Originally, I was going to try and go for something much more serious and realistic, but I’ve been inspired lately by illustrators who are very loose, where things like inaccurate perspective aren’t awkward mistakes but charming, calculated style choices. I’m not sure I actually hit “charming” with this one, but I like how the overall tone of the drawing came out. And, at the risk of sounding shallow, it IS pretty fulfilling how *quickly* an entire page can fill out when you’re not sweating the details.

There, I said it.

Of course, the first thing my daughter asked was, “didn’t the drink actually make her smaller”? Um, yes, in fact it did. Think of it as poetic license…

You can see the second version (and it’s *really* different) over here. Is there one that you like better?

I came off the holiday nice and relaxed, wanting to do something a little different this week. I’ve seen people do their illustrations as collage, mobiles, clay, etc. and thought it might be fun to make a little animated character. So, I went to work:

a.) quickly sketched up my giant skateboarder character
b.) redrew him in Illustrator
c.) colorized him in Photoshop
d.) brought things to life in After Effects

Interestingly, I ended up tweaking the colors in After Effects *after* having done it in Photoshop. The character was moving, and it the original color scheme just didn’t seem to match his grooviness. This is what it looked like before:

It’s nice (in fact, I kind of like the colors better), but it kind of ended there. I felt the new scheme didn’t just try to look nice, but seemed to communicate more of an attitude. By the way, this was the second version for this theme. The first can be viewed here. Note: this is the second version of this theme can be viewed here.

So, this started out as the story of a lost cosmonaut marooned on a tiny satellite, a single page of directions in his hand; he is still trying to figure out where he took the wrong turn. As I started in on the coloring, the environment began to look a little to unbelievable, so I decided to reinforce that and turn it into a staged scene. I like to think that the rest of the cast has long gone, as our hero stares disbelievingly at the page that tells him someone else has gotten the part.

And now… the finished drawing.

I find the heads of anything to be really challenging when not using a computer. I can make a mistake on anything else (hands, clothing, type) and make it go away or even look good but the face… argh, one tiny error and it’s ruined for me. So, okay, the face didn’t turn out perfectly for me, especially the lips. But, I really like her posture and style; it looks like she’s having a pretty good time.

Unlike other illustrations I’ve done, this one looks better on the page than on the computer. In fact, I’m printing/framing one for myself!

My illustration is about a little fish that can no longer survive in it’s environment without help, and what it discovers when it’s finally able to return home.

So… this is our film, created for The 2010 New Hampshire 48 Hour Film Project.

We were given the following constraints:
- Genre: “Time Travel”
- Character: Dr. Clark Larson, plastic surgeon
- Line of dialogue: “I need to tell you something”
- Prop: a box

Yes, the audio is poor and yes, that’s me in my narrating debut. Be gentle.

The 48 Hour Film Project is a maddening challenge to conceptualize, write, film, edit and deliver a short film in, well, 48 hours. No paid actors, no stock footage or music, only original screenplays; everything must be created by you. And… they assign you genre, character, a prop, and a line of dialogue, all of which must be in the movie.

Our team, Fabulous Monk Pictures, drew “Time Travel” as our genre. My friend and outstanding eco-photographer Jerry Monkman, did the cinematography and co-directed, while I co-directed, edited, and wrote the screenplay. (I also narrated the thing, but I’ve been hesitant to take credit for that; if you watch the film, you’ll understand why).

The kickoff on Friday night was a lot of fun, spent eating and drinking until late at The Friendly Toast, brainstorming story ideas. (Unfortunately, I came home at 1:30am to find that my wife had accidentally locked me out of the house. And was wearing earplugs so she couldn’t hear me knocking/cursing. Scraping off serious amounts of skin, I DID manage to squeeze in through a tiny basement window; it’s all healing nicely so that’s good. ‘Nuff said.)

Saturday. Yow. Let’s just say that this was a frustrating day for everyone. To begin with, it was raining. Then, we ran into the “too many cooks” syndrome and didn’t start shooting until…3pm.

Cut to seven hours later. All spent on one room. If you’re picturing a grim, disgruntled, possibly homicidal crew, you’re not far off.

We had what we thought was about a minute’s worth of usable footage. Morale was low. One volunteer had fled. It was our Come To Jesus moment. And… we threw in the towel.

The next day, I was reviewing the footage just to see what might have been and it slowly started to hit me… with some slight modifications to the script, we actually had enough footage to meet the four minute minimum requirement! I hastily rewrote the script, pulled in Jerry, narrated the thing, rendered it, and we drove like madmen to the dropoff.

It’s going to be shown in all it’s glory on the big screen tomorrow night, June 15th, at 9pm here.

It was a helluva ride, and I’m proud of our little production team.

I was actually up at around 3:30am this morning, because I couldn’t sleep. Turns out it’s a decent time to draw, although I feel a little woozy as I’m writing this. My pens all started to run out of ink at pretty much the same time, so I took a little break to work off some steam, and took some photos of where I was in the process. So, yeah, I draw at the kitchen table. Right next to the toaster, with a big mug of coffee handy. My pens of choice are Microns 005, 01, 02 and Brush.

I like where this experiment ended up, although I’m pretty sure that if I didn’t add the text and feathers on the ground, it’d be difficult to tell that this was a rooster-based character. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get his wings to behave like arms and fit in a sweater.

These are the sketches and inks. I redrew the type about a million times, until finally settling on this cursive look. I rather enjoyed coming up with three-toed boots, though.