old comics!

ok dudes, i'll be in michigan with a lot of crazy children for the rest of the week. so here, have some comic strips I did for Larison's class year before last. should be amusing, on multiple levels. (and are all true stories. or at least inspired by.)



on a completely different note, the Animation Mentor webinar hosted by Bobby Beck and featuring DON HAHN talking about Walt Stanchfield and his two books was AWESOME!!!! (who's Don Hahn? look him up on IMDB and be intimidated.) i think one of the most fun things was seeing Mr. Hahn on a webcam in an office, and not in a studio-lit environment on a Disney DVD. there were lots of good questions, and i took lots of notes. maybe I'll post those later. :)

Harry Potter character sketches

oh yeah, i DID it. hehee.

hey now! the movie comes out next week, and of COURSE I had to re-read the book before I saw it. read it in 3 days (took up half my house-sitting evenings. that's why I never did turn a movie on.) without further ado:

hopefully you can tell which are Hermione, Ron and Harry. i decidedly tried to make them NOT look like their actors, because the actors just look too good. and hopefully recognisability will cement once I color them. (oh yes, i fully intend on coloring these! what do you think the red shading ref. is for?)

not that it matters when the movie comes out... i'll be in Michigan with a lot of 3rd-6th graders next week/weekend. but i'll see it at some point. :)

MAD FRoG

page of sketches from WTM's show at the mad frog a couple weeks ago. there's another page but not as good. so you get this one. :)

(gosh, i keep linking to Walk the Moon. they must be a good band or something.) ^_____^

Who is Sebastian Jackson?

ok yes, this has to do with Walk the Moon. but FIRST, before you do ANYTHING, you have to go to the Birthday Boy website and listen to the song "Man on the Moon".

done? ok, NOW explanation.
Birthday boy is a side project of a couple Walk the Moon guys and they did a version of "Man on the Moon" with the full band for their B-sides album, calling it "The Ballad of Sebastian Jackson".

I became kind of fascinated with the character of Sebastian. what kind of passion, or insanity, drives someone off the cliff and maybe out of their mind? how did he get that way? where did it all start? (this is just my musing; there's more but i'll be short-winded. I still haven't asked Nicholas for his explanation.) completely disjointed from the Sebastian musings, I made the character of the moon man for the packaging of 'The Anthem EP' for the guys last summer, and it wasn't until 3 months ago that it dawned on me WHO the moon man might be. could this odd and empty universe he wanders through be Sebastian's purgatory/afterlife/whatever?

so, here we pick up the thread of Sebastian's life (or death), after he jumped off the edge. but as the end of the song makes me question, did his soul really fall back to earth?




these are pretty rough, brush pen/micron/tomboe marker; but figuring out all the word balloons within the roughs worked really well! (inspired by scott mccloud's roughs for ZOT in that respect.) i think i'll adopt that technique for my other projects as well. and maybe someday I'll REALLY draw this one. :)

metaphor for passion

...and while I'm explaining tags, I may as well explain this one too.

'metaphor for passion' is the working title for a project of mine that started in high school (or at least, that's when i started drawing the characters that would later go into this story.) it's constantly ongoing... in the end (if it ends) it'll be a graphic novel. assuming it gets published someday of course, who knows. i'm just taking the Flight attitude of drawing it first, then seeing what happens.

I've got a lot of it written in my livejournal, but the writing has been at a stall since last fall and I've mostly just been drawing stuff in my spare time. still trying to get the character designs tacked down, and to figure out just how fantastical this world is that they're journeying through.

if you read the story, the various environments the characters pass through might seem very like places on our earth, but i'll do my best to make them less.... common in appearance once I've gotten farther along.

a previous working title was simply 'Puppet, Cat and Blanche' since these are the main characters on this journey. buuut I changed it.

at any rate... the drawing above was drawn sometime in the past week, between working on notes and presentations for the art class I was co-teaching. it was drawn quickly which is why it's not very interesting... but, whenever I'm stressed or sad or just not myself, drawing Blanche in particular would make me feel better. (she's the first character I came up with.) perhaps at a later time I'll post some older variations of her, but these are some more recent drawings. (I was missing Matt very badly while drawing a couple of these, you can probably tell which ones.)
(accidentally deleted the original color profile of this scan; it was drawn in blue. oh well)


i've been meaning to capture and draw my cat for some time now, just because the cat character has always been painfully cartoony and made-up looking (which is something that always annoyed me about Disney's Cinderella) so i'm trying not to duplicate that. the puppet is a stuffed dinosaur though, so he's fine. :)

ta.

WALK THE MOON!!!!

HELLO howdee-hey et cetera! if you've been to this blog before, you may have seen that one of my tags is called 'Walk the Moon'. if you've never actually tried to figure out what this is, Walk the Moon is a band here in Cincinnati that I've been working with for a few years, doing their album art and t-shirts and stuff like that.

now, i would do album designs for a band whether they're good or not (as long as they can pay me, haha) but Walk the Moon is a REALLY GREAT band. yes I'm plugging them- they linked me to their blog so i'm linking to theirs! hooray for linking and also linking. speaking of which, their myspace is where you can hear a LOT of their music (including professional recordings, live recordings and even some lo-fi stuff that sounds as though it may have been recorded in Nick's basement but is still AWESOME) and links to get their albums already out. so check it out. :)

so as a treat, here is a page of concept art for their new album which will hopefully be out later in the summer:



it is for the inside of the booklet. ALIENS, yes. if you want to see some other designs I've done for them, click the tag. I'll be at the acoustic show later today-- will I see you there? :)

ta.

caricatures continued

yup, here they are finished. WOOT. I actually like the ballpark BG, now that it's DONE, haha. this one's drawn in pencil and colored in PSCS4:


and this'n is ink and watercolor. Scanner ate the colors and spit them into space. there were lots of tiny blue shadows in the dress, and... I shall stop whining now. you can see the lines; the lines are good. the colors are good too, you just can't tell in the scan. :)