idea for TV and he asked me to do a piece to help sell the style of the show. Anyways, unfortunately the show wasn't picked up but I had a blast doing some bits of design work here and there for Devin. Here's the main character, stopping to check out this vista with a castle off in the distance.

The Ancient Book of Sex and Science

So the guys and I have begun to work on our next book, "The Ancient Book of Sex and Science." It's going to be a really fun mix of sexy sci-fi and ancient modern science sex pulp. Anyways, I'll be posting some sketches and a few pieces in the coming months of what I'm working on for the book, and so will Scott, Don and Lou. So keep your looking balls locked to the internet box for more updates.

Happy Birthday Love

So about 2 weeks ago my fiancee Crystal celebrated her 23rd birthday and rather than just buying her a nice present I really wanted to make her something special. Something that you can't just get in a store. So in my downtime, I worked on this painting for her and suprised her with it on her birthday. Anyways, happy birthday love!

The Deadly Fire Cyclops!

Final Paint Gouache / Acrylic / Paper Cut-Out

Below is the process in which I created this piece. Starting at the bottom of the post with the sketch, and finishing up here with the final.



Adding the rough detail to block out some more of the smaller shapes and textures.



Then block in the rough color and graphic shape.



The background color I put down first.



The rough color study I did to help me plan out the colors I'd use.



The rough sketch

Robot Alien Sketches

Here are a few sketches of some Alien Robot designs for a future project that I've been kicking around. When I do some color studies I'll post those next.

Death By Yeti

So Here is the full Ninja piece I did for the Ninja Show at Gallery Nucleus. It was a really fun piece to do, and if you haven't checked out the show, it was great. So many good artists, so much great artwork.

9" x 33" Gouache, Acrylic, and Paper Cut-Out

Rough Sketch

I'm gonna try and post way more sketches on this blog and do so way more freequently. Now that the crunch time is over I have way more time to draw and sketch so I'll be putting them up.

Ninja Show

Here is a taste of my submission into the Gallery Nucleus "Ninja Show 2 Revenge of the Ninja!" The opening reception is on Saturday, August 11th from 6pm - 11pm. The show runs until September 3rd and there are so many amazing artists involved in this show that it's crazy. It's gonna be great, so check it out if you can.

As for my piece, the original is quite big, so this is only a small portion of what you'll see at the show.

9" x 33" Gouache, Acrylic, and Paper Cut-out.