A lot of the animation work I was doing last year is coming out, and now I can share it with you!
*drumroll*
Last year, we did a video with Weird Al Yankovic! I, a child of the 80′s, am of course a fan of the legend that is Weird Al, but I’m also a fan of the animated videos he’s done in the past. It’s like a who’s who of animation! Everyone at Ghostbot was thrilled. I was occupied with a bunch of other work while Weird Al project went into overdrive, but I helped with compositing and animation assisting on this video. The art style pushed the studio style onto a new level, and Roque directed the project like a madman. The good kind of madman.
And yes, the song is irreversibly stuck in my head now.
Secondly, the Dolby Digital spot we did is finally on the internet! This project was gorgeous, and really fun to work on. I got to do a bunch of animation assisting on this one, from secondary character animation to special effects. Roman showed his After Effects skills on this project, taking our graphic style and taking it to crazy levels with effects.
I updated the animation section with some more videos I worked on last year. It definitely makes me miss Ghostbot, we spent a great 3 years together, and the experiences I had in the studio are unparalleled. There’s something to be said for working on Weird Al, Dolby, Online Underground, and unmentionable social games all in a single day, my multi-tasking skills sharpened to a lethal level. I’m sure some of our other projects will continue to surface for the next few years.
Lately I’ve had very little time to sit down and work on my own projects, but I found a little trick: I’ve been drawing on my phone on my way to and from work. I downloaded SketchBook MobileX and the tools are really perfect for little finger doodles. I’m trying to do one every day, and immediately post them on twitter and tumblr.
In this bit of time between projects being finished and released, I wanted to share some of the inspiration I’ve been finding on the internet and compiling.
I can spend hours on ffffound and various other blogs, downloading reference images. There’s something really exciting about browsing the most-viewed images amongst bloggers, sharing a mindset of style and texture. It may be a form of hoarding, I’m not sure, but I end up with thousands of images. Rarely do I actually go back and use them, it’s really about the thrill of finding them, and see which ones imprint on my mind and linger there as I sit down to sketch.
There’s always more ideas than what you can put on paper, but I really hope to follow some of these threads further.
For the next couple weeks, if you go to the MTV Geek website, you’ll see my art all over the site! I was really excited to be asked to design a layout for MTV, and join the ranks of some pretty amazing featured illustrators they’ve had over the past few months. Major thanks to my friend Eddie for being rad and putting this together.
I’m in the middle of too many projects that I can’t talk about, so instead, I want to share with you some things that have been inspiring me:
Brian Eno DJ Radio Show – Not too much can be said, really. It’s Brian Eno and he’s DJ’ing. Run wild!
Jim Jarmush DJ’s a Radio Show – Jim’s an amazing filmmaker, but he’s also really, really into psych music. He curated a day at ATP awhile back, and mentions a ton of my favorite shows I’ve seen over the past year, from Sleep to Greenhorns to Black Angels, and there’s some neat talk about music and moviemaking.
Shit Robot Music Video: My friend Neil’s friend back in Ireland did this music video, and it really makes me want to get a camera and film some stop motion. Right now.
Stephen Fry and Lady Gaga have tea: This article is amazing, Mr. Fry is a fantastic writer, classy and funny as you would expect, and he’s absolutely enchanted by Lady Gaga. Whatever your opinion may be about her, this article paints a really charming juxtaposition of characters, and Gaga’s intelligence shines through. She says something that applies directly to what I’ve been working on lately:
I live halfway between reality and fantasy at all times because I choose to, and anyone can choose that, and I believe everybody has something so magical about themselves and why, as a society, are we so afraid of magic? Why is magic synonymous with artifice? Why is the fantastic synonymous with a lie?
I’ve also become addicted to French Bulldogs, and I’m growing out my bangs. Drawing too many girls with bangs in their eyes… I guess it was destined to happen.
Anyway, welcome if you’ve come from mtv, and please help yourself to the comics section.
I have the internet back at my apartment! Such a nice thing. It was a nice vacation from technology in the home, but at the end of the day, I just want to stream movies and check my favorite blogs constantly. I just wrapped up the second week of my new job working in social games, and feel inspired by the energy in the studio and I feel very lucky to get paid to draw all day. I’ve always valued personal projects alongside work (or school) and so this weekend I’m sorting through my recent artwork that’s piling up around the house, and realizing there’s a lot of stuff I haven’t shared in awhile. So here we go:
I’ve been hanging around a lot of music equipment and I find them really, really fun to draw! The impact of music on my art is huge, from songs that put ideas in my mind and drive me to try and capture that feeling on paper, to the influence of living with a musician and starting to understand what sort of imagery makes a musically-minded person get excited.
Here’s a deer I’m working on for a new project. He was a tiny element in a larger drawing I was working on in my sketchbook, and I’ve been taking on some art direction from musician friends to elaborate the idea. I’m fascinated by what different people zero in on in a drawing, and it’s gotten me to think about symbols and the sort of images that stick in your head and don’t go away.
This whale skeleton has been stuck in my head for awhile. My friend Kenn drew a fantastic cartoon whale skeleton for a game we were working on awhile back, and I was determined to get it tattooed on myself, until I realized the drawing actually made it into the game, and then I couldn’t bring myself to get it. But lately I’ve been drawing my own version of the skeleton whale, and working on some paintings of it as well. Hopefully it’ll make its’ way into a project in the future. Swim on.
And here’s a page from my sketchbook, where a catfish swims over the Castro hills. I had so much fun drawing him, I thought “maybe I’m thinking too hard about this…” and just need to draw funny, surreal images. This has led me to start scripting out new Weird Fishes comics, so it all comes full circle.
But I can’t just draw fish, I’m also working on a series of surrealist women, all hair in their faces and lips and horns and branches growing out of them. I think it’s all going to fit together, these creatures and figures forming together into their own world. Whatever it’s becoming, the drawings are piling up, and I’m wondering if it’s going to reach a point of being a gallery show, or a book, or both? I think we’re due for a new book of drawings.
I recently decided to make a career change, and managed to arrange it so I had a month off in-between jobs. I’m nearly at the end of my break, and the transformation my mind has gone through during this time was much-needed and fulfilling. There’s barely been a moment to be lazy, since I’ve been running around doing interviews, starting a new line of drawings, scripting new comics, going on adventures in the sun, plus I went on an trip to Austin, Texas!
Here’s one of my favorite things, documenting myself with fashion drawings:
My first week off I ran around SF with my portfolio, and this was a lot more stressful than an average week of work in the office, but it was thrilling and I got some great results. The week after, I hopped on a plane with some friends to visit Texas for the first time and see the Austin Psych Fest!
I’ve never been to Texas before, and from what everyone tells me, Austin is the oasis to visit. We got to spend a day walking around on foot, in this warm gorgeous weather, and I fall in love with the architecture. The buildings were all painted with colorful birds and sugar skulls and guitars, then we found moped shops and SF-worthy coffee shops and record shops with all my favorite vinyl. I definitely felt at home here.
The festival itself was as overwhelming as you’d expect, with over 50 loud, droney bands to choose from. APF4 took place at the Seaholm Power Plant, a giant concrete structure that had some unfortunate acoustics and heat-holding powers. The structure was divided into two stages, one too big to project sound properly, the other too small to fit the audience. But we made due, because the music was great and the people were top-notch.
The experience of going to a music festival was new to me, but it reminded me a lot of large comic-conventions. You’re given a list of things to do that seems incredible, and you manage to miss most of it and get lost in the mess. I intended to document all the bands I saw, but soon found that nearly impossible and instead jumped back and forth from stage to stage trying to experience as much music as possible. Friday night, I know we listened to a lot of bands, and A Place to Bury Strangers was in there somewhere, but the standout for me was Tobacco, with their gritty low beats that reverberated through the walls and into your feet.
Saturday arrives and I’m excited to see the San Francisco-based bands I came down here to support: Lumerians and Sleepy Sun. They’ve been touring together for the past week, and bring some great energy with them as they play back-to-back on stage 1 and 2. Sleepy Sun has a new set that I think is catchy and undeniable, their old favorites transformed with a a little more force and rock and roll. I run over to see Lumerians, who blow out the fuses on the stage, and then play with an intensity that I adore. I’m biased, for sure, but it was well worth the trip just to see them play, and then experience the rest of the show with some of my favorite people.
The rest of the night is a fantastic wall of sound involving Young Prisms, Indian Jewelry, Soft Moon, Crocodiles, Black Moth Super Rainbow, and I think we even caught Spectrum at the end there. Some of this was caught from outside, where a cool wind catches everyone in the face as we try to remember who we want to catch next. The power plant is a hothouse, the best kind there is, but utter hell at the same time. We catch a rickshaw back to the hotel, and get a glimpse of the Austin nightlife, still going strong late on a Saturday night as we check out, ears ringing.
All I can say about Sunday is that it happened, we were there, but everyone I encountered shared the same problem: our ears hurt so that we didn’t know who was playing. So we ran around a lot, from backstage to the bar to outside to hide in the Lumerians’ van. Dirty Beaches was fantastic, and it made a baby cry with extreme force and I couldn’t figure out what a baby was doing there, anyway. Pete International Airport left a good impression, creating a sound that made it’s way through my extra-thick earplugs and left me wanting to hear more. In an act of tragedy, I miss the Black Angels, too exhausted after Roky Erickson to pay anyone attention, no matter how great, or how fantastic their festival was that they put on.
So, Austin, I wish I had swum in your waters, enjoyed more of your barbecue, and seen more of your city, but I had a great time. APF4 was a marathon, one I barely managed to finish, but I made it all 3 days, saw friends, and came home with some new favorite music.
And now for the unplugged part: I come home to find out that our internet had been shut off. This is the excuse that was needed to change services (I’ll leave them unnamed), and so we’ve been internet-free at the house for 10 days. And I love it. It’s like going back to the nineties. I can receive emails on my phone, but there’s no blog-surfing, no streaming Netflix and no constant messages or facebook updates. I’ve delved into drawing, keeping a journal, reading books, analyzing symbols and thinking about what kind of art I really want to be doing. No internet is great. This is a real vacation. Plus, I get to sit at the cafe when I really need to take care of business, and then write my blog post.
I’ve been working on a poster design for the past few weeks, and I’ve discovered a pretty strong interest in lettering and 70′s rock posters inside me. Coming from comics, I like the look of lettering and drawings, how they interact and change the mood of a picture. For this piece, I consumed tons of reference photos, looked at lots of neat poster designs, and experimented with mixing watercolors and digital effects. I can’t share the full poster yet, but here’s a piece of the drawing I’ve been pouring my attention onto.
As soon as I got the poster turned in, I returned to this beast of a project. I knew it was taking on a lot to animate a whole music video myself, but the song I’m working with is amazing, and I really can’t wait to have a piece that I’ve done from start to finish. I’ve worked on a ton of commercials and games in the past couple years, but almost none of them can be used in a reel, because I cleaned up a girl’s face in one scene, and animated a sigh in this one, but never all in one place. I love getting to design, storyboard, and execute this idea and see what my mind looks like animated.
It’s definitely taking longer than I’d hoped, but it’s coming along beautifully anyway. I’m animating it in the style of old paper cutout animations (more jagged, very little tweening), and using hand-painted backgrounds. In the end it should be pretty crazy, I’m getting some very talented help with the editing and After Effects, and I can’t wait to get it out the door. I just spent this evening scribbling out the end sequence in Flash, and I’ll be fleshing out and animating them for the next few weeks.
And now for something entirely different, as promised, I went on a photoshoot with Tristan Crane and it was a gorgeous sunny day and we played in the grass and I even got to climb a cherry tree! I’ve barely done any modeling with a photographer, and I think there’s a definite advantage to drawing all the time when you get infront of a camera. I’m always thinking about faces and expressions and how to pose the body in my drawings, and this seems like a natural extension.
Long past are the days of cartoonists and animators living inside caves, anonymous and cloaked, the modern artist has to be everything.
I’m finally going to come out of the closet about my love for video games. I work full-time as a Flash artist for games, and when I started it was more like my cool day job that allows me to fund my life drawing comics, but it’s become something I’m really, really serious about. The industry is just saturated in portable Flash games right now, and I find myself being drawn to game design, UI, portable gameplay and a heavy dose of 90′s nostalgia.
Back when I started playing games in the 90′s, it was all about shareware, and, since I’ve never owned a gaming station of any kind, I was downloading games on my Mac as fast as my dial-up would allow. Most of these games were simple, made in tiny studios, free to download, and you pay for it if you really like it, quite a lot like today. There were space shoot-em-ups and factory precision games, and I especially liked anything with action and a female character. When Tomb Raider came out on the Mac, I was first in line to buy it at the store, and I programmed my own websites dedicated to Lara Croft on the Mac. I even started beta testing later versions ported over to my platform. Deep into it.
Tomb Raider was pretty great in all it’s polygonal 3D glory, but I’ve always loved 2D platform games. This started with Mario marathons at my cousin’s house, and accelerated with the old DOS game “Jill of the Jungle”, where you ran around in a little green bathing suit climbing vines and slicing up giant insects. So good! Can’t ask for more. As a kid I designed little adventure games in Hypercard, I was always reflecting on the games I played, whether it was by creating websites or making mini-games. I’d play the game “Catz” and become obsessed with digital pets, then draw my own little pet gifs and put them up for people to download for their sites. If little me could see what I do now at my job, designing and animating wild animals for adoption on Facebook, she’d be beside herself with joy.
Now we have to send a little love to Superbrothers. When I saw the first trailer for Sword and Sworcery, I couldn’t believe it. The Superbrothers hit the vein of my generation’s sweet spot. It’s 8-bit nostalgia at it’s best, with gorgeous, immense environments to tap around and explore. I’ve found myself sitting there admiring the simple designs on the bushes and trees, with pixels highlighting everything in just the right places to make the environment sparkle and breathe. It’s like looking at the gouache background paintings that Mary Blaire would have made, so simple and bold you can hardly understand how so much is conveyed in so little. Flecks in the wind show you which directions you can go in, eating mushrooms allow you to see flashes of color and mystical elements around you, and the ever-charming bunnies disappear in the undergrowth when you walk too near.
I guess you have to be the right kind of person to like it, ie: ideally in your twenties, grown up with video games, absorbed with psychedelic rock, mysticism, and a love of space and the wilderness. I flipped out when I saw the way they use the moon cycles, mystic triangles and tree spirits, and the character is a badass female warrior! And she doesn’t even wear a bikini! In fact, she’s so androgynous, you don’t even know her gender until she’s referred to as “she” later on in the game. It’s a ballsy move, and so refreshing.
But there’s a lot more to it than video game art nerdery, there’s this hyper-cool soundtrack by Jim Guthrie that will blow your mind. It’s not just background music, it goes beyond just setting a mood, this music will grab you by your vital organs and take you on a wild ride at 2AM when you should be sleeping. The epic moments of achieving a goal as a warrior, the music pumps in your blood as you parade back to the village, crazy and wild and then when it stops, the quiet sounds of the forest are overwhelming. When in battle, the music prepares you for each attack, or it celebrates an odd, otherworldly moment of walking on water. You even meet a pixelated Jim Guthrie at one point in the game. They’ve even integrated the use of a vinyl record into the main menu screen and even into the gameplay, and when you travel from daytime adventuring to dreamworld exploring, your vinyl disc flips over to the B-side that is the dream world.
And here’s the genius merchandise tie-in: you can purchase the vinyl record. It’s printed just like the one in the game, pixelated deer and all. It’s full of amazing tracks from the soundtrack. It went on sale last night, and as soon as I got the tweet, I bought it without even thinking. This is a genuine creation of video game geekery, artistry, music, and love of vinyl.
Deep thought: the Sword & Sworcery App costs less than the Sword & Sworcery record because Apps cost less than records.
-@the1console
Video games are more accessible to everyone these days, it’s not just nerdcore little boys and girls who stay up all weekend to beat a level, one of the biggest markets are women who play casual games. The ability to make games “live” and send out updates and patches to players instantly is what’s driving the new medium, an instant feedback loop from game designer to user and back. The way the Superbrothers are using twitter inside their games to go viral, and to also instantly connect to their fans is shocking and perfect. While music executives fight the internet, comic book publishers can’t figure out how to deal with digital comics, and TV is at war with streaming, video games seem to be flourishing. Old-school giant game might be fearful of this new, cheap, fast app gaming system, and they should be. The bay area is full of gaming start-ups, and while a lot of them are cookie-cutter copies of game models that seem to work, the amount of innovation is astounding. As long as we have guys like the SuperBrothers who’re willing to challenge the norm and stuff every eccentric and stylish thing they love into a single game, while being funny and self-aware through the whole process, we are going to be ok.
This is a very exciting future of video games to be in.
I realized that I don’t share my photography on my blog very often, but I absolutely love my iPhone’s camera. It’s everything I always wanted my camera to be: easy to carry in my pocket, versatile and instantly allowing me to post pictures online.
Hipstamatic is one of the most popular, and the one that I resisted as long as possible. The name is terrible, and living as close to the Mission as I do, I don’t want to hear ANYTHING with “hipster” (or even worse, “hipsta”) in it’s title, but once I gave in and downloaded it, I really enjoyed it. This app brings the joy of analogue photography to digital without having to lug around a big lense. I’m fascinated by the fact that with the speed and possibilities of technology today, we have to take away elements to make it more human. By not seeing the photograph immediately upon taking it, a bit of the thrill of analogue photography comes through. Combine that with the mystery of development with “lenses” and “film” that treats light in unexpected ways, and digital photography leaps onto new ground.
Even with “Camera Bag” and “Instagram” and all the other apps that’ll give film effects to your already-taken photos on your phone, and do it pretty well, I still think the best pictures I’ve taken are with Hipstamatic. I’ve built up quite a collection. Obviously, I take a lot of photos, this collage is just my favorites from January this year. Flipping through my photos is just as good as any diary, reminding me of my trip to NYC for New Years, driving down to Santa Cruz for the weekend, what drawings I was working on, the concerts I saw, the haircut I got, it’s all right there, dated and everything.
It should be said that most of our phone pics that we take aren’t very printable. Something about that is attractive as well, the way we work and think today we exist on screens and capture the world through screens and instantly share them with everyone else to see on their little screens. The low-quality image size has caused me to do paintings from some of my favorite shots (like these paintings based on my snapshots at bars and parties).
We like immediate, but we want a feel of humanity with our photo-taking. Being the app junkie that I am, I downloaded “Color” immediately after reading an article about it. I think it was the very day it came out, and I excitedly took my self-portrait at my desk at work, only to find that nobody else in the Sunset district had gotten the app yet. I bully my coworker into downloading the app on his phone so we could test it out (without another person, it’s completely useless, I mean, it doesn’t even have any filters) and we proceed to take pictures of our food, coworkers and the parking lot.
Total waste of time. Really slick app (and it better be, for a $41 million investment) and it /was/ fun to see other people’s pictures update on your phone so quickly, but really? This didn’t stop me from twittering about it and getting my friends to all download it and meet for a Color-dinner-extravaganza, but after 3-minutes we were far more engaged in the status of our drink order than sharing pictures we were taking.
I like the idea of photography that’s location-based and sharable with people in the area, but Color came out far too voyeuristic and useless. This doesn’t stop me from trying out new ones, and I get a distinctive feeling that as our understanding of location, privacy, and the addictive quality of posting, documenting and sharing our lives, apps will grow and evolve with us, and probably force us into thinking about photography in new ways.
That said, nothing can beat old-school photography. I just bought some film that I’m playing around with, and I’m getting my portrait shot by Tristan Crane this weekend. As many photos of myself that I may take with my phone, nothing beats a good, professional shot.
Inspired by psychedelic rock poster art, and indulging in my love for skulls as hats, this is definitely going in the right direction. I’m beginning to dream of paint drips and wooden panels.
I’m continuing the collection of black and white portraits, and this time, basing it off a photo of myself. It seems a natural progression, from fictional characters to famous people to self-portraits. Strangely, this one morphed into something that doesn’t really look like me. But I love the flowers. I’m starting my quest to draw the perfect tattoo design.
(click for details)
Total waste of time. Really slick app (and it better be, for a $41 million investment) and it /was/ fun to see other people’s pictures update on your phone so quickly, but really? This didn’t stop me from twittering about it and getting my friends to all download it and meet for a Color-dinner-extravaganza, but after 3-minutes we were far more engaged in the status of our drink order than sharing pictures we were taking.
