Sunday, January 31, 2010

MY 5 YEAR PLAN

More pics from Daniel Laine's book African Kings.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

600 DAYS

...by Pretty Good Dance Moves...
...featuring Heather Christian of the Arbornauts.

Friday, January 29, 2010

RIP VAN WINKLE

...we read the original story by Washington Irving in English, which could summarize as follows: this lazy guy is married to a horrible woman. He falls asleep for 20 years and she is dead when he wakes up; he lives happily ever after (there's a lot more subtext, etc, but hey). Responding to the story, I cynically did the following cartoon in some kind of bastardized 70's Playboy steez ala Mort Drucker and Erich Sokol (who are both very awesome).


Wednesday, January 27, 2010

JOSH (respect) KEYES

Josh Keyes is a BAMF of a painter. The images on his website will slap your mind. I noticed today that he's the cover story in the new issue of Juxtapoz (Tim Biskup, too).

Silhouettes




Saturday, January 23, 2010

DUCK SHOT IN FACE 18 TIMES


-Rabbit Fire
These are the three cartoons comprising the infamous "hunting trilogy", featuring Bugs Bunny consistently outsmarting Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. The dialogue is smart and there are a ton of sight gags. Written by Michael Maltese, directed by Chuck Jones, music by Carl Stalling and voices by Mel Blanc. This is the dream team of mid century american animation. At one point Blanc voices Bugs imitating Daffy and Daffy imitating Bugs. Jones throws in so many little facial tics and sideways glances to the audience, so funny, plus some really cool design like the panel above, and great painted backgrounds. I'd love to go through these frame by frame. Kids cartoons suck so much these days because creators don't give kids enough credit. They're talked down to. These old cartoons are so funny because these guys were just trying to make themselves and each other laugh.
"I'm a Fiddler Crab! Why don't you shoot me? It's Fiddler Crab season!"

"Let's run through that again..."

Friday, January 22, 2010

MACEF'S '"THE INTELLEGENT HAND" COMPETITION

There was this design competition in Italy in which over 3100 designers from 88 different countries took part. This is what these pretentious assholes chose as the winner:

Hey, are your black turtlenecks a little too tight?
Must have been a slow fucking year.

Also, London's "Unpackaged" grocery store seems to be getting a lot of attention for selling stuff without packaging - you bring your own containers and pay by weight.


What a bold new concept. Umm, farmers markets, anyone? As well, the space itself looks like a hair salon circa 1992. Ironical that the store itself is poorly packaged!

grumble grumble...
Thanks for the labels.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

4X6 LANDSCAPES

Working from photos taken on location.

PORTRAITS


Here are a couple portraits I did for an assignment today. The first is derived from an actual obituary of a guy who was convicted of giving Canadian military secrets to the Russians during WW2. He was a communist who hated Nazis. This is india ink on watercolor paper and digital color.
The second is of Jack Parsons, a Magician/Rocket scientist. Check out his Wikipedia entry. Collage, ink, paint and white-out on board.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Thursday, January 14, 2010

SKETCHY

This is a sketch in preparation of a painting of Jack Parsons. My plan is to stalk, attack and crush it in the small hours of the 21st.

I anticipate it being a free-for-all, involving ink, paint, collage and basically whatever isn't nailed down, barring availability of a crowbar.

Friday, January 1, 2010

LITTLE NEMO

100 years ago Winsor McCay was destroying the Sunday funnies. Here's how he rocked New Year's 1910:

He could draw anything with his eyes closed; architecture, animals, clothes, vehicles, imaginary thingsand his bionic imagination could totally take your lunch money and stuff you in a locker. He was constantly messing with perspective and scale and color, designing the page as a whole instead of a bunch of individual boxes. The conceit of the strip was that this kid Nemo had wicked dreams and at the end of each strip he'd wake up. But the next time he went to sleep the story would pick up where it left off. The story itself was incidental to McCay's drawing crazy stuff, and the dream angle just allowed him to make up any crazy stuff he wanted. Newspapers were huge back in the day and McCay was like "Oh, you're giving me a full page to go off on, and 60 bajillion people are going to read it every week? Okay I'm just going to get to work here and start blowing America's mind for the next 20 years." The strip ran in 360 newspapers. He smoked cigars and wore a hat while he drew. Hey Winsor McCay, are you cool?






These are all found online, so some of the scans are dodgy and they're not all in english. There are books available at libraries and bookstores.